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TECHNOLOGY Friday 27 January 2017
Diversity in tech: Lots of attention, little progress

BARBARA ORTUTAY 2015, when a photo-recog-
AP Technology Writer nition feature misidentified
NEW YORK (AP) — The tech black faces as gorillas.
industry brought us self- Some related missteps:
driving cars, artificial intel- — Snapchat released two
ligence and 3-D printers. photo filters that contorted
But when it comes to racial facial features into buck-
and gender diversity, its toothed Asian caricatures
leading companies are no or blackface . One was
trailblazers. later withdrawn after pub-
Despite loudly touted ef- lic outcry. The other “ex-
forts to hire more blacks, pired,” and the company
Latinos and women, es- said it won’t put it back into
pecially in technical and circulation.
leadership positions, diver- — Airbnb initially took no
sity numbers at the largest steps to prevent hosts
tech companies are barely from discriminating against
budging. In 2014, 2 percent guests whose profile photos
of Googlers were black showed they were black.
and 3 percent were His- The practice was correct-
panic, numbers that have ed after an outcry.
not changed since. The — Twitter took nearly a de-
picture is similar at Face- cade to tackle the harass-
book and Twitter . Micro- ment of women and minori-
soft is slightly more racially In this Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015, file photo, Jaysean Erby raises his hands as he solves a coding ties on its service.
diverse (though not when it problem as Apple CEO Tim Cook watches from behind at an Apple Store, in New York, as Apple In a New York Times opin-
comes to gender) and Ap- hosted Hour of Code events around the world as part of Computer Science Education Week. ion piece , Microsoft re-
ple even more so, though Associated Press searcher Kate Crawford
still not reflective of the Williams, who is African- urged companies working
U.S. population. Amazon is American, says she has on artificial intelligence to
more racially diverse still, made sure to hire women address diversity, warn-
although it counts a large, as well as underrepresent- ing that otherwise “we will
lower-wage warehouse ed minorities. see ingrained forms of bias
workforce in its totals. ___ built into the artificial intel-
Women, meanwhile, make WHY IT MATTERS ligence of the future.”
up less than a third of the Diversity isn’t just about ___
workforce at many com- fairness. It’s about hav- INTO THE PIPELINE
panies — even less in engi- ing designers who reflect Some 11 percent of com-
neering and other techni- the diversity of the people puter science graduates
cal jobs. they are designing for. For were black and 9 percent
Tech companies them- tech companies hoping were Hispanic in the 2013-
selves tend to blame a to reach millions or billions 14 school year, according
“pipeline problem,” mean- of users, a lack of diversity to the latest data from the
ing a shortage of women In this Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017, photo, Aniyia Williams, founder and could mean their products U.S. Department of Educa-
and minorities with tech- CEO of Tinsel, right, talks about program placement with Kara
nical qualifications. But a Lee, at the offices of Galvanize in San Francisco.
number of academic ex- Associated Press
perts, industry employees ican, previously worked as ing boot camps. So far, to
and diversity advocates an engineer at Twitter, Ap- little avail.
say there’s a bigger prob- ple, Google and Yahoo. Why? Interviews with more
lem. Silicon Valley, they ___ than 30 tech workers, ex-
argue, has failed to chal- THE INDUSTRY IS TRYING ecutives and diversity ad-
lenge its own unstated Companies are spending vocates suggest the blame
assumptions about what a lot of time and money lies with subtle biases in hir-
makes for great tech em- on improving diversity. Two ing, unwelcoming work en-
ployees. years ago, Intel splashily set vironments and a paucity
“The people who are doing itself the goal of achiev- of diverse role models in
the hiring are not changing ing full representation in top positions.
their thinking around what its workforce by 2020. De- Aniyia Williams, founder In this Friday, March 15, 2013, file photo, a Facebook employee
they view as qualified,” spite committing $300 mil- and CEO of the startup Tin- walks past a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Ca-
says Leslie Miley, engineer- lion to the effort and mak- sel, says companies should lif.
ing director at the mes- ing some early progress , focus on their own culture Associated Press
sage-service startup Slack. Intel acknowledges there is rather than blaming exter-
Hiring managers, he says, “a great deal of work to be nal factors they can’t con- “will not appeal to a large tion. Yet only 4 percent of
spend too much time wor- done.” trol, such as limited com- population,” says Lillian Google’s 2015 hires were
rying that applicants who Similar programs are in puter-science education in Cassel, chairwoman of black, and 3 percent were
don’t fit techie stereotypes place throughout the in- U.S. schools. It’s not enough computer sciences at Villa- Hispanic. At Intel, fewer
aren’t “Google-y enough dustry, from outreach at to release diversity reports nova University. than 5 percent of hires
or Facebook-y enough or high schools and historically and say, “Oh, not a lot has Diverse perspectives can were black and 8 percent
Apple-y enough or Twitter- black colleges to internship changed, but it’s the world, also help prevent grievous were Hispanic. Numbers at
y enough.” and mentoring programs not us that’s the problem,” errors — such as a prob- other tech companies are
Miley, who is African-Amer- and sponsorships for cod- she says. lem that arose at Google in comparable.q