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Silicon Valley has a well-known diversity problem, which became even more apparent when the major companies started releasing reports showing how hard it is for women, and minorities, to reach the highest levels.
One of the companies that has been making the hardest push to be more inclusive is Intel, which last year pledged to spend $300 million on the cause.
And what did it get for its troubles? It was threatened, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told Rev. Jesse Jackson in a talk at the PushTech2020 conference on Friday.
“People worry that as a white man, you’re kind of under siege to a certain extent,” Krzanich told Jackson.
“There’s been a bit of resistance. We’ve even had a few threats and things like that on some of our leadership team around our position on diversity and inclusion. We stand up there and just remind everybody it’s not an exclusive process. We’re not bringing in women or African-Americans or Hispanics in exclusion to other people. We’re actually just trying to bring them in and be a part of the whole environment.”
Krzanich does not seem to have elaboraed any further, leaving out some key details, including the nature of the threats, and how many the company received. He also did not mention if such a response would in any way alter how Intel goes about tackling the problem.
VatorNews reached out to Intel for more information, and we will update this story if we learn more.
In January of last year, Intel announced it was investing a whopping $300 million to “build a pipeline of female and under-represented engineers and computer scientists,” as well as to actively support hiring and retaining more women and under-represented minorities.
Intel also revealed its plan to fund programs that celebrate diversity, including the International Game Developers Association, the E-Sports League, the National Center for Women in Technology, the CyberSmile Foundation, the Feminist Frequency, and Rainbow PUSH.
One thing you can say is that the company’s push has already manifested itself in some real results. In its last diversity report, published in the summer of 2015, the company revealed that 43.3 percent of the people it has hired in the United States were either female, African American, Hispanic or Native American.
The company had hired 2,944 people, of which 1,035 were women, 139 were African American, 222 were Hispanic and nine were Native American.
However the percentages of those workers did not rise very much in that same time period. As of July 2015, 24.1 percent of Intel’s employees were women, up from 23.5 percent in December 2014. African Americans were 3.5 percent, up from 3.4 percent. The percentage of Hispanics and Native Americans remained unchanged.
Solving the diversity problem in tech
Intel is far from the only company that is trying to make strides toward diversity.
Apple, for example, put $50 million into creating outreach for minorities, and women, in tech.
That included partnering with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a non-profit that supports students enrolled in public, historically black colleges and universities (also known as HBCUs), such as North Carolina A&T State University, Howard University, and Young’s alma mater Grambling State University.
It also partnered with the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), a non-profit that helps create a broader pipeline of female technology workers.
Last year, Facebook, Box and Pinterest announced that they had gotten together to launch a new mentorship program called WEST (Women Entering and Staying in Tech). The idea is to get more women interested in computer science, and to help them be prepared for the tech jobs of the future.
WEST will feature women who have technical jobs at all three companies, who will serve as one-on-one mentors. They will meet with mentees individually and as a group, in-person and online, over the course of a year.
Even with these types of initatives, actually getting results is slow going.
Facebook, for example, has barely made progress in making its workforce less male and white. As of June of 2015, the company was 55 percent white, down from 57 percent in June of 2014. It is 68 percent men, down only one percentage point from the year before. In tech jobs, they are 51 percent white and 84 percent men. In senior leadership, it is 73 percent white and 77 percent men.
Microsoft, meanwhile, saw the number of minorities, and women in tech roles, increase, but it lost 2% of its female workers overall.
There’s a lot of factors holding back tech from being truly diverse. The last thing any company needs to be actively threatened for trying to do the right thing.
(Image source: businesswire.com)
