Why Tech’s Diversity Problem Is Everyone’s Problem

I t wouldn’t be hard to win a drinking game centered on the word “diversity,” considering how often the term gets tossed around in the tech world. We have diversity data, diversity initiatives, diversity events and more diversity initiatives. But the tech industry cannot talk about (much less solve) its lack of diversity in a bubble.

Consider Facebook’s recent efforts to diversify its workforce and how those efforts contrast with the company’s actual data on diversity. For all of Facebook’s talk about increasing diversity, updated numbers showed no year-over-year rise in its dismal percentage of Hispanic (4%) and black (2%) employees in its workforce.

Leading research universities award black and Hispanic computer-science and computer-engineering degrees at twice the rate that leading tech companies hire them.

While the unbalanced numbers alone warrant criticism, anger toward Facebook intensified when the company blamed “pipeline problem” — the idea that there simply isn’t enough diverse talent out there to hire — for its lack of progress in becoming a more diverse employer. Critics rightly pointed out that diverse talent is often overlooked or made to feel unwelcome by the tech world. Consider, for example, the USA TODAY report showing that leading research universities award black and Hispanic computer-science and computer-engineering degrees at twice the rate that leading tech companies hire them.

“When we talk about the pipeline and what’s broken, sometimes it’s as simple as asking a student, what do you need to be successful?”

It’s true that qualified, diverse talent indeed exists — and is often overlooked — but it should make us curious why there isn’t even more. In that respect, there is some validity to the idea of a “pipeline problem” if we’re using the phrase to describe systemic inequality, particularly with regard to education.

Diana Lizarraga works as the director of Cal NERDS at UC Berkeley, which helps a diverse range of students (who are LGBTQ, low income, first generation, underrepresented, student parents, transfer students, reentry students, disabled, foster, undocumented and women) pursue a STEM education. “When we talk about the pipeline and what’s broken,” she said, “sometimes it’s as simple as asking a student, what do you need to be successful?”

Hurdles to success (read: pipeline leaks) are often related to socioeconomic status. Lizarraga explained that students can be embarrassed about not having professional clothes or money to go to a conference, for instance — the kinds of networking opportunities that can give them a career boost. Cal NERDS steps in to help students get professional clothes and head shots, offers emergency meal cards and helps organize paid research opportunities, coding boot camps and more.

Yet many students fall out of the tech pipeline long before a program like Cal NERDS can step in (and many colleges may not have such a program at all). Eli Kennedy is the CEO of the Oakland-based Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to developing a pipeline of diverse young scholars. While he acknowledged that the pipeline problem is complex, it wasn’t hard for him to point out some obvious points of failure.

A study by the Level Playing Field Institute, for example, showed that access to computer-science courses in California’s public high schools is lowest in districts with high populations of students of color and low-income students. And access is higher, as the report put it, in “student populations that are already disproportionately represented in the computing sector.”

This gap is not limited to computer science either, which speaks to the fact that the pipeline problem is more than tech’s problem. “The challenge of preparing students with STEM is significant,” Kennedy said, “but the schools that our students are going to aren’t really good at preparing them for anything, to be totally honest.”

A growing chorus of voices argues that hollow “diversity initiatives” take the place of real action to fight systemic racism.

In San Francisco specifically, schools with the highest level of achievement tend to have the lowest levels of family poverty — a common trend. There are seemingly endless studies linking family income to everything from summer learning opportunities to higher SAT scores. Meanwhile, income inequality follows predictable racial lines.

Most people would regard equal access to quality education — regardless of wealth — as a cornerstone of American democracy. The so-called pipeline problem is yet another reminder that such access is lacking. Dismal diversity in tech is a side effect of an imbalanced status quo.

To that end, some criticism of diversity in the tech world runs even deeper. A growing chorus of voices argues that hollow “diversity initiatives” take the place of real action to fight systemic racism.

It is telling that education spending in the United States is outpaced by prison spending, while police-related injustice also follows racial lines. Black people are disproportionately arrested, incarcerated and killed by police, as was sadly highlighted again last week with the killings of Terence Crutch and Keith Lamont Scott.

In the wake of the earlier killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, Rachel Williams, head of Diversity and Inclusion at Yelp, noted that tech entities like Facebook Live and Twitter have played an indispensable role in exposing injustices but added, “It has hopefully become apparent to people that the work of [diversity and inclusion] leaders and recruiters is really hard when African American males are being, quite frankly, hunted and disenfranchised and disproportionately killed.”

“It stands out just how mute Silicon Valley is when it comes to unarmed black people being shot and killed by cops,” wrote Justin Edmund shortly after Alton Sterling’s death. “Tech companies are no stranger to using media, money and smarts to raise the stakes on issues [they] care about,” Edmund added in the same post on Medium. “If they really thought that hiring black people was in their best interest, they wouldn’t let them be murdered in the streets by police.”

Other critics suggest that the tech industry’s forays into education aren’t necessarily means of leveling the socioeconomic playing field but merely cynical attempts at cashing in. As Christopher T. Fan writes in The New Inquiry, “What better rationale for diversity than even deeper incursions of the private sector into American education? Such investments promise big payoffs. The so-called ‘edutech’ industry is worth billions of dollars; the for-profit and charter school industries are valued in the trillions.”

Regardless of how much of the “system” you want to blame, one thing is certain: symbolic gestures like Facebook HQ flaunting a Black Lives Matter sign ring hollow, and the company’s embarrassing diversity numbers speak volumes.