If you are like me, you are probably perusing the web right now via a Macintosh computer. And Google? What person in the free world can honestly live without it?
You might be surprised to learn that Apple, Google, Oracle, Yahoo! and Applied Materials—all among the nation's top tech companies— have repeatedly and successfully refused to disclose the race and gender makeup of their workforce.
Many say they know why. These industries, despite Steve Jobs talk of running a progressive company, clearly lack diversity. If you were to take Apple Inc.'s management team as any indication, there is virtually no diversity at the company at all. But that's all speculation because Jobs has refused to comply with a Freedom of Information request disclosing the makeup of his workforce, claiming that he's protecting trade secrets.
From bad to worse
In all fairness, the tech industry faces a diversity challenge that is in some respects beyond its control. Computer science, computer engineering, etc., aren't the type of majors that many Black and Latino kids, or girls for that matter, choose to study.
Yet, those jobs pay very well and happen to be the real growth industries. In the first half of 2006, the tech industry added 140,000 jobs, according to the American Electronics Association. In 2008, the average salary for this industry was $79,484. That's 87 percent higher than the average private sector salary of $42,405. Despite the current recession that has stalled job growth in all sectors, it's the first industry to already invest billions with the expectation of spurring future job growth.
Those future jobs, much like the past ones, will likely go to white men. As long as Jobs, and executives like him, continue to hide data as opposed to address problems, we can't expect that trend to change. In fact, if recent history is any indication, it will get worse. The largest Silicon Valley companies (those that did disclose the information) lost more than one in ten Black and Hispanic employees from 2000 to 2005, leaving their workforces at just 7 percent Black and Hispanic, even as their overall employment grew 16 percent, according to federal employment data obtained by the San Jose Mercury News.
The number of women in this sector declined to 33 percent.
"There's always been this problem of pipeline," said Mario Armstrong, a frequent NPR contributor and host ofDigital Cafe, a tech talk program. He added that the lack of women and minorities in the tech industry is because the industry has not figured out how to find talent in a diverse way.
"And there has been a very vocal problem about how do we find the next competitive pool of talent. And where is this competitive pool of talent? How do we recruit it? How do we keep them happy? This is an industry problem," he added.
See entire story and illustration of Apple's management team here
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