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Burton has owned and operated Kelso Integral, a Kansas City computer consulting firm specializing in home and small business maintenance for 29 years. Customers love it. He appears on live streams, podcasts, and local and international TV as a computer expert. However, he still faced racial prejudice at work.
“They say if you fight for your rights, you will get them.” The black entrepreneur he said. “I’m living proof of that.”
During his career at big box retailers in the 1990s, opportunities were overlooked–Seeing jobs go to white men, because these guys look like what you think a techie should look like.
Kelso equates the problem with unconsciousness. No one is coming out and saying it openly. Indeed, his company finds Five star reviews from customers. But he knows there is prejudice.
“I have seen progress, but some meetings are still needed,” he said Michael DortSenior Marketing Strategist for Testero, helping companies manage compliance with SOC-2, a voluntary standard for protecting customer data.
“I still go to meetings where I don’t see a lot of people who look like me at the conference,” said Dortch, who is black — and most of the black people she sees at these conferences work for hotels or conference centers. Conference attendees think Dortch works for the hotel or conference facility as well. They regularly ask him for directions or to drop off cabs.
Dortch remembers an incident several years ago in a conference center where they rode a long escalator up to the main concourse. “I look down and there’s hundreds of white men dressed in black. Hundreds of them. You’ll see the occasional brown person. You’ll see the occasional woman,” Dortch said. “The demographics don’t seem to have shifted much today – especially in the upper echelons.”
Statistics and studies bring Kelso and Dorchen. In the tech industry, despite years of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, white men still dominate all positions.
In number
Last year, the Pew Research Center analyzed the latest US Census data (2017).–2019) and found that black and Hispanic workers were underrepresented in STEM occupations compared to all occupations overall. The data shows that blacks make up 11% of the US workforce and Hispanics make up 17% of the total US workforce (ages 25 and older), while blacks make up only 9% and Hispanics only 8% of the STEM-oriented workforce in the US.
The same data shows overrepresentation by whites and Asians, with whites holding 67% and Asians 13% of STEM occupations, respectively 63% and 6% of all occupations.
Other data suggest that the numbers are skewed towards higher roles. Recently in Built In, the technology work community, “A staggering 73 percent of companies report having zero black or African-American executives.
In a similar analysis, Pew found that men hold more tech jobs than women; Specifically, men hold 75% of “computer jobs” and 85% of engineering jobs. Additionally, in the 2021 Impact of Wage Inequality in the Workplace report, women in tech are 2.5% less paid than men in the same role.
Discrimination is more subtle now.
Marianne Belotti, an engineering manager at Rebellion Defence, who works in information management for the defense industry, says the bias has become more subtle in her 15-year career. Women are denied incentives and opportunities, passed over for publicity, and less likely to be invited to meetings.
At one point, she had to bring a male colleague to meetings with government stakeholders because she knew she would be completely ignored. She makes a point, a male colleague repeats what she said, and is told he’s brilliant.
“Of course there are situations that come up where I’m the only woman in the room,” Belotti said.
“Companies have come a long way because they know they have to pay at least lip service to diversity,” said a tech marketing expert Peggy Liao. It wasn’t long before they were completely walking the walk and talking the talk.
“I want to acknowledge how far we’ve come in the last decade or two. But we’re not there yet,” Liao added.
Why should companies care about diversity?
Recruiting diverse teams isn’t just the right thing to do. It is good for business.
“There’s a lot of research that says diverse groups are better,” Belotti said. They make better decisions. They are happier. They are more efficient. They are more profitable.
By 2020, a McKinsey study Many have reported the same.
“Our 2019 analysis shows that companies with the most gender-diverse executive teams were 25 percent more likely to achieve above-average profitability than peer companies in the fourth quarter,” the report read. “This is up from 21 percent in 2017 and 15 percent in 2014.”
Similarly, companies with higher levels of ethnic and cultural diversity tend to have more homogenous businesses. According to the study, “companies in the upper quartile [of ethnic and cultural diversity] It outperformed the fourth in profitability by 36%.
A diverse workforce also helps build employee loyalty, reducing turnover and associated costs. in the Built-in In a study, 67% of employees said they would be more interested in staying in their current role if their employer improved DEI efforts. Recruiters say they value employers’ efforts to create diverse, fair and inclusive workplaces. 58% said DEI initiatives are most important when considering job opportunities.
A focus on DEI contributes to successful recruitment initiatives. In a recent report, technical-interviewing firm Karat found “high-performing engineering leaders.”– Managers and above “I am very satisfied with the performance of their company’s software engineering hires and am confident that their company will achieve its US software engineer hiring target for 2022.”-Twice as many engineering leaders as other engineering leaders strongly agree that hiring DEI is a priority. They were also more than three times as likely to strongly agree with their peers that they have the resources needed to realize increased diversity on their teams.
“Yet despite this disparity, only 48% of leaders see DEI as a strategic priority, “creating a huge opportunity for leaders who get it right,” the report reads.
Diverse recruitment pools are large, which helps companies find candidates in jobs that are difficult to find employees for– For example cyber security. A year ago, it was reported that there were 500,000 open cybersecurity positions in the United States alone.
Still, underrepresentation persists. A A recent Aspen Institute analysis of 2016 and 2018 surveys collected by the Center for Cyber ​​Security and Education (“ISC2”) found the following.
- 9 percent of the cybersecurity workforce self-identifies as black, compared to 13 percent of the U.S. population.
- 4% of the cybersecurity workforce self-identifies as Hispanic, compared to 19% of the US population.
- Women make up 51% of the US population, but only 24% of the cybersecurity workforce.
Other IT fields, too, face recruitment challenges.
“This is not a problem that is going away anytime soon.” Dortch said. “And that means you need to cultivate as many fields as possible to grow the talent you need in the future. Traditional fields are not enough to meet the demand.”
“It’s difficult to recruit young students to work in certain areas of the technology sector – for example in mainframes,” said Derek Britton, director of communications and brand strategy at MicroFocus.
Companies should consider recruiting from diverse colleges and non-traditional environments, such as historically black colleges and universities (“HCBUs”). Also, members of underrepresented groups can recruit their peers to make those fields more attractive.
“Instead of late-career busybodies coming up with graduate recruitment programs, why not use the graduates to design graduate programs?” Britton said. “These people are already on staff. They’re just not in the right place in the company to act as influencers.”
Britton added, “It’s so obvious, it’s embarrassing to explain the story, but you’d be surprised how often these very obvious ideas are ignored at the corporate level.
And diversity helps boost business. Business-to-business requests for proposals (“RFPs”) require suppliers to provide evidence of a diversity initiative, Britton said.
Diversity helps businesses solve problems
“Diversity gives you strength,” Kelso said. “When you have the ability to draw from many different resources – personalities, skill sets and economic and social backgrounds – it makes your company stronger, because you can solve problems from different sources.”
Misty Decker, director of global AMC product marketing for MicroFocus, cites an example she knows personally. A large retailer was experiencing intermittent system outages that continued for months. Finally, a woman saw the problem and quickly saw a pattern: withdrawals coincided with days with coupons. The woman who solved the problem was responsible for shopping for her family.
However, as Decker said, no woman could solve the problem. Because she doesn’t shop for her family, Decker said she wouldn’t have noticed the pattern herself.
Diversity can help make artificial intelligence (“AI”) more efficient and fair, Bellotti said. People who are in a lot of luck think that the world is fair and reasonable. As such, computer scientists from sanctioned groups build similar biases toward AI.
“They have a good conversation with the people around them. They can go to the store manager with a problem or a complaint and have a good, genuine relationship with them,” Belotti said. “They have a different experience of how the world works than other people in marginalized groups.”
Bellotti added, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people who are hearing warnings about ethical AI are women and people of color.” When you have these experiences, if your relationship with the world is unfair and unkind, you look for problems in a different place than other people.”
Training AI models on all white faces It reduces the accuracy of facial recognitionIt has led to bans by many police departments. And AI can in recruiting systems. Reinforcement of racial discrimination in hiring. AI systems are already trained to look for candidates who resemble successful employees; If your existing labor base is based on race, AI will reinforce that.
Belotti said that in many cases, the solution is to put a human being in charge of the machine. This solution may conflict with human nature.
“Human beings are very sensitive to things like blame and shame, and if you completely outsource the decision-making process to a machine and then put them in a position where they can blame the machine if it changes, they will do that if they go wrong,” Belotti said.
“Input differences create output differences,” Dortch said. “As long as all of your technological input comes from a dynamic middle-aged white youth population, the outcomes are not truly reflective of the diversity of society that you want to serve.”
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