Black Lives Matter filled the summer of 2020 with cries for justice as protests spread throughout the nation, with many Silicon Valley firms pledging support to the movement as well.

With the industry having been a majority-white, majority-male space since birth, tech giants issued promises to diversify their staffs and promised hefty donations designed in part to help diversify employment pipelines and increase training for tech jobs.

Among the more ambitious pledges last year, Google and Facebook vowed to increase underrepresented leadership by 30% over the next five years, with each earmarking over US$100mil to support Black business owners and other groups in the Black community. Other firms joined in: a 2020 study by corporate analytics platform Blendoor estimates that over US$4.5bil was poured into diversity efforts across the entire industry.

But despite promises and impressive cash donations, some wonder if anything has really changed in Silicon Valley.

“I don’t see any company out there that is making major steps forward,” said Matt Carter, CEO of San Mateo software network Aryaka. According to Blendoor, Carter is one of the few Black executives in the industry, a group that made up less than 3% of leadership at top tech firms in 2018.

More than a year after tech companies have scored social media points with their claims of change, Carter asks them a simple question: “Are there more Black people sitting in your company?”

Not really, according to the latest round of annual diversity reports. Although diversity and inclusion teams have existed for years at some companies, in the aggregate, white and male employees still occupy a majority of positions and executive seats, even when research suggests the lack of diversity can be costly for corporations. Blendoor reports that Black and Hispanic workers made up just 4.7% and 6.8% of the industry in 2021, according to its analysis of most recent information from 240 companies. It’s less than a 1% increase from what was recorded in 2014 - far from what the equitable world tech leaders envisioned six years ago.

“They say, ‘We can’t find people’. Yes you can,” Carter said, among many to be frustrated with the lack of progress. “You can’t allow (companies) to sit back and say, ‘Well, we’re not where we need to be’. I heard that 25 years ago. It’s the same answer... I see a lot of rhetoric, and I don’t see a lot of results.”

He points to a common criticism of tech’s diversity mission: Companies preach of their diversity initiatives, but are less vocal about whether or not they’re actually successful.

Take, for instance, Cisco: Despite maintaining a Global Inclusion and Diversity Council since 2007 and vaguely pledging for a “fully diverse and inclusive” community in 2017, the company that was previously headquartered in San Jose declined to comment on why minority representation has only increased by a few percentage points in the past five years. Its US workforce remains majority-white at 51.8%, while Hispanic/Latino employees make up just 5.8% of the workforce despite being the largest ethnic group in California. Black employees take up an even smaller slice at 4.1% - both of these figures up less than 1% from what they were in 2015.

Oracle, which moved its headquarters from Redwood City to Austin, Texas, last year, also declined to comment on its lack of progress, having reported similar figures. Although the company has made commitments on its website to recruit from Hispanic-Serving institutions and historically Black colleges, the company’s 2021 data reports that 58% of its US workforce is white - a slight decrease from 2015, when, after initially objecting to the release of its diversity stats, the company was forced to admit roughly 60% of its employees were white. Meanwhile, 6.3% of its US employees today are Hispanic and 3.7% are Black, a less than 1% increase from what it reported overall in 2015.

Both firms have garnered such attention for the lack of progress that they faced lawsuits in the past year, critiqued for spouting “corporate platitudes”, “virtue signaling” and having “no real commitment to diversity”, according to complaints filed by company shareholders.

Other companies, among them HP, LinkedIn, Adobe and Square, did not respond to requests for comment or did not make a spokesperson available to answer questions, only offering a basic summary of their diversity initiatives.

“We’ve seen a lot of commitments over the past 16 months or so. We’ve seen a lot of white words on black backgrounds... and that’s a step, but it’s not the only step we need to take in the industry,” said Rhonda Allen, CEO of /dev/color, a support organisation for Black engineers.

Allen speculates that the lack of action in Silicon Valley’s diversity effort can be partly attributed to its technical nature. “Folks are building and moving quickly,” she said of the industry, “(and) sometimes, in moving fast, we can compromise on inclusion.”

Researchers have come to reverberate these findings: Cecilia Ridgeway, a sociology professor at Stanford University, said that the technical nature of the industry can cause some hiring managers to believe that the best person to bring on is the person with the “right answer”.

“People are not trying to be biased, but they have some hidden assumptions,” Ridgeway said. “If you’re not sure if someone is competent (in the workplace), then you think, ‘Well, you really better prove it to me. I need more evidence from you than this other guy’.”

This can create a double-standard for women and people of colour, Ridgeway said, even as study after study shows they are underrepresented in the industry.

Companies that have been more successful on the diversity front recognise this struggle. Twitter has incorporated anti-bias measures, such as partnering with third-party platforms to remove biased language in job descriptions and recruiting from diverse venues during the pandemic, among them the National Society of Black Engineers, ColorComm, and others.

It’s one reason why Twitter thinks it has made more progress in minority representation than most tech companies, citing bias elimination as a major aspect in its diversity agenda. Between 2017 and June of this year, the company has nearly doubled the number of Black and Latinx employees in its overall workforce, and more than doubled the number of Black employees in leadership.

“This progress cannot come fast enough,” Twitter said in a statement to The Chronicle. The company has has pledged to have at least 25% of its leadership be women or underrepresented minorities by 2025.

Intel has taken similar steps: Dawn Jones, its chief diversity and inclusion officer, said that the company runs trainings on unconscious bias and requires new-hire panels to include women or underrepresented minorities. The policies have led the company to announce it reached full representation in its US workforce in 2018 - meaning that percentages of underrepresented minorities matched that in the available labour market - two years ahead of schedule.

Jones, who is overseeing Intel’s new goal of doubling the number of women and URM in leadership by 2030, also attributes the company’s success to its commitment to transparency and measurement, although she admitted in a blog post on Intel's website that progress was inconsistent.

“We’ve improved in some areas and declined in others,” she said of Intel’s 2020 numbers, which show an approximately 2% increase in Black and Hispanic representation in its US workforce since 2014. “We must do more as an industry,” Jones said.

A tech veteran of over 20 years, Carter looks back at his career and describes it as a lonely experience, recalling that, despite the call for diverse team members, he rarely made it past the first round when interviewing for Silicon Valley firms.

“And it’s a similar experience for women and people of color... I’ve seen a lot of very talented women and minorities who haven't gotten the opportunity simply because they didn’t fit into the status quo,” Carter said, a paradigm he tries to break in his own company of around 400 employees. Carter estimates that 70% of those who directly report to him are women or people of colour - a sight that, by all measures, is practically unheard of in the industry.

The lack of diversity also comes at a cost for corporations. A study by Deloitte suggests that diversity in the workplace can help firms attract good talent, with nearly half of all Millennials saying that diversity is “an important factor” in their job search. Another study by McKinsey & Company found that firms in the top quartile for ethnic diversity were 33% more likely to take home above-average profits, while those in the bottom quartile were 29% more likely to earn below average.

The McKinsey study also found that the most diverse firms, among other qualities, saw diversity as part of the company’s growth strategy and had a commitment to diversity that cascaded from company leaders - some “critical areas companies tend to fall short on”.

Just look at the ethnic breakdown of company boards that are mostly populated by white male executives: A 2014 review by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that, on average, executive seats were 1.9% Black and 3.1% Hispanic at top tech firms. And despite a new law in California mandating companies to include board members from underrepresented backgrounds, many tech giants have seen only marginal improvement in these figures. In the past five to six years, Cisco and Oracle have both seen a less than 1% increase in Black and Hispanic executives.

Stagnant numbers like these have led to the birth of new diversity advocacy groups in the space: Intel, Snap Inc and other tech giants joined forces last year to create the Alliance for Global Inclusion, a coalition that aims to improve diversity practices and hold companies accountable with its inclusion index.

Apple, which has seen a 64% increase in employees from underrepresented communities since 2014, recently announced a US$100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, which partners with historically black colleges and has created a developer hub in Detroit to support diverse recruitment. It’s followed most recently by The Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s yearlong “readiness programme”, which seeks to prepare diverse candidates for leadership on corporate tech boards.

Existing leaders, like Carter, have also been encouraged to take a different approach to diversity than the rest of the industry. Carter attributes Aryaka’s makeup to his commitment of looking for actual talent rather than a familiar face. “What (other companies) are really doing is saying... ‘Yeah we want to embrace diversity, but you have to fit with us’, as opposed to, ‘Wait a minute, how do we fit with you?’”

And despite the history that entrenches it, Carter, Allen and Ridgeway think there’s hope Silicon Valley isn’t totally immutable.

“I do see a different future, but that future doesn’t come without disruption,” Allen said. “It’s not only about sparking change, it’s about sustaining that change and sustaining the momentum long after the news cycle moves on.”

 - TNS