Silicon Valley Companies Face Minority Hiring Complaints

This past week, a coalition of minority activist groups, including the National Asian American Coalition, the Black Economic Council, and the Latino Business Chamber of Greater Los Angeles protested in front of iconic Silicon Valley behemoth Google because it (as well as many other tech firms such as eBay, Cisco, etc.) wouldn’t provide a breakdown of its workforce by race or ethnicity. From my recollection, Google as well as other Silicon Valley technology giants have cited such information requests in the past as competitive information.

I would say that from my knowledge, Google does seem to go out of its way to promote computer science in middle school, high school and college aged women and does a pretty good job of hiring women for both technical and non-technical roles. In terms of minority outreach, given my ten plus years in Silicon Valley, I think Silicon Valley could do a much better job overall in recruiting women and under-represented minorities such as African Americans and Hispanics, as well as Asian Americans and women in leadership positions. The only Silicon Valley female CEO is Carol Bartz of Yahoo! and board representation as well as C-level and upper management representation is woefully low.

What is especially disturbing is that Hispanics and blacks make up a smaller share of Silicon Valley’s tech workforce in 2008 than they did in 2000, even as their share grew across the nation. There was also a decline in the share of management-level jobs held by women between 1999 and 2005. So as the country’s tech industry is becoming more diverse, Silicon Valley is becoming less so. That’s kind of sad.

In a local television news report, Professor James Lai, Ph.D., director of ethnic studies at Santa Clara University, says it appears foreign workers on H1B visas were aggregated with Asian-Americans.

These are high-tech workers typically from China and India into the Asian American U.S. born sample, and that is in some ways misleading when we’re focusing, this report is focusing on the hiring of U.S. workers, domestic workers, that becomes a problem.

Nothing against my Asian cousins, but I find this somewhat disturbing. It only reinforces Asian Americans as “not real Americans” and perpetuates “foreignness.” If Silicon Valley is to be a center of innovation, tech firms (as well as venture capitalists) must do a better job of recruiting based on merit, rather than continuing to hire based on past perceptions and preferences.