Facebook takes heat for diversity 'pipeline' remarks
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is taking heat for comments made by its global diversity chief.
This week the giant social network released its annual diversity report, showing little progress in increasing the ranks of African Americans and Hispanics. In a blog post announcing the results, Maxine Williams outlined a number of initiatives from the company to close the racial and gender gap in the short and long-term.
One line stood out to some diversity advocates and blacks and Hispanics working in tech. "It has become clear that at the most fundamental level, appropriate representation in technology or any other industry will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system," Williams wrote.
The implication, say some: Facebook was blaming the nation's education system and the recruitment "pipeline" — too few graduating with the degrees and training tech companies need and too few applying for jobs with these companies — for not employing more black and Hispanic workers.
In protest, they started a hashtag on Twitter: #FBNoExcuses.
Facebook declined to comment on the backlash.
"This narrative that nothing can be done today and so we must invest in the youth of tomorrow ignores the talents and achievements of the thousands of people in tech from underrepresented backgrounds and renders them invisible," said Laura Weidman Powers, CEO and co-founder of CODE2040, a nonprofit that connects blacks and Hispanic engineering students with tech companies.
Facebook makes scant progress on diversity
People working to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in tech say more women and minorities should have access to the industry and the high-paying, fast-growing jobs it offers. Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented in computer science and engineering programs relative to the population while Asian students are overrepresented.
Yet data show many more black and Hispanic students major in computer science and engineering than work in jobs in the tech industry. Nine percent of graduates from top engineering programs are black and Hispanic, according to a recent report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Representation for blacks and Hispanics at major technology companies is about 5%.
USA TODAY analysis of the employment records of Facebook, Google and Yahoo revealed that minorities are also sharply underrepresented in non-technical jobs such as sales and administration, with African Americans faring noticeably worse than Hispanics.
"While there is some truth to the 'pipeline' theory and anxiety over the ability of the U.S. educational system to provide a sufficiently large, well trained, and diverse labor pool, there are additional factors at play," the EEOC report stated.
Observers say those factors are the recruiting methods and corporate cultures of tech companies, especially in Silicon Valley, which has historically been dominated by white and Asian men. People of color aren't landing these jobs, staying in these jobs or even applying in the first place, after hearing negative things about the culture of the companies and the experiences of the few blacks and Hispanics who work there.
"I am kind of shocked that Facebook would continue to perpetuate a narrative that has been so thoroughly disproven by the data," said Joelle Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a strategy firm that consults with technology companies on diversity and inclusion.
Kayla Smith, a network engineer, says she loved working at Facebook and for someone like Mark Zuckerberg, but left after one year because the culture was not inclusive enough. The only woman engineer on a team of 25 or so men, she says she felt too isolated.
"I didn't get invited to meetings. I didn't get put on projects. I withered and felt irrelevant," she said. "There is a lot of effort and thought put into diversity at a company level but at individual levels, there are a lot of micro cultures. Diversity did not trickle down to the team I was on."
Around her, she saw few people who were not white and Asian men. "From what I saw empirically, looking left and looking right, I was seeing very few women and I wasn't seeing any people of color," Smith said.
Williams' remarks surprised her.
"It's wrong. It's not about pipeline," Smith said. "I think when you are a tech company and a successful tech company, you have confirmation bias. The way you do recruiting must be the right way because look at how successful you are."
So what does Facebook need to do?
"Figure out how to help diverse candidates be successful there. Be responsible for their success," Smith said.
Technology companies in Silicon Valley have been pouring resources and money into diversity efforts since Google first disclosed the lopsided demographics of its workforce in May 2014. The efforts have focused on increasing the diversity of the tech workforce and making the culture of tech companies more inclusive.
The push has gained urgency in the tech industry. Whites are expected to become a minority in the USA by 2044, Hispanic and African-American buying power is on the rise and Silicon Valley has ambitions that now lap the globe. Having women and underrepresented minorities brainstorming and building, not just using, the products dreamed here is quickly becoming a necessity.
Recruiting and hiring processes have been dissected at major tech companies to identify barriers for women and underrepresented minorities at every stage. Companies have also examined how they evaluate and promote employees to ferret out bias. From there, they are deploying strategies such as looking beyond traditional networks and broadening the kinds of schools they recruit from, implementing their version of the NFL's Rooney Rule to interview at least one minority candidate for open positions, offering training in unconscious bias and holding managers responsible for considering and hiring diverse candidates.
EEOC: More diversity needed in tech hiring
Many of those efforts are starting to pay off for Facebook, Williams said, with hiring rates at times exceeding the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the population. But that has had little effect on the overall diversity of Facebook's staff, with Hispanics accounting for 4% of its U.S. workforce and African Americans 2%, percentages that have not budged since 2014 and that fall below other industries' averages.
At Google, women and minorities still lag
Facebook is hardly alone. Google reported in June that it's making very slow progress on diversity. It's hiring more black and Hispanic workers: 4% of hires in 2015 were black and 5% were Hispanic, according to Google. Hispanic employees in technical roles increased to 3% from 2%. But the increased hiring did not budge the overall percentage of underrepresented minorities in the Google workforce, with Hispanics making up 3% of the work force and African Americans 2%.
Williams told USA TODAY earlier this week that significant demographic shifts inside tech companies will only come about when the nation increases the number of students of color studying computer science and when other industries outside of tech begin hiring more people of color.
Kaya Thomas, who wrote a Medium essay Invisible Talent in response to Williams' comments, says that conclusion disregards the talent pool that is available now.
The 20-year-old software engineer grew up loving technology and took her first computer science class as a freshman at Dartmouth College. While working as an intern at Time Inc. building mobile apps, Thomas created her own: We Read Too, that features children's and young adult books written by author of color featuring characters of color.
"Creating We Read Too showed me I could use my tech skills to make software that could help solve issues that I faced and cared about," Thomas says.
So she started working with the non-profit Black Girls Code to pass on her skills and enthusiasm. This summer, she's interning with a tech company through CODE2040 and, after she graduates next year, she hopes to land a full-time gig in tech.
"I know that the pipeline is a problem. We definitely need more kids from underrepresented backgrounds learning how to code but for Facebook to use that as an excuse for their low diversity numbers was completely appalling to me," Thomas says. "I felt personally hurt because I couldn't stop thinking about all the work I've put into making tech a passion of mine and my other peers of color who have done the same. It felt as if Facebook was telling us we didn't exist."
Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn @jguynn Read more of our coverage on diversity in tech here.