Silicon Valley Failed To Think Different

Tech companies’ mostly White workforce reflects years of broken promises on diversity

- David Rocks

Quora Inc., which runs the eponymous questions and answers website, couldn’t figure this one out: Why were so many Black and Latinx college students rejecting its job offers or withdrawing from interviews? Last year, a recruiter suggested that the Silicon Valley company might seem more welcoming if it had dedicated groups of underrepresented employees for the candidates to consult. Higher-ups were initially skeptical, she says, whether the company even had enough diverse employees to do so. Quora says it’s in the process of creating such groups.

Silicon Valley’s predominantly White, male workforce didn’t have to be this way. The wave of national unrest around ingrained racism has called attention to the dearth of people of color across corporate America. Yet if there’s one industry that should have been able to avoid these problems, it’s technology. Many of today’s biggest tech companies, which frequently use their corporate mission statements to espouse utopian harmony, didn’t exist a few decades ago. They didn’t inherit the same racial disparities entrenched at banks and other centuries-old institutions. Yet they’ve replicated the same rot.

“Tech had started to take over our world, but as the industry added tens of thousands of jobs, it was ushering in the same systemic racism we’ve faced for 100 years,” says Joseph Bryant, who leads PushTech2020, an initiative of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. “It’s not just, ‘Don’t put your knee on my neck.’ It’s also, ‘Help me get a job and build wealth, because I’m qualified and you’re not even looking in my direction.’ ”