Income Inequality in Silicon Valley

                In the last few years Silicon Valley in California has become prominent as companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have gained huge amounts of revenue and profit from their products. That, in turn, leads to highly paid employees of the company, who live in the San Francisco Bay Area (a.k.a. Silicon Valley) where the companies are headquartered. However, a recent article published in USA Today by Jon Swartz provides a remarkably deep look into the income inequality inherent in the Silicon Valley power structure. Specifically, the article gives a picture on Silicon Valley’s poor: those who do not have a high-paying job with a tech company.

The article describes the conditions in the forgotten parts of Silicon Valley with a wide view. Swartz mentions the facts that most reporters do not in their looks at Silicon Valley. Despite everything I have read about both these topics (low-income people in America as well as Silicon Valley), I had never heard that there were tent cities of homeless people in San Jose, California, with the largest having 350 people. I found it especially shocking that despite rich towns like Atherton being next to poor towns like Redwood City, high-paid tech employees do little to help the area’s poor. Particular attention is spent on the mostly Black and Hispanic town of East Palo Alto, which is in the heart of Silicon Valley yet gets none of the blessings of that position. Its crime rate has always been very high, and went up again just last year. (Swartz 2014)

                A fact that goes unmentioned in the article is how imbalanced hiring practices lead to income inequality, as the people who get jobs with the large technology companies are of a very different racial makeup than the United States in general. For example, Google’s percentages of black and Hispanic employees are at astonishingly low numbers. A report earlier this year showed that only two percent of Google’s workforce is black and only three percent is Hispanic. High-level employment is even lower, with 1.5% of Google’s leadership being black and 1% Hispanic. (Jacobson 2014) 

 

Mark Zuckerberg (The World's Billionaires 2014)

                The values of the biggest Silicon Valley companies are growing at a rapid rate. The net worth of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has grown as the company he owns a large slice of has expanded. According to Forbes Magazine’s database of the richest people in the world, he was worth 6.9 billion dollars four years ago; now he is worth 34 billion. (The World’s Billionaires 2014) His income and wealth grows as the Silicon Valley’s wealth stagnates. It appears that this course is one that will be continued for the near future. In my next and last blog post, I will consider some possible remedies for these growing inequalities.

Jacobson, M. (2014, May 28). Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it’s not good. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/

Swartz, J. (2014, November 3). Struggling in the shadow of Silicon Valley wealth. USA Today. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/11/03/east-palo-alto-philanthropy-facebook-silicon-valley/16244117/

The World's Billionaires. (2014, November 3). Mark Zuckerberg. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/