Hiring Practices in the Tech Sector

              When considering hiring practices and the discriminatory acts that lead to inequality in the workplace, one might assume that there is at least a slight representation from different races to compose the different sectors of our workplace. However, when looking specifically at the technology sector in the United States, the statistics are somewhat daunting in terms of how it is composed. To look for specifically at individual companies we will take a look at two powerhouse companies that dominate the technological sphere in the United States. Both Google and Facebook are currently struggling to diversify their workforce, regardless of what their ads or news write ups may say.

              Google employs 46,170 employees worldwide, with only thirty percent of them being women. Then when looking specifically at the technical employees that Google employs, an astonishing seventeen percent are women. These numbers do not have very much meaning until we compare them to the entire workforce in the United States. A statistic that surprised me was that forty seven percent of the American work force is composed of females. With so much discrimination going on I figured that that number would have been slightly lower, but it seems we are closing the gap in terms of sexual equality in the workplace. When looking at race though the numbers are staggeringly different. Eighty percent of American employees are white, twelve percent are black, and only five percent are Asian. When looking at Google individually though we see that sixty one percent of its employees are white, about one third are Asian, three percent Hispanic, and only two percent are black. So as we can see, whites clearly dominate the sector as they do in the country as a whole, yet Hispanic and black Americans barely take up a slice of the pie at Google.

              Facebook is an interesting case because they have not release any of their data in terms of racial and gender makeup of its employees. From the public’s eye it seems as if they are trying to cover up the obvious fact that like Google, they are far from have racial equality in the workplace. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was quoted saying, “It’s really important to share [the diversity numbers] internally, and eventually externally.” The fact that she stresses that eventually they will release this data suggests that there is clear inequality in Facebook’s makeup. Sandberg later goes on to say how Facebook is looking for candidate with, “diverse backgrounds,” to take directing roles of the company. We do know that of the eight Facebook directors that are currently employed at the company, all eight of them are white, with only two of them being women. There is a clear problem with the equality at Facebook which partly may have to do with how youthful of a company it is. They have yet to go in and truly reconstruct the board that brought Facebook to the big stage. Granted there have been changes made, but nothing that can be seen as revolutionary.

              In the past weeks Microsoft’s CEO made a contradictory comment regarding women and raises. The comment Nadella made suggested that women should not be asking for raises, but rather if they are putting in quality work and have “good karma,” they will be compensated accordingly. This is a serious issue due to the large disparity in wages that men earn compared to women.  Even though the CEO publically apologized and went on to say that, “If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.” As heartfelt as this comment may be, the fact that the other way of thinking is still clearly prevalent in our society suggests that a larger change needs to be made in order to achieve workplace equality.

 

Video Can be Seen Here:

http://www.bing.com/videos/browse?mkt=en-us&vid=f1d7577d-3b0f-45f2-b1ce-68728ef9245d&from=sharepermalink&src=v5:share:sharepermalink:

 

http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-males/index.html

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-employee-data-illustrating-techs-diversity-challenge/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/05/22/facebook-rebuffs-plea-to-release-data-on-race-gender-of-employees/

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/09/technology/microsoft-ceo/index.html