When Intel’s C.E.O., Brian Krzanich, announced this week that his company plans to spend three hundred million dollars over the next five years to improve the gender and racial diversity of its U.S. employee base, and of Silicon Valley at large, his choice of venue was as noteworthy as the size of Intel’s pledge. Krzanich announced the initiative during a keynote address at the International Consumer Electronics Show, a high-profile tech trade event, held in Las Vegas, that has had its own issues with diversity. This year, Krzanich’s was one of twenty-two keynote speeches, of which men gave nineteen. A similar proportion of speakers was white. Laura Weidman Powers, the C.E.O. of a nonprofit called CODE2040 that aims to encourage greater black and Latino representation in the tech workforce, attended C.E.S. for the first time and summed up the crowd as “overwhelmingly male, white, and Asian.” As usual, many of the women on the trade-show floor were the scantily clad spokesmodels, known informally as “booth babes,” who help show off companies’ products.
Silicon Valley has never been diverse but, until last year, the gender and racial makeup of most of the region’s biggest tech firms wasn’t publicly known. Then, in May of 2014, Google disclosed that, worldwide, only thirty per cent of its workers were female and that, in the U.S., two per cent were black and three per cent were Hispanic. As Google goes, so goes the Internet, and, by late summer, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and several other companies had followed with statistics of their own. The numbers looked about as bad as Google’s. Intel has been a Silicon Valley standard-bearer for a long time: it has existed for forty-seven years—longer than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined—and its semiconductor chips helped to give Silicon Valley its name. Intel has also been publishing diversity statistics for several years—it was among the first to do so—and yet its figures don’t look much better than those of the newer arrivals, even as it has tried to improve them. The company’s U.S. workforce of more than fifty thousand is twenty-four per cent female, four per cent black, and eight per cent Hispanic.
Broadly speaking, Intel is now trying to figure out why that’s the case and fix the problem. In announcing its diversity initiative, Intel said that its goal is to have a workforce and senior leadership that are “more representative of the talent available in America”—less male, less white. In particular, the company hopes to increase the number of women and black and Latino employees at Intel in the U.S. by fourteen per cent by 2020. Intel hasn’t broken down how it plans to spend the three hundred million dollars, though Rosalind Hudnell, the company’s chief diversity officer, offered me an outline of its plans.
The company wants to invest in training and financial support for engineers and computer scientists who are women or from underrepresented minorities; an individual scholarship might be worth up to two hundred thousand dollars. It also hopes to support the hiring and retention of workers from those groups, including by tying Intel executives’ compensation to their success in reaching its diversity goals. It plans to fund programs to improve the representation of women and minorities in the tech and video-game industries, in part by donating to efforts by the International Game Developers Association Foundation to increase the number of women working in game development. It will also contribute to initiatives designed to counter the bullying of women in gaming, a point that was especially remarked upon in the tech press, because Intel had, several months earlier, faced accusations of sexism after getting embroiled in a video-game-industry controversy known as Gamergate. But when it comes to breaking down the three hundred million dollars in spending, the company offered few precise details.
The reason for this is straightforward: the company’s executives, including Krzanich, aren’t sure yet where the money will go. At C.E.S., Intel hosted a panel on diversity, which featured Powers (whose costs the company covered), Krzanich, Hudnell, and others. On the panel, Krzanich admitted that the company is still working out the details. The uncertainty points to the fact that, for an industry that places so much value on information, Silicon Valley has learned little about how to make the gender and racial balance of its workforce look more like society at large. Because tech companies have been so guarded, for so long, about diversity issues, Powers said, there just isn’t much information out there about what works, when it comes to addressing them.
Some facts are known. It has been well established that too few women and underrepresented minorities—black and Latino students, in particular—are graduating with the tech skills valued in Silicon Valley. (Of those who earn bachelor’s degrees in computer science, eighteen per cent are female; among U.S. citizens and permanent residents earning bachelor’s degrees, eleven per cent are black, and nine per cent are Hispanic.) This is why Intel plans to invest in training and funding students in science and tech fields. Tech companies also aren’t hiring enough of those who are available and qualified. (I wrote about the training and hiring problems in August.) But when I asked experts on workplace diversity where Intel should use its resources, they emphasized another area that has gotten less attention—retaining the women and minorities who are already in Silicon Valley. “Anyone can create an ad that looks like the United Colors of Benetton,” Nicole Sanchez, the C.E.O. of Vaya Consulting, a firm that helps tech companies increase their racial diversity, told me. “It’s much more difficult to ask, ‘Then what happens?’ ”
The percentages of female, black, and Hispanic tech employees at Silicon Valley companies tend to be lower than the percentages with computer-science degrees. This partly has to do with hiring practices, but women and ethnic minorities are also leaving tech jobs for other fields; according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, more than half of women with technical jobs leave their work midway through their careers, double the turnover rate for men. There has been a variety of research into the measures companies can take to keep female and minority employees from leaving. Companies have seen success when they hire enough people from diverse backgrounds that they can form friendships and not feel isolated, and help them find those social connections—rather than hiring small numbers of “token” minorities for the sake of demonstrating an attempt at becoming more diverse. It also helps to spell out clear performance standards, so that employees are judged based on how well they are meeting those standards, rather than on subjective—and potentially biased—factors. And companies can reduce attrition by offering flexible work policies that keep women, in particular, from quitting.
Intel is already doing some of this, Hudnell told me. It runs dozens of “chartered employee groups,” including the Women at Intel Network, the Intel Latino Network, and the Network of Intel African American Employees. But she agreed that more work remains—hence the nine-figure investment. “Part of finding the answer is trying different things,” she said.
Some of what makes Silicon Valley’s diversity problem so difficult, of course, is that it’s so tied to culture. Women and underrepresented minorities often report that they feel left out of Silicon Valley’s mostly male and white culture, or that they feel forced to change their behavior to fit in; this outsider status is often cited as a reason for leaving tech fields. Money will, of course, help Silicon Valley to change its human-resources practices and train more female and minority engineers, but to transform the industry’s culture will be harder still. Three years ago, the BBC asked the C.E.O. of the organization that puts on C.E.S. about the significance of the booth babes to the conference. He responded that “people naturally want to go towards what they consider pretty.” He didn’t specify which people he had in mind.
