NEW COALITION TO BRING MORE WOMEN OF COLOR TO TECH

Melinda Gates is leading a new coalition to bring more women of color to tech, at Facebook the share of women has grown from 31% to 36% in the same time frame. Similar trends hold true at Google, Apple, and other major tech companies.

Of the employees of color at Facebook, nearly 85% are asian, the percentage of black and latino employees in tech roles has remained flat 3% and 1% since 2014, Techs least visible group are women of color.

It”s no secret Silicon Valley has a diversity problem, its perhaps surprising for most women of color to have representation within the field  which is actually getting worse. The share of black and Latina and native American women receiving computing degrees has dropped by one-third over the past decade, from 6% to 4% according to a study from the National Science Foundation.

Asians are the most likely candidates to be hired in tech but are least likely to be promoted, Melinda Gates wanted to find out what tech companies were doing in order to reverse these trends. Her investment and incubation company Pivotal Ventures combined forces with McKinsey to look into how prominent tech companies were spending their corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets. 32 tech companies that took the survey including Google and Microsoft spent a total of $500 million on CSR and philanthropic giving in 2017, but only 5% of that money went towards gender diversity efforts.

Although the companies expressed a strong desire to increase the number of black, Latina, and Native American women in their ranks, only .001 percent of their spending went toward the kinds of programs necessary to accomplish that.

As a response to the survey’s findings, Gates is spearheading a coalition of a dozen tech companies called ”Rebooting Representation,” which aims to double the number of underrepresented women of color graduating with computer science degrees by 2025. The coalition—with founding members including Adobe, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oath, and additional members including BNY Mellon, Best Buy, Symantec, LinkedIn, and Qualcomm—has already pledged more than $12 million toward this goal.

“I love imagining these young women and the futures ahead of them,” Gates wrote in a statement. “They may or may not be thinking about careers in tech yet. But it matters that tech is thinking about them.”

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