Why We Need More Women in Higher Ed IT

Changing mindsets is only the first step to ensuring IT teams improve diversity among their ranks.

By Deborah Keyek-Franssen and Beth Schaefer, Ed Tech Magazine

Striving for diversity in IT stems from the imperative that we deliver the best services and solutions to our students, faculty and staff.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• 5 Ways to Get Girls to Fall in Love With STEM (Inc.com)

Can computers be racist? Big data, inequality, and discrimination

Michael Brennan, Ford Foundation

It seems like everyone is talking about the power of big data and how it is helping companies, governments, and organizations make better and more efficient decisions. But rarely do they mention that big data can actually perpetuate and exacerbate existing systems of racism, discrimination, and inequality.

Read the story here.

Apple makes progress on gender, racial diversity

Reuters

Apple Inc has made progress on boosting gender and racial diversity in its U.S. workforce, a regulatory document filed by the iPhone maker showed.

Silicon Valley companies have been criticized for the lack of diversity and have been facing increasing pressure to diversify their largely male, mostly white workforces.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Silicon Valley To Women Who’ve Left Tech: Please Come Back (International Business Times)
• Report Reveals Inconsistency with Apple’s Workplace Diversity Claims (INSIGHT Into Diversity)
• Apple's employee diversity improved in 2015 — but only just (Business Insider)
• Apple is (very) slowly improving its employee diversity (Engadget)
• Here's everything Facebook is doing this year to address its 'pathetic' diversity numbers (Business Insider)
• Can't hack it: Tech's diversity efforts are 'a failure' (CNN Money)
• Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders? (Bloomberg Business)
• Why Does Silicon Valley Continue Lacking Diversity? (Diversity, Inc.)
• New Study Finds Gender Discrimination in the Tech Industry Is Still Sky-High (VOGUE)
• The tech world has yet to embrace Martin Luther King’s dream (Daily Dot)

Why tech companies support affirmative action

By Katie Lobosco, CNN

Some big companies are making the case for affirmative action as the Supreme Court hears arguments on the issue Wednesday.

Tech giants IBM and Intel, as well as chemical maker DuPont, say that colleges and universities should be allowed to consider race when admitting students as a way to increase diversity.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Universities Collaborate to Attract Females, Other Minorities to STEM (U.S. News & World Report)

Congressional Black Caucus, Leading African American Organizations Announce New Initiatives To Increase Tech Diversity

BlackEngineer.com

America's Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G. K. Butterfield and Congresswoman Barbara Lee, co-chairs of the CBC Diversity Task Force, have convened leading African American Organizations to announce new initiatives in tech diversity.

Read the press release here.

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• Congressional Black Caucus Tackles Tech Sector Diversity (Bloomberg BNA)

Gates Scholarship Program Aims to Boost Minority Leadership

By Alex Daniels, The Chronicle of Philanthropy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will replace its signature work in postsecondary education, the Gates Millennium Scholars program, with a $417.2 million scholarship program that aims to use technology to build campus leaders among low-income minority students.

Read the story here.

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• Raising a New Generation of Ghanaian #CodeGirls (BlackGirlNerds)

Bay Area Tech Companies Still Lag on Gender Diversity

Reuters

Gender diversity in the San Francisco Bay Area technology sector has improved over the last five years, but the region's most gender-diverse businesses are in the retail, biopharmaceuticals and financial services sector, a new study from the University of California, Davis, found.

Read he story here.

Related content:

• IBM Apologizes For Demeaning Women Engineers With New Commercial (Think Progress)
• Have universities been looking at STEM data all wrong? (eCampus News)
• Microsoft 2015 diversity numbers flat, women fall flat (USA Today)
• Gallup: Girls Less Confident About Computer Science (NBC News)

Twitter Stock Down as Revenue Plummets and a Diversity Scandal Rises

By Kaitlyn D’Onofrio,, DiversityInc

Twitter suffered a very dismal third quarter for 2015, with Twitter stock currently down 1.8 percent. And between Q2 and Q3, Twitter only increased its monthly active users by 1.25 percent.

Meanwhile, Twitter now also finds itself in the midst of a very public diversity problem. Following CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to lay off 9 percent of Twitter’s employees, Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote a letter to Dorsey regarding the layoffs and expressed his concern that the decision targeted minorities, who are already severely underrepresented at the company.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Ex-employee blasts Twitter, rival firms come knocking (CNN Money)
• Inside Twitter's big diversity problem (CNN Money)

Facebook is targeting minority parents to improve tech's diversity gap

Facebook is targeting minority parents to improve tech's diversity gap

On Wednesday, the tech giant launched a new resource for minority learners—and their families.

By Valentina Zarya, Fortune

On Wednesday, the tech giant launched a new resource for minority learners—and their families.

Diversity in tech is a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days—with good reason. The arguments for it are countless: diverse workforces improve the bottom line, get companies closer to their customers, help spur innovation…the list goes on. However, one factor that stops tech companies from hiring more minorities and women is the so-called “pipeline problem.”

Indeed, in 2014 just 14.7% of computer science graduates were women, 4.1% were black and 7.7% were Hispanic, according to a report by the Computing Research Association.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Free housing, other efforts try to attract women to tech (The Associated Press)
• How LinkedIn embeds diversity goals into day-to-day management (Fortune)
• Google Works with HBCUs to Boost Diversity in Tech Field (INSIGHT into Diversity)
• Slack Engineer Erica Baker: Diversity Efforts Need To Extend Beyond Gender (Tech Crunch)

Tinder, But For Diversity: Can Code Help Silicon Valley Find And Retain Minority Engineers?

By Salvador Rodriguez, International Business Times

SAN FRANCISCO -- If lack of diversity is Silicon Valley’s problem, is there a tech solution? While creating a diverse workforce with proportionate women and minorities may seem like the ultimate human problem, some believe there's a fix that involves code.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Tech Diversity: Coding Boot Camps Bringing Higher Percentages Of Women, Minorities Into Tech, Study Finds (International Business Times)
• How to diversify your IT hiring pipeline (CIO)

Fixing Tech’s Gender Problem Requires Rethinking Business as Usual

By Rebecca Prinster, INSIGHT into Diversity

Conflicting narratives exist to explain why women are underrepresented and underpaid in the technology industry. One popular theory blames a leaky pipeline and a lack of interest in entering the profession.

But many women who have worked at tech companies and left the field mid-career blame a hostile culture that is not conducive or sympathetic to women.

The truth is a little of both.

Read the story here.

STEM Initiative to Focus on Minority Women, Girls

By Ronald Roach, Diverse Issues in Higher Education

With a high-profile announcement from the Obama administration last month, a consortium of 10 colleges and universities and nine nonprofit organizations led by Arizona State University researchers has launched a national initiative to “identify and scale effective evidence-based strategies to improve STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) diversity in the nation’s colleges and universities with a special focus on women and girls of color from underrepresented communities.”

Read the story here.

Tech Diversity Gets Another Conference: Tech Inclusion 2015 Brings Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest

By Salvador Rodriguez, International Business Times

SAN FRANCISCO -- A few weeks ago, Melinda Briana Epler and Wayne Sutton were unsure whether anyone would show up for Tech Inclusion, the technology industry diversity conference they’ve been planning for months. This week, they had to start turning people away after the event sold out, the latest sign that the tech industry’s diversity movement is quickly gaining momentum.

Although conferences focusing on women and specific ethnicities have been around a while, Tech Inclusion 2015 is the one of the first of its kind, focused on diversity and inclusion in Silicon Valley for people of all ages, ethnicities, genders, sexualities or other kinds of backgrounds. It is also the latest effort by techies to bring more diversity to their industry, whose inclusion figures for women, Hispanics and African-Americans are embarrassingly low. Kicking off Friday morning, the conference has drawn more than 350 attendees and 120-plus speakers, including people from major tech companies such as Facebook Inc., Google Inc., Pinterest, Twitter Inc. and Yelp Inc.

Read the story here.

What It's Like To Be Black at Google

Black employees at the tech giant are building their own community in an industry known for its lack of diversity.

By Nigel Roberts, The Root

It’s a challenge for African Americans working in California’s Silicon Valley to have a sense of community. Clennita Justice has worked for several technology companies there over the past 25 years.

At many of those companies, you could go for days without seeing another black person,” says the senior engineering program manager, who now works at Google.

Read the story here.