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Sheryl Sandberg

Voices: Silicon Valley has a diversity deficit

Jon Swartz
USA TODAY
Half of Yahoo's 12,000 employees are white and 39% are Asian; only 4% are Hispanic and 2% black.

SAN FRANCISCO — The tech industry fancies itself a great equalizer in society, empowering individuals to do extraordinary things with the latest digital wizardry.

And yet a common question lingers, voiced by friends and colleagues who pointedly ask: Where are the blacks in Silicon Valley? The Hispanics? The women?

Their exasperation is well founded.

What has been an open secret in tech circles, deflected and glossed over by executives, is at last coming to the fore: The industry comes nowhere close to reflecting the composition of its customers.

This was made painfully clear Tuesday by a Yahoo diversity report — the latest in a string of depressing demographic information compilations from tech companies — that underscores alarming racial and gender gaps.

The numbers are stark. Half of Yahoo's 12,000 employees are white and 39% are Asian; only 4% are Hispanic and 2% black. Just 37% are women. Nationally, women make up 47% of the workforce. The population is 64% white, 16% black, 12% Hispanic and 5% Asian, according to the 2012 U.S. Census.

Yahoo's numbers mirror similar reports from Google and LinkedIn, fueling the long-held debate that has raged over tech and the impoverished. In a country sharply divided by income and class status, in no area is it as pronounced as in technology.

Silicon Valley has "been a bastion of sexism," says Vivek Wadhwa, a fierce critic of the valley's white male-dominated culture and author of the forthcoming book Innovating Women.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions Festival on Wednesday, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg called the lack of diversity in all companies "pretty depressing."

The discourse will surely ratchet up when Facebook discloses its gender and racial breakdown this summer. Despite the rainbow coalition of its 1.3 billion members worldwide, the social network is as predominantly white and male as its corporate counterparts.

The young boys network is alive and thriving not just among not engineers, but also among executives who run tech companies and the venture capitalists who fund them.

"It is a self-perpetuating cycle of those in a small network that is passed from generation to generation," says Derecka Mehrens, executive director of Working Partnerships USA, a nonprofit community-based organization in San Jose.

Yet for the first time in decades, change is in the air. Companies are finally making public the demographic information they collect and report to the federal government. Coding programs for non-whites are picking up steam. And political figures like Jesse Jackson are showing up at shareholder meetings, urging the likes of Google and Facebook to come clean on numbers.

Why now?

After years of tolerating — some would argue venerating — tech's meritocracy, many now question its exclusionary nature. As the income gap in Silicon Valley widens, creating a middle-class hole, non-tech participants are expressing their resentment over the privileges of their tech neighbors.

The mounting pressure has forced some companies like Google to rethink their approaches. Google chairman Eric Schmidt in March said the company is "very, very worried" about the growing financial inequality in San Francisco.

On Thursday, Google launched Made with Code, a $50 million initiative with the simple and singular focus of bringing more girls into the coding fold.

Enlightened VC firms such as Accion's Venture Lab are investing in start-ups with tech solutions and financial services for the poor and underserved. One of its seed investments, Quippi, offers gift-card technology to the Hispanic community with reduced service charges, making it easier for Hispanics to buy goods from major Mexican vendors.

But pardon my skepticism if I don't see major change any time soon.

Tech has had a decidedly white male look for a reason: It has been very slow to embrace diversity. Despite encouraging signs, progress is arguably years away.

We'll have to wait longer before we see more color in the Silicon Valley tapestry.

Swartz, USA TODAY's San Francisco bureau chief, has covered Silicon Valley for more than 25 years.

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