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On the current trajectory, it would take roughly 95 years for Black professionals working in the national private sector to reach 12 percent representation in management roles, a new report finds. McKinsey & Company published this finding amongst others in its inaugural Race in the Workplace: The Black Experience report. The new report studies Black professionals working in the U.S. private sector, diversity, equity and inclusion programs and what economic success looks like. Walmart, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, PolicyLink and the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility collaborated to conduct research on 24 national companies, which represent 3.7 million employees. Monne Williams, Atlanta partner at McKinsey & Company and co-author of the new report, told AfroTech that McKinsey invited a number of companies and they had to opt-in to participate. This initial report focuses on large employees with good industry representation, she said. “We looked at current representation...
One in three BIPOC tech employees feel discriminated against by their employers, a new report finds. While a third of minority tech workers aren’t feeling comfortable at work, 67% of them said their company has a diversity and inclusion team that’s supposed to be focused on making sure they feel welcomed and supported, according to information provided to AfroTech. These findings were published by global data and market research company Savanta. Lead researchers Sadia Corey and Daniel Garcia wanted to publish this report after the civil unrest that swept the nation last year. “We really felt like after the movement from the summer, George Floyd’s death and some of the protests that were happening, we wanted to keep the conversation going and bring some statistics to some feelings and sentiments that we already know about in the U.S. workplace,” Corey told AfroTech. As part of Savanta’s Black Lives Matter: Everywhere, Amplifying the voices of minorities in the workplace report, there...
This article was originally published on 04/17/2019 As artificial intelligence gains popularity, members of the public have started to notice how it seems to perpetuate discrimination. With situations like Google Photos misclassifying Black people as gorillas and Amazon’s recruiting tool that taught itself men are the preferred candidates, AI’s problems are clear. In a report released this year , researchers from AI Now stated the industry is facing a “diversity crisis.” Researchers also raised important questions about efforts to improve diversity and AI’s entanglement with old pseudosciences. According to the report, more than 80 percent of professionals in AI are men. At Facebook and Google, women make up only 15 percent and 10 percent of AI research staff, respectively. The data is even worse for Black workers, though, where only 2.5 percent of Google’s workforce is Black, while Facebook and Microsoft sit at 4 percent. Researchers caution that efforts to “focus on women in tech”...
When it comes to the tech industry, Silicon Valley has long reigned as the place to be. However, new research shows things may now be changing. A report by the Brunswick Group has found that Silicon Valley is having difficulties locating new workers, and this may cause issues for the area’s future. For the report, the Brunswick Group surveyed 300 tech workers employed in Silicon Valley in order to understand the industry’s health, market opportunities, impending threats and more. Researchers found that 74 percent of tech workers expect China to be the most serious rival to the San Francisco Bay Area. Respondents also named Austin, Texas, to most likely rival within the United States. This should come as no surprise, especially with Amazon now expanding its Austin Tech Hub . Outside of Austin, cities like Atlanta, Georgia and Raleigh, North Carolina are also becoming major tech hubs . This year, Google even announced plans to expand its Atlanta office . Another thing that came up in...
A new U.K. government report has found that big tech companies — like Amazon, Google, and Facebook — are in need of some serious new antitrust rules. Commissioned by Britain’s finance minister, the Digital Competition Expert Panel’s report pushes back against the idea that digital platforms produce “natural monopolies.” Instead, the report points out how big tech companies are stifling competition and innovation, calling for the U.K.’s laws to be “updated for the digital age” because competition among digital platforms is “not only necessary but also possible.” Jason Furman, former chief economic advisor to Barack Obama, chaired the group behind the report. He told CNBC , “The digital sector has created substantial benefits but these have come at the cost of increasing dominance of the few companies which is limiting competition and consumer choice and innovation.” Take some of the recent mergers in big tech as an example — Amazon now owns WholeFoods plus Facebook acquired both...