Articles about Diversity

Many companies like to talk about diversity and inclusion nowadays, but for some, it seems to be nothing more than a way to get positive publicity. True diversity is not about having a balanced employee pie chart to show off to the media, but giving everyone opportunities despite things like gender, skin color, sex, and religion.

Today, Google announces that its 'Code Next' initiative is officially launching in Oakland, California. What is it, exactly? The search giant is looking to help Black and Hispanic students to get excited about computer science. Sadly, according to Google, more than half of Black students, and close to half of Hispanic students, do not have access to computer science learning. 'Code Next' is looking to change this.

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Concerned as ever with diversity and equality, Google recently proposed a new set of emoji including a wider range of images of women in different professions. Today the company makes good on its promise and delivers the goods... with a little help from the powers-that-be.

Launched because "there aren't a lot [of emoji] that highlight the diversity of women's careers", the new emoji portray women in roles that have previously been the domain of man -- at least in pixel form. In all, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is adopting more than 100 new emoji after Google's suggestions.

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Embracing diversity is just one of the latest passions of the technology world. Companies involved in the web and messaging do things like releasing diverse emoji, while games like the Sims 4 implement changes that reflect dissolving gender and sexuality boundaries.

But key tech players such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have also been keen to demonstrate how diverse their respective workforces are. Google has just released its latest diversity report -- including, for the first time, details of black and Hispanic intake -- and it shows that while the company is becoming less white and less male, progress remains slow.

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Intel, SAP, Lyft, Spotify and VMware are just some of the 30 Silicon Valley based companies that have signed a "Tech Inclusion Pledge" as a promise that they will promote diversity in their workplaces going forward.

Two years ago, the civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson pointed out the lack of diversity in the tech companies operating out of Silicon Valley. He went so far as to press a number of companies to release their data regarding the number of African Americans, Hispanics and women employed at their organizations.

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A free update released today for The Sims 4 introduces a swathe of new options relating to creation of Sims. Significantly, gender-specific options no longer exist. Players can access the full range of clothing, hairstyles, physiques and voices regardless of the gender selected.

Electronic Arts says that in all, some 700 options that were previously tied to male or female Sims are now gender neutral. The move, part of a general trend in the technology industry to diversity, has been warmly welcomed by players.

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Tech companies are falling over themselves to embrace diversity both in the workplace, and in products. The latest example of this comes courtesy of Facebook which today releases an update to Messenger complete with hundreds of diversity-friendly emoji.

As well as bringing in the full (well, fuller) gamut of skin tones, the new emoji also nod to gender equality, as well as including redheads for the first time. On top of all this, Facebook is also standardizing its emoji set so the same selection is available to everyone, regardless of the platform they might be using.

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Google workers feel that emoji could be used to promote gender equality. A quartet of employees have put forward a new set of emoji that portray women in a number of different professional roles such as technology engineer, mechanic, and farmer.

In a bid to balance things out a little, the emoji proposal sees women portrayed in more roles than ever before, including those traditionally thought of as being male-dominated. A set of 13 new emoji have been submitted to the Unicode Consortium for consideration. They may later be added to the official emoji set.

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A call by shareholders to do more to increase diversity on Apple's board of directors has been soundly rejected by the company. The board is currently predominantly white and male, leading to calls for an "accelerated recruitment policy requiring Apple to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors".

But in a proxy statement, the board can be seen to have voted against the proposal, saying that it would be "unduly burdensome and not necessary because Apple has demonstrated to shareholders its commitment to inclusion and diversity". The result of the vote will come as something of a surprise as Tim Cook has admitted that the company has much to do to improve diversity.

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Every technology company is keen to develop as diverse a workforce as possible -- even if only for appearances. Microsoft, like Google and Apple, has taken to publishing its diversity figures, and the latest report is rather mixed.

While Microsoft says that racial diversity has increased slightly, the same cannot be said of the gender balance. The overall percentage of woman at the company has dropped by 2.2 percentage points, and Microsoft has an excuse straight from the 'my dog ate my homework' school of thought: restructuring its phone hardware business meant dumping a lot of women.

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Workforce diversity is something that every company wants to be seen to be getting right. At the moment -- particularly in the world of technology -- they're failing spectacularly. As in so many walks of life, it's a world dominated by white, middleclass men, and it's a problem that gets worse the further up the hierarchy you look. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. They all have one thing in common: a desire to be seen as the most welcoming, ethnically and sexually diverse, forward-thinking companies out there.

It's great PR, and now Twitter is trying to step up its game. News of a commitment to making the Twitter workforce more diverse sounds great, but sounding great isn’t the same as being great. I've mentioned that talk of diversity is good public relations, and that's exactly what we see here -- spiel, empty gestures, misguided proposals, and embarrassingly ham-fisted approaches. Now Twitter is taking things a step further.

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Diversity has become something of a buzzword in tech, and it's one that companies are only too keen to bandy about at every opportunity. The likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are eager to demonstrate how diverse a workforce they have built up -- but the fact of the matter is that they have all failed abysmally.

This much we know. We've seen that Facebook's workface is far from diverse, Amazon is about as white and male as it gets, and that Apple wants people to believe it's doing everything it can to foster greater diversity. Its latest report shows that the number of female, black, and Hispanic employees has increased but Tim Cook wants to do more. But the big question is: does diversity matter?

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Workforce diversity is something that has been brought into sharp focus in recent months as companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook reveal the make-up of their staff. White, middleclass, male employees dominate the world of technology, and this is certainly the case at Facebook -- even if a redesigned icon was an attempt to bring women to the fore.

Now the social network is embarking on something of a PR campaign, desperate to prove that it is doing everything it can to develop as diverse a workplace as possible. Today Facebook publishes sections of its employee training program that aims to eradicate the 'unconscious bias' that leads to -- in Facebook's words -- 'black sounding names' getting fewer callbacks than 'white sounding names'.

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If game designers opt for a male protagonist thinking it would make it easier to tap into the predominantly male gaming audience, then they’re in for a nasty surprise.

A recent study conducted by Time has shown that most boys don’t really care which gender the main character is, as well as that they’re aware that women are underrepresented in video games.

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Facebook has been busy updating its look. It's very subtle, so you'd be forgiven for missing it. Following on from last week's incredibly understated logo change (just believe us, the font is slightly different) comes an update to the friends icon. A minor thing, you might think, but with the current focus on diversity, it's one that is noteworthy.

The social network comes in for constant criticism; just about everything it does gets a negative reaction. If it's not complaints about Internet.org, it's the company's lackadaisical attitude to privacy. If people are not whining about changes to their news feed, they are questioning censorship. One Facebook designer was unhappy with the way the friends icon pushed a male figure to the front, while the female symbol shrank into the background. So she redesigned it.

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Like transparency reports, diversity reports have become quite the fashion at the moment. Companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon are keen to demonstrate that they are not dominated by white, middle-class men, and that they are open to the full gamut of gender identities and sexualities. Today Facebook released its second diversity report showing that at Mark Zuckerberg's company things haven’t really improved over the last year.

More than half of the workforce (55 percent) is white, and at senior leadership level this jumps all the way up to nearly three quarters (73 percent). The percentage of black workers at the social network is incredibly low -- just 2 percent. The gender balance is largely skewed as we have come to expect. Across the company 68 percent of employees are male, although in 'non-tech' roles women make up 52 percent of the team. For those striving for equality, the numbers make for somewhat depressing reading.

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