Facebook and Silicon Valley Seriously Lack Gender and Racial Diversity
Although the members of Silicon Valley are given tremendous credit for advances in technology, they are still an old boy’s network. Women and minorities are excluded regularly, leading some to accuse our leading minds of also leading the way on blatant racism.
The gender gap was accentuated when the head of a prominent venture capital firm filed a sexual harassment suit against the company, arguing that she was retaliated against by a colleague who was upset that she ended a physical relationship.
Less than 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science go to women, according to federal data. Jocelyn Goldfein from Facebook.com says that it’s getting tough to hire top talent from the US, especially among women. She says that much of this is due to a lack of role models for technologically-inclined women.
“The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists,” she said.
Facebook has been accused of a lack of diversity on its own board of directors, which consists of seven men, all white males. This is a problem, since the majority of Facebook’s users are women, and minorities are disproportionately represented as well.
Goldfein defends Facebook, by noting that many of the engineers behind it’s most prominent projects happen to be women.
“If they realize that when I click on a photo and it pops up, that was made by a woman, think how powerful that would be,” Goldfein said.
She doesn’t say much about black people. But then again, no one in Silicon Valley ever does.
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5 Responses to Facebook and Silicon Valley Seriously Lack Gender and Racial Diversity
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Silicon Valley has several reasons why they don’t have a lot black people. One of the reasons is that most of the Tech companies are neutralized citizens or first generation American. Why does that matter? It matters because the stereotypes that they’ve been taught about women and blacks. I dare you to find a company photos that’s not diverse except their diversity is East Indian, south pacic(Korea, Japan) and Europeans both east and west. I know personally a friend who came to the states from Ireland and her now exboyfriend with barely the experience was hired by Google. People need to wake up. This is clearly revenge for treating foreigners as second class and boxing most of them out. You’ll see a speckle of blacks and I guarantee half are Africans or others.
Jc
June 4, 2012 at 11:42 pm
Just curious as to what a “neutralized” citizen is? Maybe “naturalized” citizen?
Jason Lucas
June 7, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Continental African immigrants disproportionately represent the highest educated group in America & of course this has contributed to the huge brain drain on the African continent. Immigrant African educational attainment surpasses any native born ethnic group in America including White Americans, African Americans & Asian Americans. This statistic has held firm according to census taking reports starting in the 90′s.
Thomasisthe1
June 7, 2012 at 1:03 am
So why don’t we see more African immigrants at places like Google and Facebook since they are “disproportionately represent the highest educated group in America”?
Becky Amos
November 27, 2012 at 5:08 am
No kidding! White man don’t want Black man or Women to out shine them in the work place. This can be traced all the way back to the 1940′s, when only whites were in college
Michael Blalock
November 26, 2012 at 10:11 pm