There is plenty wrong with how companies hire people. Narrow geographic recruitment drives (limited budgets for relocating young hires, or just laziness since Facebook is basically down the street from Stanford), insane expectations of work history/academic achievement (they would argue high standards, without considering how life happens to people), underestimation of existing skill sets, discouraging job descriptions, etc. Those are unforced errors of management, and in particular human resources (the arbiters of hiring) is a bureaucracy in a constant ongoing mission to justify its own existence. These should be addressed, but there’s much more going on.
The lack of diversity in the workforce comes from a lack of diversity in the applicant pool. That’s a problem that stems from lower level education and parental/teacher influence. Kids are told their degree choice won’t matter by advice givers who grew up when degree choices didn’t matter for their own jobs (even though it has always mattered to have a STEM background to do STEM work). Anecdotally, half of my AP calculus class in high school were girls, and out of the entire class I was the only one who went to an engineering school, let alone studied engineering (caveat, I went to a small private school in the south, but you’d think at least two people would even apply for an engineering school). I wasn’t even the smartest or hardest working. Today there are more support services and organizations at the college and professional level to encourage women to stick with engineering than ever before. But how can they support people who never even consider engineering? 18–20% of engineering/CS majors are women. Something like 6–8% of engineering/CS majors are black.
Retention of people is an issue but Fowler is a mixed example. She found a job within a week at a better company, she wasn’t driven from the entire field.
It might surprise people at The Ringer to know that there are jobs in technology outside of Silicon Valley, which isn’t actually the center of the universe. Something rarely touched on at all in the questions about the overall technology workforce is the abuse of the H1B visa by domestic companies (mostly outside of Silicon Valley) in concert with Indian labor companies like Tata or Infosys. My office is filled with Indians on H1B as contract laborers who are not full time employees, lack standard American benefits, are paid less than they would get on the open market in America, and will never get green card sponsorship from the company who authorized the visa (why would these companies set their golden goose free). Not only do these people live essentially as highly paid indentured servants with no hope of permanent status, the jobs they fill are jobs that could be filled by American graduates.
To be sure, even Americans are getting screwed by companies who contract American staffing companies that get paid for the hard work of not providing competitive wages or basic benefits like PTO or health insurance to the poor schmucks who sign on. The current Ravens owner’s fortune relies entirely on this shady ‘industry’. Fundamentally, even a shitty job is better than no job when you got bills and a family to feed. Both this and the H1B issue come from companies refusing to invest in their workforces, seeing their employees as costs to be minimized instead of assets to be maximized. This doesn’t happen in the flashy offices of Google or Facebook where they actually do invest in their employees, pay them great wages, and provide great benefits.
‘Diversity in STEM’ as an issue is just a symptom of much larger problems. Aesthetic diversity is largely used as a distraction from core issues and doesn’t solve any real problems, and the standard liberal conception of diversity is entirely aesthetic. The perfect example of this insistence on a surface issue rather than the welfare of society is the campaign of Hillary Clinton (which should be stressed until Clintonite insidious philosophy and cynicism is recognized as anathema and purged from political discourse). At one campaign said that breaking up the banks isn’t a priority because that won’t solve racism or sexism. Never mind that the average American family is precariously overleveraged, or that the despair facing Americans led to 30,000 people dying by opioid overdose, or that cost pressures on housing and jobs means we have a working homeless population of like 2 million people. By emphasis on aesthetic diversity in the standard liberal conception of diversity, it is more progressive to have Obama order a drone strike than when Bush did it, and it would be a triumphant achievement to have heels be stamping on a human face forever instead of a boot. Yass and slay sister, am I right?
I don’t have a concrete solution because this isn’t one problem, it’s dozens of problems at once happening at different levels. Plus, anything I say would be discounted by the fact that I am a cishet man who makes more than the median American household income, even if I am a weird looking Asian who grew up and lives in the deep south, I am ‘privileged’ and should thus check it (code for shut the fuck up).
If you really want to focus on the extremely narrow issue of tech workforce diversity, I would suggest that a more equitable distribution of workers would be possible if girls and non-Asian minorities consider majoring in physics, engineering and computer science instead of biology, English, and gender/African American studies. That would be a start.
