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Snap's first diversity report shows an overwhelmingly white workforce
“We will first continue to improve within Snap, and then work to open-source the future of DEI.,” Snap continued.
Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell launches a game studio
Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell has launched a multiplayer-focused game studio, Mountaintop, and hopes it'll avoid the pitfalls of rivals.
NASA names its DC headquarters after its first Black female engineer
From this point forward, NASA’s Washington DC headquarters will be known as the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters, named after the agency’s first Black female engineer.
Microsoft will double its Black senior leadership by 2025
Like Google and several other tech companies, Microsoft plans to diversify its workforce to include more Black individuals.
Facebook pledges $200 million to support Black-owned businesses
Facebook plans to spend $200 million to support Black-owned businesses and organizations.
Google's racial equity push includes $175 million for Black businesses
Google is committing to racial equity by improving representation and contributing $175 million to businesses.
Reddit appoints Michael Seibel to Ohanian's vacated board seat
Michael Seibel is well-known in the tech world for promoting diversity and inclusion.
Make-A-Wish Foundation gets a fan into 'NBA 2K20'
It's not unheard of for Make-A-Wish Foundation kids to request tours of their favorite game studios, but when 2K heard that 15-year-old Make-A-Wish recipient William Floyd wanted to visit the NBA 2K headquarters in Novato, California, the company decided to go one step further. It created Floyd as a playable roster member in NBA 2K20 and made him available as a free agent to millions of players around the world.
The making of a diverse game studio
The original name for Manveer Heir's new game studio that focused on stories of people of color was Big Mouth Games. The former BioWare and Raven Software designer embraces his loudness. Now, he's putting his money where his considerable mouth is.
Microsoft workers say it's making progress on diversity
Microsoft's push for greater diversity in its workforce appears to be paying off, and it's not just the company's management saying so this time. The tech giant's 2019 Diversity and Inclusion report offers the first public glimpse at Microsoft's Inclusion Index, or the percentage of employees who feel welcomed by both coworkers and management based on their identity. About 88 percent had "positive sentiments" about their sense of belonging and their belief in Microsoft's diversity efforts.
Intel will publicly share its race and gender pay gap statistics
The Obama administration initiated a program that required companies with over 100 employees to submit payroll data that, while anonymized, contained information such as employee compensation broken down by race and gender. This data was meant to help identify pay gaps affecting women and people of color. After a delay caused by the Trump administration, the program is back on track, and Intel is pledging to not only submit these statistics to the government, but also to make them public.
Howard University and Amazon want to diversify the entertainment industry
Howard University and Amazon Studios are working together to diversify the entertainment industry. Today, they announced Howard Entertainment, a program that will give African American, Latinx and Native American students a chance to study and train alongside entertainment executives.
Facebook plans to double its minority employees in the next five years
Facebook is more diverse than it was six years ago, but the company admits it has a long way to go. Today, Facebook released its 2019 Diversity Report, and while it employs more women and minorities than it did a few years ago, it's still predominantly male. In the US, the majority of its employees are White or Asian. But those numbers are expected to change. In the next five years, Facebook hopes at least half of its workforce will be women, under-represented minorities, people with disabilities and veterans.
Facebook has a three-part plan for making AI more 'inclusive'
Facebook kicked off the second day of F8 2019, its annual developers conference, with a keynote about the technologies it uses to combat abuse on its platform. As the company detailed last year, artificial intelligence is key to keeping its apps and services safe. Facebook says AI is now proactively taking down more than 99 percent of spam, fake accounts and terrorist propaganda, though it's still struggling with hate speech (51.6 percent) and harassment (14.9 percent). Another area where Facebook is looking to improve the technology is inclusivity. What that means, essentially, is that it wants to teach its machines to work the same for everyone, regardless of skin color or other physical attributes.
Artificial intelligence is on the brink of a 'diversity disaster'
The lack of diversity within artificial intelligence is pushing the field to a dangerous "tipping point," according to new research from the AI Now Institute. It says that due to an overwhelming proportion of white males in the field, the technology is at risk of perpetuating historical biases and power imbalances.
Pinterest's diverse workforce helped it design a better skin tone filter
Last April, Pinterest began testing a search feature that allows users to filter results by skin tone. The idea being that those looking for beauty tips will be able to find relevant makeup and hair advice, regardless of their race. Today, the company is announcing that this feature will roll out more broadly across its user base, and that it's also coming to its mobile app. Not only is it a particularly useful feature, it's also emblematic of Pinterest's ever-growing efforts at increasing the diversity and inclusion within the company.
Amazon strikes a global deal with Blumhouse for eight thrillers
Jason Blum's Blumhouse Television, the production house behind TV shows like Eye Candy and Cold Case Files, has struck a deal with Amazon Studios to create eight dark/thriller films that will all be thematically connected. If the name Jason Blum sound familiar, he's the man behind such horror films as Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and the recent Unfriended: Dark Web. He's also behind the highly successful Halloween reboot that premiered earlier this year.
Intel says its staff is now representative of the US 'skilled workforce'
In 2015, Intel made a $300 million commitment to ensuring its workforce accurately represents the US skilled labor market, particularly with regards to women and underrepresented minorities (African-American, Hispanic and Native American people). It originally aimed to meet this target by 2020, before moving the timeframe up to 2018 last year. It now claims it has achieved that goal.
Apple is happy to use women and people of color as art, not authority
Apple's 2018 iPhone event opened with a black woman busting her ass to ensure a white man's success. The introductory video is a Mission Impossible-style short featuring a young woman racing across Cupertino campus to deliver a briefcase to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who's waiting calmly backstage before the event. She arrives out of breath, and he opens the briefcase. Inside is the clicker for the presentation; he picks it up with reverence while the woman asks, incredulously, "The clicker?" She then stands, panting, behind the curtain as Cook walks out to enjoy a raucous round of applause.
Rotten Tomatoes is changing what it looks for in movie critics
Rotten Tomatoes has overhauled its criteria for which critics and outlets get to contribute to its Tomatometer scores, opening the platform up to more voices and points of view. The company said that when it got started, it largely included critics from major publications and broadcasters with a large audience reach, which fit with the media landscape at the time. "In the intervening decades, a lot has changed," said the company, noting that staff positions at major outlets have dwindled and many critics are producing good work elsewhere, through smaller online outlets, podcasts and YouTube, for example.
