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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.
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.
Google bans ads for bail bond services
In its continued bid to clean up the online advertising space, Google is banning ads from bail-bond companies. In a blog post, the company referred to studies that consistently show for-profit bail bond providers "make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable" and wrote that such adverts are "deceptive or harmful."
Intel's diversity report shows slow growth for women and minorities
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich condemned hate speech and white supremacy on Twitter after the horrifying events in Charlottesville this weekend. On Monday, he resigned from Trump's American Manufacturing Council to "call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues..." Now, alongside a mid-year diversity report that documents some slow and flat growth in diversity at Intel, Krzanich is touting his company's "fast march" toward the full representation of women and unrepresented minorities in Intel's US-based workforce by 2018. That's only one year away.
Intel's diversity report shows change is slow, but important
Intel has made a big deal about its commitment to fostering a more inclusive workplace and now wants us all to see how well it did in 2015. The firm is celebrating the fact that it was just about able to exceed its goal of hiring 40 percent of new employees from diverse backgrounds and plans to push that to 45 percent this year. Overall, women now comprise 24.8 percent of Intel's workforce, up from 19 percent in 2014, with the number of African American, Hispanic and Native American hires generally trending upward. That's not even mentioning the chipmaker's outside projects like teaming up with Lady Gaga to tackle online harassment.
Apple is (very) slowly improving its employee diversity
Apple mildly improved employee diversity this year, but voted against a proposal to improve it where the problem is worst -- the executive suite. According to the company's latest EEO-1 Federal Employer Information (FEI) filing, it had a net increase of 1,475 black employees, 1,633 hispanics and 4,586 women. That bumped the overall percentages slightly for black and hispanic people, while the number of female employees rose from 28.7 to 30 percent. Earlier this year, Tim Cook said that the company hired 11,000 women in 2015, 65 percent more than last year. If that's accurate, then the EE0-1 reports shows that a lot of women and minority employees also left the company in 2015.
Twitter publicly announces goals for hiring diversity in 2016
It may have taken a while, but major tech companies are finally making diverse hiring more of a priority. To that end, Twitter has publicly announced its diversity goals for 2016 in an effort to hold itself more accountable going forward. Worldwide, the company wants 35 percent of its employees to be women in 2016, with 16 percent of "tech" roles and 25 percent of leadership roles to be held by women. Today, the company reported that 34 percent of its workforce was women, with 13 percent of its tech roles and 22 percent of its leadership roles held by women. Twitter's 2016 goals are pretty modest increases over what its reporting now, but it's still one of the few major tech companies making such goals public.
Intel tackles diversity problem through referral bonuses
If the Ellen Pao case showed us anything, it's that Silicon Valley is still very much a (white) boy's club. In response a number of industry leaders including Apple, IBM, and Google, have pledged anywhere from $50 million to $300 million to boost the level of diversity in their workplaces. Intel is the latest firm to address the issue by doubling the referral bonus for any employee that successfully recruits a female, minority or veteran into the company to a whopping $4000. This is part of Intel's $300 million pledge to diversify its workforce.
Intel pledges to hire more women and minorities
It's not all chips and wearable sensors at Intel's CES press conference. CEO Brian Krzanich just announced a far-reaching diversity initiative, promising to hire, promote and retain more women and underrepresented minorities. In particular, he said the company intends to invest $300 million in diversity initiatives, with the goal of reaching "full representation" at all levels of the company by 2020. It remains unclear how exactly Intel will determine what the appropriate ratio is, or what number of employees in a specific demographic might indicate success. Intel simply said in a statement that it "full representation" means "representative of the talent available in America."
Double Dragon with diversity in 'Beatdown City'
Game developer Shawn Allen grew up as a biracial black kid raised by a white mom in a mostly Latin neighborhood in Manhattan. Now, as an adult, most people assume he's black, Middle Eastern or Hispanic, while others squint and ask, "Where are you from?" Diana, his wife, is Puerto Rican, and their friend, Manny, is Sicilian and chief of his Taino tribe. Together, they're aiming to bust down the barriers to video game diversity with a retro-styled brawler, Treachery in Beatdown City. It features RPG elements and a turn-based combat system, and it features a cast of minority characters. The star of Beatdown City is Lisa, a Puerto Rican woman designed by Diana to counteract the "spicy Latina" stereotype in popular media, Allen tells me. "Lisa was made to be a strong character first, who can also be a positive Latin woman in games," he says. "She is, if not the only, one of the few leading Puerto Rican women in games." Beatdown City isn't an activist game – it spawns from the team's love of brawlers, and they've worked to make it different (turn-based combat will do that) while still recalling classics such as Double Dragon and Streets of Rage. But if Allen and his friends are going to make a game with human characters, they're going to be as diverse as the developers themselves, Allen says: "When Manny and I started making the game, we wanted to make iconic, memorable characters like brawlers of old did. But we infused them with backgrounds based on our culture, the culture around us and of people that we know. The more we thought about it, the details flowed very easily."
Game census concludes that minorities under-represented in games
Even though you've seen CJ gangbanging in GTA: San Andreas and Faith gallivanting across a vast urban landscape in Mirror's Edge, it doesn't mean minorities and women are finally getting a fair shake in gaming. According to a census of video game characters conducted by SoCal researcher Dmitri Williams (via NewScientist), it's still an area largely dominated by white men. Gasp! Of course, with an undertaking as huge as checking every character in every game ever, this data of Williams and company comes with a few caveats. First of all, the census went down in February of 2006 and has only surfaced recently thanks to NewScientist. Second, the only systems and games combed include the top 150 titles sold on Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PS2, PSP, GameCube, GBA, DS and PC. Still, it's a lot to sift through and -- when the dust settled -- Williams and the gang came up with a couple of charts and some data to back up their claim. [Via Game Politics]
