diversity
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Striving to be seen: Black Girl Gamers on Twitch
Jay-Ann Lopez is in her mid-twenties, living in London, and she's been into video games her entire life. "I've been gaming from a very young age," Lopez said. "My first console was a Nintendo that was gifted to me by my uncles, and since then I've always had a love for gaming." For many video game fans, this is the end of the story. Play video games, fall in love with video games, share that love with other interested people: It's a fairly simple formula. However, for Lopez, it hasn't been that easy.
Facebook employs five times more women than five years ago
Facebook is slowly but surely diversifying its staff, with more women and people of color filling the ranks, according to the company's annual diversity report. But the company admits it still has work to do in order to increase representation in certain areas.
Google hopes to quell internal fighting with new rules
Google has long encouraged staff to share ideas with each other, but that's becoming toxic enough that the company is taking steps to rein things in. The Wall Street Journal has learned that Google has instituted new rules disciplining employees who attack colleagues, discriminate against them or participate in discussion that are "disruptive to a productive work environment." In other words, it's hoping to rein in the sort of chats and discussions that led to James Damore's anti-diversity memo, his firing and the subsequent lawsuits.
Google is still very white and very male
Google released its annual diversity report today and though strides have been made in some areas, in others, the company has shown little improvement. Globally, Google is 69.1 percent male and in the US 53.1 percent of the workforce is white, 36.3 percent is Asian, 3.6 percent is Latinx, 2.5 percent is black and 0.3 percent is Native American. Compared to last year, the biggest gains were made in the representation of Asian employees, which increased from 34.7 percent. But the percentage of women in Google's workforce as well as the representation of black and Latinx individuals saw hardly any change, increasing just 0.1 percentage point over the year. Native American representation didn't change at all.
Microsoft’s inclusive Xbox avatars could arrive this spring
Microsoft announced last year that it was overhauling its avatar system and while the more diverse and customizable Xbox Live avatars were initially due out last fall, the company has kept us waiting. But a source familiar with Microsoft's Xbox plans has told The Verge that the new system will be available to Xbox Insiders for preview this month and is set for a wider rollout in April.
Tinder rallies support for interracial couple emoji
The official emoji catalog accounts for all kinds of relationships, including same-sex couples and families, but it doesn't reflect interracial couples -- isn't that an odd omission in 2018? Tinder thinks so. The dating site has launched a campaign to officially add interracial couple emoji to the Unicode Consorium's character set. Online dating and interracial couples "go hand in hand," it argued, and that makes the company a prime advocate for greater diversity in chat icons.
Google faces lawsuit for firing critic of anti-diversity memo
Google fired James Damore last year, in part, because of a leaked memo alleging that the company culture unfairly targeted white males and political conservatives. Now Google is being sued by a former employee who claims he was targeted for speaking out against Damore on internal message boards, according to The Guardian. Tim Chevalier, a site reliability engineer who identifies as queer, transgender and disabled filed a lawsuit saying, in part, that he was ousted for "calling out discrimination and harassment for what it was."
Labor board says Google legally fired diversity memo writer
James Damore may claim Google was wrong to fire him over his memo criticizing the company's diversity culture, but a federal government overseer begs to differ. The National Labor Relations Board has published a January memo recommending a dismissal of Damore's then-active complaint. Board attorney Jayme Sophir found that Damore was protected under federal law when he criticized Google, but that he wasn't protected when he suggested that women were biologically inferior at programming. His remarks were likely to create "serious dissension and disruption" in the workplace, Sophir said, and that actuallly happened -- women pulled their candidacy for engineering positions after hearing of Damore's memo.
Uber hires first chief diversity officer to further reform its culture
Last year, Susan Fowler, a former Uber employee, penned an essay detailing rampant sexual harassment and sexism at the company as well as a complete lack of interest on the part of administrators to do anything about it. That report led to an investigation, a handful of firings and eventually a new CEO. The investigation into Uber's toxic culture, conducted by Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran and shared with the company last June, recommended the company establish a chief diversity and inclusion officer position and now Uber finally has.
A fifth of startup founders think sexism reports are 'overblown'
Despite the pervasive issue of sexism and harassment in Silicon Valley gaining prominence in recent times, it seems the industry still has a long way to go in acknowledging the problem. A survey by venture firm First Round Capital polled 800 startup founders and found that 19 percent of respondents (that's nearly a fifth) believe sexual harassment in tech has been "overblown" by the media, while 40 percent say the issue is "more significant than the media is reporting". Meanwhile, 53 percent say they, or someone they know, has personally experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
Google sued by female ex-employees over pay discrimination
Google's salary practices are back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Three women who worked for the company are suing over gender-based wage discrimination. The plaintiffs claim Google knew about the pay inequalities (or, at least, should have been aware of them). The suit -- filed on Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court -- aims to represent the thousands of Google employees in California, and seeks lost wages and a slice of the company's profits.
Danny Glover is advising Airbnb's diversity efforts
When he isn't busy raising awareness for pseudobulbar affect (PBA) and generally being too old for shit, actor Danny Glover will be advising Airbnb. It's part of the push the short-term rental company is making to promote staying in communities of color. He'll be joining the NAACP in Airbnb's work to educate, train and "take advantage of the economic opportunity of hosting" on the service, according to a statement.
Facebook shut down an internal forum because of harassment
Last year Facebook was home to an internal forum spouting sexist and racist comments, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. The forum, called FB Anon, was set up in May 2015 for employees of the company to voice their opinions of the workplace freely and anonymously. But in the month's leading up to President Trump's election it was increasingly populated by right-leaning staff and, according to Mark Zuckerberg, used to harass others. The group was abruptly shut down in December 2016. These reports come during an increasingly challenging time for tech companies. In the wake of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, where violence resulted in the death of one protestor and injuries for many others, companies have taken a zero-tolerance approach to hate speech. GoDaddy and Google have revoked domain registrations for neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, crowdfunding sites have pulled campaigns supporting white supremacists and social media platforms have banned whole groups expressing violent alt-right ideologies.
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.
Google cancels all-hands meeting due to safety concerns
At the same time Google fired the author of a 10-page memo criticizing its diversity efforts due to "biological" differences, CEO Sundar Pichai scheduled a company town meeting for today to discuss the issue. Now, Recode and Business Insider report that he sent another email to employees canceling the event, citing websites that posted personal information about employees critical of the memo. Instead, the company plan is that "in the coming days we will find several forums to gather and engage with Googlers, where people can feel comfortable to speak freely."
How to get fired in the tech industry
Step 1: Decide you'd like to write a memo. The topic is completely up to you. But, remember, you want the title to be both alarming and relevant to current social conversations. (#SEO #Content) For example, we'll use a memo called "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber." Its title plays off the widespread hand-wringing over filter bubbles on social media, reminding readers of their enemies and immediately placing everyone on edge. That sucker's gonna get a lot of clicks.
Google employee behind 'echo chamber' diversity memo fired
Over the weekend, a Google employee's internally-shared 10-page document attacking a supposed "echo chamber" around diversity and inclusion went viral. Now, Bloomberg reports -- based on an email from the employee himself -- that the author of the memo has been fired. Recode has published a note sent to employees by CEO Sundar Pichai, which maintains that while "People must feel free to express dissent," "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct." Pichai closed the note by saying he is returning early from a planned family vacation for a company town hall meeting Thursday to discuss issues including "how we create a more inclusive environment for all."
Google employee's anti-diversity screed enrages coworkers (updated)
For all the talk of improving diversity in technology companies and getting employees to treat each other with respect, it's clear that there's still a long way to go. Motherboard has learned that a Google staffer infuriated many of his coworkers after publishing a viral document attacking the company's purported "ideological echo chamber." He contended that women had low representation in software engineering due to biological differences (because they prefer people more than things, he claims), and said that the company should drop attempts to include different cultures and genders to instead focus on accommodating conservative social views.
Facebook is slowly becoming less white and less male
Facebook's latest diversity stats are in, and it seems that while the process is glacially-slow, the company is becoming less white and less male. In the last year, the number of women in tech has risen from 17% to 19%, with women accounting for 27% of all new graduate hires in engineering and 21% of all new technical hires. The number of Hispanics at the company has increased from 4% to 5%, while the number of black people has risen from 2% to 3%. These figures don't represent a particularly impressive move forward from last year, but they are in many cases much better than they were in 2014. According to a blog post by the company, much of this "success" can be attributed to a range of diversity-focused programs, designed to eradicate the White Boys' Club mentality that has long-plagued Facebook's boardrooms.
Google wins fight with Labor Department over pay gap data
Google appears to have emerged mostly triumphant in its fight with the Department of Labor over supplying pay gap data. An administrative law judge has ruled that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs overstepped its boundaries by asking for as much data as it did when trying to address reported pay disparities between men and women. According to the decision, the OFCCP's requests were "intrusive on employee privacy, unduly burdensome and insufficiently focused." To put it succinctly, the Office couldn't justify why it needed as much info as it wanted.
