Few others will. To get an idea of how different technology companies are faring on the diversity front - to see if the issue is even on the map of anyone but a small group of activists and government regulators - The Standard contacted a dozen Bay Area companies trying to cash in, one way or another, on the Internet. Seven of the 12 - Exodus Communications (EXDS), Healtheon (HLTH)/WebMD, HP, Inktomi (INKT), Network Associates (NETA), Oracle (ORCL) and Webvan Group - never responded to messages. A spokesman for Sun (SUNW) Microsystems said his company would be taking "a pass" on the "opportunity" - a new VP of human resources would be starting in April, so of course the company couldn't comment until then. The head of PR at Yahoo responded only after a follow-up e-mail was sent to chief Yahoo Jerry Yang, but the answer was the same: no interview and certainly no breakdown of the racial makeup of Yahoo's workforce. The head of PR at ExciteAtHome promised to set up an interview with the company's human resources director, but she never followed through. "To be frank with you," eBay (EBAY) PR director Kevin Pursglove said, "the racial makeup of our workforce is something that's never come up." He, too, promised to set up an interview but never did.
For the record, The Standard's top brass also refused to give a racial breakdown of our own staff. "If we were to release figures, they'd not be entirely flattering," says CEO John Battelle. Finding qualified minorities has not been a priority until this point, Battelle adds, but a new HR director, who has specialized in diversity issues, is among the steps The Standard has taken to address the problem.
Martha Clark, VP of human resources at LookSmart (LOOK), was among the few who returned a phone call. Clark readily confesses that LookSmart should be dedicating more of its energies to finding qualified minority applicants but so far a "massive Internet advertising campaign" has been the extent of the company's recruitment efforts. "When your priority is finding people immediately to make your company more viable, you're not in a position to initiate outreach and affirmative-action programs to the extent that you'd like," she says. Fifteen months ago, LookSmart employed less than 100 people. The company now has roughly 450 people working in its San Francisco main office and 650 employees worldwide. "We've had explosive growth in the past year," she adds. "We've been fighting for survival."
Clark says all the right things, including that the company is now starting to research ways of widening its pool of job applicants. "We are absolutely committed to bringing in more women and minority applications," she vows. She is particularly proud of the company's record in hiring and promoting women: Asked if she'd share a racial breakdown of the LookSmart workforce, she instead boasted that women account for 48 percent of the staff, including an impressive 47 percent of top management and executive positions. It turns out that 26 percent of the company's 650 workers are minorities: 15 percent Asian, 9 percent Latino, 2 percent black. That one in nine of the employees at LookSmart is either Latino or black might be a clue to why Clark was one of the few who bothered to call back.
"The key to change at a company is to have someone inside championing the cause," ShopNow's Walker says. "You need to have people already inside to raise awareness, and that will drive people's attention. If there's no champion inside a company, it's so easy to say, 'Oh, there must not be the talent,' and then move on to the next issue. ... To me, the business case is simple: There's this tremendous labor force available in African American and Latino communities that can drive tremendous value for shareholders of those companies."
Yet even Walker's company proved reluctant to share a profile of ShopNow's staff broken down by race. Walker had said he'd be happy to share the information, but follow-ups with underlings proved futile. The company is more than five years old and has been filing EEO-1s for several years running, but because the company has grown threefold in the past few months (mainly through acquisitions), a spokesman said ShopNow wouldn't share "outdated" information and that an accurate accounting would take at least a few weeks. But did we know that the company's president is Latino?
"Something I hear all the time when I talk to HR directors is that while there may be discrimination in this industry there's none at our company," Igasaki says. "But then when you ask why their numbers aren't higher, they say, 'We're doing all we can; the pipeline is dry.' But just as we're not going to take at face value the protestations of community groups, we're not going to take at face value the claims of these companies that say, 'We don't discriminate, we take whoever we can.' It's possible that these high-tech firms have blind spots, that they haven't looked all the places where people have the requisite skills. I also think it's possible that there are companies out there that just don't want to hire blacks or women or Latinos or older people or whoever. We can't say for certain that that's not the case until we have more facts in front of us."
The EEOC receives roughly 80,000 complaints a year from individuals alleging employment discrimination. Igasaki admits that only a tiny fraction of those are filed against tech companies. "We're talking about maybe a few dozen cases a year - if that," he says. Yet the EEOC is free to investigate any company - or any industry, for that matter - as it sees fit. "There are people saying that we shouldn't even look unless we get a specific complaint saying, 'This company and these people discriminated against me,'" Igasaki adds. "But that's not the way our law was written, so we go beyond that."
Igasaki can't recall what precisely prompted his agency to zero in on Silicon Valley, but the industry's attitude played a role. "Frankly, when I hear this claim that in high tech they don't discriminate, that makes me deeply suspicious," he says. "Why do people inside high tech think they can filter out their prejudices and only hire based on skill, when people in other industries can't? To my way of thinking, there's no industry or group of people who are beyond prejudice and free of discrimination. People naturally discriminate - we tend to associate with people like ourselves. So I think we need to be very aware of this tendency so we don't discriminate. Part of the way to deal with discrimination is introspection, which can't happen if you don't think there's any problem."
Igasaki cited some other factors behind the agency's interest: The "volume of complaints by community groups" was another factor, as was a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle in May 1998, headlined "High-Tech Boom a Bust for Blacks, Latinos." Written by staff reporters Julia Angwin and Laura Castaneda, the article was based largely on the EEO-1s (obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request) submitted to the federal government by 33 leading Silicon Valley firms. The article documented the obvious: Whites and Asians were overrepresented; blacks and Latinos were grossly underrepresented. The Bay Area workforce is 14 percent Latino, yet only half of that - 7 percent - worked at those 33 companies. Similarly, blacks make up 8 percent of the local workforce but accounted for only 4 percent of the combined workforce at these firms. Not surprisingly, blacks and Latinos were far more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to work in lower-rung jobs.
