"These companies say they really want to hire black engineers, but they don't advertise in the black newspapers; they don't recruit at the historically black colleges; they don't participate in job fairs," says John Templeton, the moving force behind a group called the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley. "I'm always hearing these high-tech and Internet companies claim that they can't find any blacks who are qualified, but the truth is they never take the most basic of steps to reach the people they're supposedly so interested in reaching."
Inspired by the Chronicle article, Templeton, who is black, initiated a study of his own. He looked at the hiring records of 253 technology firms that filed EEO-1s in 1996 and 1997. His findings mirrored the Chronicle's. The same percentage (3.7 percent) identified themselves as African American, and there was the same dwindling of percentage as one moved up the corporate hierarchy: Only 2.8 percent of those employees classified as "professional" and 2.3 percent of those classified as "officials and managers" were black.
"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 225,000 African Americans out there working as systems engineers, programmers and systems analysts," Templeton says. "So in other words, black engineers are finding IT work in universities, government agencies, hospitals and banks - just not in Silicon Valley." Part of the problem, he maintains, is that technology companies are so quick to search overseas for talent that they don't stop to ask whether there are eager and qualified people of color closer to home. "When these companies advertise for programmers in Bombay but not in D.C. or Atlanta, guess what? They're going to be hiring a lot of Indian programmers but not many African Americans," says Templeton, who runs an Oakland-based publishing firm called Electron Access. He's also author of Silicon Ceiling: Solutions for Closing the Digital Divide, published last year.
In many ways, Templeton has been the shadow impresario choreographing the diversity debate, ensuring that the issue remains in the public eye, even as he has remained largely behind the scenes. He is among those with whom EEOC regulators met early on in its Silicon Valley investigation. He has also pressured the Labor Department and the Congressional Black Caucus to crack down on high-flying technology companies that have no affirmative-action plans in place, though they are required to do so by law. (All companies above a certain size that do business with the federal government must establish an affirmative-action recruiting plan.)
It also was Templeton who convinced Jesse Jackson to establish a Silicon Valley outpost, and hence he who was the mastermind behind the whirlwind of television and newspaper coverage of Jackson's high-profile visit to the Valley last February. (Templeton was assisted toward that end by Cypress Semiconductor (CY) CEO T.J. Rodgers, the Valley's resident loudmouth, who went on TV to describe Jackson as "the seagull that flies in, craps on everything and flies out." In case the rhetoric wasn't turned up high enough, Templeton subsequently issued a press release declaring chipmaker Cypress "a white-supremacist hate group.") The Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition this month is moving into an office in East Palo Alto, Calif., a turn of events certain to spark more news stories into the foreseeable future.
"To us, all of this comes down to a policy decision," says the group's resident activist, Butch Wing. "According to reports, there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in Silicon Valley. One alternative to filling that need over the next three to five years is to raise the [H1-B] quotas and bring in more people from abroad. But another possibility is to create a battle plan - to develop a plan with the community, with elected officials and with the help of groups like ours to train, educate and prepare youth and other residents from the local region to fill those jobs."
For the moment, Igasaki has mostly good news for Internet companies. "We're focusing mainly on companies that have been around a long time, because they have a long track record of hiring," he says. "Some of these newer companies, their hiring practices may trouble us, but they don't have a track record of hiring that we can examine over time. It's harder to make a case if we can't show a pattern of discriminatory behavior." If Igasaki's agency can demonstrate that, over time, a company has fallen consistently short of a workforce that reflects the talents and racial makeup of the existing local labor pool, the burden of proof switches from the EEOC, which otherwise would have to prove discrimination, to the company, which would have to prove its practices are not discriminatory.
Yet that's not to say that any individual company, no matter what its age, is in the clear. "We're looking for whatever information we can get," Igasaki adds. "It could be a young company or an established one - or it can have nothing whatsoever to do with race. So much of the concern raised in the media and by community groups has focused on race. But there's gender issues. There's also issues around age, which is something we're very concerned about, given things we're picking up on in these new industries, especially the Internet companies.
"Another concern relates to the so-called glass ceiling. There's certainly quite a pipeline of Asians and Asian American talent into high tech, but you don't yet see that reflected at the managerial and executive ranks. This is something else we're looking at closely. The numbers suggest that the same glass ceiling that stands in the way of women stands in the way of Asian Americans," Igasaki notes. ("In a way, Asians have to deal with the worst stigma in terms of breaking into management," says NetNoir's Kevin Hinkston, who has worked closely with upper-level executives at both HP and IBM. "The general stereotype you hear is that they're great technologywise but not good with people, so they don't make good managers.")
Companies that end up on the wrong side of the EEOC may think they have nothing to fear beyond a modest fine and a stern warning to do better in the future. That's what Mitsubishi (7011) presumed when the agency hit the company with a suit alleging widespread sexual discrimination at its Illinois plant. Mitsubishi ended up settling the case out of court in 1998, agreeing to pay $34 million in damages. It also agreed to strict EEOC oversight with hiring and recruitment - a concession that no doubt intrudes on the company's day-to-day operations.
