Like a great many people eager to plug in to Silicon Valley, Paul Igasaki has made more than his share of trips to San Francisco International Airport in the past 12 months. Igasaki, however, has not been coming to peddle a business plan on Sand Hill Road or talk dot-com deals South of Market. He's vice chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and he's been scouring the Valley for evidence to prove what he deeply suspects: That despite the torrent of self-congratulation spewed about the color-blind, brave new world built in the tolerant, racially diverse environs of Northern California, the area's tech companies are no different than the other industries the EEOC keeps an eye on. "From what I've seen thus far," Igasaki says, "I wouldn't necessarily say racial discrimination is more problematic in the high-tech area than elsewhere. But I wouldn't say it's any less of a problem, either."
Consider Igasaki a headhunter of a different sort. Any company with more than 100 full-time employees, publicly held or private, must submit what's called an EEO-1, a kind of annual census form that breaks down its workforce by race and gender. "We're looking at [EEO-1] reports frequently and sifting through back reports to look for patterns," Igasaki adds. "We have some very deep concerns as far as the high-tech field is concerned. For that reason we've launched an ongoing review of racial hiring in Silicon Valley. This is very much a priority of ours." Based on his investigation, which is about a year old, Igasaki has concluded that there's a "disturbing lack of minorities working in high tech, especially black and Latino workers."
Igasaki bristles at the suggestion that the EEOC has "targeted" the technology industry. A lawyer by training and cautious by nature, he prefers the more bureaucratic term "ongoing investigation." A source inside the agency, however, is more blunt. "Of course we're targeting Silicon Valley," the source says. "We're busy looking under every rock we can, looking for a couple of high-profile companies we can hit with a suit. We want people throughout the industry to notice that we're here." According to this source, the agency has compiled a short list of celebrated companies that its attorneys believe offer the agency the best shot at a winnable lawsuit.
Several years ago, the EEOC's office in San Jose, Calif., housed a single investigator. Now this satellite of the agency's San Francisco district bureau is staffed by two full-time attorneys and six EEOC investigators. There have been staff increases in other San Francisco-area offices (in part because of the technology-related probe but also due to other projects under way), as well as in Seattle and other locales rich in companies focused on the Internet. "We've been beefing up our staffing in every place that we see significant economic growth related to high technology," Igasaki says.
Igasaki, a presidential appointee, served for a time as the EEOC's chairman, sitting in the seat formerly filled by Clarence Thomas. He's a long- time civil rights attorney who now has clout - and he seems determined to do something about what he describes as the "extreme disparities we're seeing between the number of blacks and Latinos working in high tech, especially at the professional and management level, and the presence of qualified black and Latino candidates in that geographic area.
"The law forbids me from saying anything specific about any company, or group of companies, we may or may not be investigating," he notes. "It may be that as we speak we have dozens of cases pending against technology companies. But I will say this: Anytime we take a look at an industry and see the kind of disparity that we're seeing in high tech, we take an interest."
Igasaki offers such comments in calm, even tones - but just below the surface lurks an implied threat aimed at any Internet company that doesn't place a racially diverse workforce on its radar screen: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"Sometimes I think it's important to send a message to an industry that race discrimination is not something we'll tolerate," Igasaki says. "And from what we've seen so far, this is an industry in which a message may need to be sent."
Ask someone Caucasian about race in the Valley and the odds are good they'll gush about the rich jumble of people with whom they come into contact every day. Chris Holten Hempel worked at Netscape for four years before cofounding Spark Public Relations. "I don't get it," Hempel says when told that the EEOC is investigating Valley companies for alleged discrimination. "If you were talking about the lack of women, sure, but race? At most of the companies I deal with there's a pretty broad racial mix. Even at Netscape it was diverse across the board."
Perception, however, is a funny thing. Netscape's workforce, according to the EEO-1 the company filed in 1996, a year after going public, was 15 percent Asian. Yet just 1 percent of the Netscape workforce that year was black - and most of them were concentrated in clerical and other support-staff jobs. (Company reports of racial makeup are broken into four broad categories: management, professional staff, technical staff and factory/support personnel.) Similarly, despite a high concentration of Latinos in the Valley, Netscape's workforce was just 3 percent Latino, again with the highest concentration in the lower-rung jobs.
