A new report from the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst finds that White and Asian men continue to dominate the workforces of large Silicon Valley companies. The authors of the study used data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to calculate executive, managerial, and professional employment data by race and gender for 177 leading Silicon Valley tech firms, comparing them to 1,277 smaller tech firms.
The data showed that 70 percent of total managerial and tech professionals in the large Silicon Valley Tech firms are men. White men are the most common group, holding 38.7 percent of professional jobs, 46.5 percent of management positions and 58.7 percent of executive jobs.
The report found that on average, Black men make up less than 1.5 percent of employees in all three job levels studied. While Black men are more than 3 percent of executives in 16 firms, and all but seven firms have at least one black male employee, 71 percent have none at the executive ranks.
Black women are rare in all professional, management and executive jobs. There are 10 firms with no Black women at all, and the overall median proportion of Black women is close to zero in all firms.
“These firms already know how to develop innovative products, compete in dynamic global markets, hire in competitive labor markets and are rapidly transforming our world,” the authors state. “It’s difficult to come up with a plausible reason why many cannot manage diversity.”
The full report, Is Silicon Valley Tech Diversity Possible Now?, may be downloaded by clicking here.
