The logic is questionable, because using a particular product does not automatically qualify the user to engineer it. It is akin to claiming that anyone who drives a car must also have the mechanical engineering skills to build or design one.
The African-American National Urban League believes a new technology gap is opening because of racial “discrimination” in its 2018 State of Black America report released on Thursday, the Associated Press reported.
They want to pressure social media and technology companies to make sure that minorities are part of the digital revolution.
“C-suite executives of tech firms publicly espouse the gospel of racial and gender diversity and inclusion, but these spaces do not reflect our nation’s demographic diversity,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “Only increased representation from top to bottom will drive corporate change that prioritizes equity.”
The latest Equal Employment Opportunity reports filed by Google, Facebook and Twitter show that only 758 – 1.8 percent of their combined workforce of 41 000 employees, were black. Morial says their own research show that in the majority of tech companies, fewer than five percent of the workforce is black, while at least half of the workforce is white.
The organisation introduced a “digital inclusion” index in response to the question: “Are the new job, business and educational opportunities created by increased digitization of our world being equally shared?”
But the prospects for blacks in the tech industry remain bleak, say others. Ryan Carson started Treehouse in 2011 believing, like many coding-school founders, that people do not have to go to university to land high-paying tech jobs and that his school, by lowering the barrier to entry, would bring racial diversity to tech. Seven years on, he realised that he had failed, he told Bloomberg in March.
Coding schools are not substitutes for university degrees, despite the ambitions of people such as Carson. Some coding schools have over-promised on jobs and skills. A number of graduates and employers told Bloomberg in 2016 also that this training had not sufficiently prepared people of colour for the work they were supposed to be doing.
The efforts generallly by coding schools to get more people of colour and women into tech, have been a failure. Many coding schools, including Treehouse, offer scholarships aimed at promoting racial diversity and some were even created in partnership with Google, using coding programs designed for women and people of colour.
Yet despite this, tech companies have remained largely white and male.
