The Hmong American Farmers Association was one of five nonprofits selected to receive $175,000 through Google’s Impact Challenge in Minnesota, which asked local nonprofit innovators and social entrepreneurs how they would make their community a better place. HAFA seeks to advance the economic prosperity of Hmong farming families in Minnesota, who lead the Twin Cities local food economy but continue to face many barriers, according to the organization’s website.
For the Impact Challenge, HAFA proposed launching a community-supported agriculture box that would provide a weekly supply of fresh, locally grown, healthy food to low-income and food-insecure families in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
“Our project melds our existing mission – supporting Hmong refugee farmers – with an innovative new concept that brings locally grown foods to underserved families,” co-founder and HAFA executive director Janssen Hang said in a statement.
A panel of local judges selected the winners, Minne Inno reports. In the next stage of the competition, Google will award an additional $125,000 to the organization that receives the most online votes before February 19.
Hmong families sell the fruits (and vegetables) of their labor in Minnesota farmers' markets.
The aims of other winning organizations include increasing the supply of child care in rural Minnesota, breaking the poverty cycle while reducing disparities in STEM careers, training adults in electronics recycling to help those facing employment barriers, and increasing and accelerating creative career opportunities for young people of color.
“We were blown away with the incredibly diverse and innovative proposals from the state’s nonprofit organizations that came pouring in after we launched the Impact Challenge,” Dan Harbeke, Google’s head of public policy and external affairs, said in a statement. “We’re excited to see which deserving organization Minnesotans select as their ‘People’s Choice’ winner.”
On its website, HAFA has asked supporters to vote so the organization can purchase a new refrigerator truck for future farming operations.
WHAT IS IT with the fratboy-culture dominating Silicon Valley and the way it demeans women?
SV is not so different from the rest of the country, really. It attracts a wide swath of people who want to get in on the new frontier and be on the cutting edge of the future.
(Full disclosure: I am the father of two daughters, who are smart, strong, compassionate and independent women, so any biases that might appear in this post are purely intentional.)
While it might attract the enlightened, the bold, the creative and innovative, it also draws in the mysogynist, the elitist, the sexist and the other elements from the dark side, including the alt-right, white supremacists by any other name.
As I write, two stories published today (July 8) brings this apparent dichotomy to light.
Google announced the firing of one of its male employees who issued a manifesto to employees citing the biological differences between the sexes that prevents women from being as good as men in the high-tech industry.
The 10-page manifesto written by Google engineer James Damore, said in part that women are more talkative than assertive, and have more “neuroticism” that makes them less tolerant of stress than men.
"Questioning our assumptions and sharing different perspectives is an important part of our culture, and we want to continue fostering an environment where it’s safe to engage in challenging conversations in a thoughtful way,” Google vice-president of engineering Ari Balogh said in a statement.
“But, in the process of doing that, we cannot allow stereotyping and harmful assumptions,” the statement continued. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had to cut short his vacation to handle the situation. "Portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace," Pichai wrote in a memo to employees. "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."
The U.S. Labor Department is investigating Google to see whether the firm has unlawfully paid women less than men. Google denies that it does. According to Google's diversity report, the company's workforce is 69 percent male, 31 percent female. When it comes to technical positions, the gender breakdown is even more skewed, with just 20 percent of technical jobs being filled by women.
Damore’s letter caught the attention of high-profile women in tech.
Megan Smith, another former Google vice-president and the chief technology officer for President Barack Obama, said the views expressed by Damore were “rampant” in tech.
“It’s insidious,” Smith told Bloomberg TV. “It causes people to leave the industry and it’s bad for shareholder value.”
“It’s toxic,” Girls in Tech founder Adriana Gascoigne said Monday. “He’s breaking down the biological aspects of being a woman versus a man and categorizing women in a way that makes us seem weak, that makes us seem incompetent, that makes us seem like we’re actually bad for a company’s bottom line.”
Remember Ellen Pao?
Ellen Pao
Ellen Pao, who became a household during her gender bias trial against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, on Monday (July 8) shared the first results of her newest initiative — Project Include. While her inaugural report shows some small improvements — the companies participating increased their percentage of female, Asian, Hispanic and multi-racial employees — it mostly highlights the fact that diversifying the industry will be a long and complex process.
“There is still a lot of work to do, as the data reflect many of the patterns of underrepresentation in the tech industry,” Pao and her co-founders at Project Include wrote in a blog post. “But the improvement over large companies’ demographics is encouraging, as are the many changes between the baseline and follow up reports, though it is too early to know for sure what caused all the changes.”
They found women, transgender men and non-binary employees reported a decrease in perceived fairness. Since her widely publicized 2015 gender bias battle, Pao launched Project Include with a group of female co-founders, including Freada Kapor Klein of the Kapor Center for Social Impact and Slack engineer Erica Joy Baker. The idea was to provide concrete steps companies could take to improve diversity and inclusion of women and minorities at their companies, and metrics to measure their progress.
Megyn Kelly, right, interviews six victims of sex harassment in Silicon Valley.
Sexual harassment
Sexual harassment is one of the major battlefronts in Silicon Valley. Women often find themselves getting unwanted attention from male are co-workers, bosses or potential investors. The frat-boy behavior towards women has been known throughout the male-dominated industry for years. Earlier this year, the issue was once again in the spotlight when an Uber executive was accused of sexual harassment toward a female employee. When the executive was not punished for his actions, the victim made it public. Uber's CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to resign because of his handling of the woman's complaint. By the time dust settled, over 20 employees, including the woman's manager, were fired for their mishandling of the complaint. When the Uber incident became public, more women stepped forward with their own stories of unwanted sex advances in other companies. Over a dozen women came forth naming some of the biggest names in the industry. Venture capitalists, those people who help finance startups, were especially TV journalist Megan Kelly dedicated one of her episodes of Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly to the issue, inviting six women to tell their stories. Three of the six were Asian/Americans.
“Elephant in the Valley,” a 2015 survey by released some of their findings about harassment in Silicon Valley:
90% witnessed sexist behavior at company offsites and/or industry conferences
60% reported being the target of unwanted sexual advances from a superior
60% who reported sexual harassment were dissatisfied with the outcome
One in three say they felt afraid for their personal safety because of work-related circumstances
There are some limitations to the study. Project Include worked with startups that voluntarily joined Pao's survey and didn't include the big tech companies like Google, Apple or Microsoft so it is not reflect the industry as a whole but it does present a picture of young entrepreneurs trying not to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors.
The startups saw their proportion of women increase from 41 percent to 46 percent during those eight months, Asian workers increase from 12 to 15 percent, Hispanic workers increase from 11 to 12 percent, and multi-racial workers increase from 7 to 11 percent.
And the cohort companies tended to do better than their peers who weren’t part of the study. The percentage of Hispanic workers in Project Include companies was twice as high as the industry average. And nearly half of all roles at Project Include companies were filled by women, compared with an average of 34 percent throughout the industry.
But there were also some losses during the eight months studied — the proportion of African-American workers dropped from 5 to 3 percent, and transgender or non-binary workers dropped from 2 percent to 1 percent.
***
Clearly, the tech industry, centered in Silicon Valley, which likes to promote itself as the industry for the 21st century and known for breaking new ground in creating less rigid work environments than traditional offices or factories, still has a significant number of men with 19th century attitudes towards women.
Facebook chief operating officer and former Google vice-president Sheryl Sandberg said Monday on Facebook that inequality in technology didn’t arise out of gender differences.
“It’s due to cultural stereotypes that persist,” she wrote. “We all need to do more.”
IT APPEARS that U.S. courts will be one of the battlegrounds where immigrant rights advocates and Silicon Valley giants will fight against the immigration orders shot out of the White House. The growing outrage against Donald Trump's Executive Order that bans immigrants from seven predominately Muslim countries, has helped The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) raise over $24 million since the order was signed last Friday. That's according to Anthony Romero, the executive director of the civil liberties group. Romero told Yahoo News that in addition to the $24 million, more than 150,000 new members have joined the organization.
"I’ve never seen anything like this," Romero told Yahoo News. "People are fired up and want to be engaged. What we’ve seen is an unprecedented public reaction to the challenges of the Trump administration."
Many celebrities and Silicon Valley luminaries encouraged their social media followers to support the civil rights group. The ACLU was one of the organizations that filed a complaint in a New York City court that resulted in a stay on parts of the Executive Order.
The same outrage that fueled the ACLU spike in donations was seen in Kal Penn's fundraising effort for Syrian refugees. Indian/American actor Penn started his online fundraising after a person on Twitter told him that he does not belong in America.
Penn, best known for his role in Harold and Kumar, also served as a public engagement adviser to former president Barack Obama. He shared the image of the racist tweet with a fundraising page link which was created under the name "Donating to Syrian refugees in the name of the dude who said I don't belong in America."
"We are better than the hateful people who tell us we don't belong in our own country, that American can't be a beacon of freedom and hope for refugees from around the world. We will turn their bigotry, along with the President's, into love," he wrote on the page.
Penn's initiative soon went viral on social media and people began to donate under their own names and some on behalf of Steven Bannon, Melania Trump, Kellyanne Conway and the President Trump himself.
Soon after the initial target of $250,000 was reached within 24 hours, Penn posted a thank you message on the page saying, "Beautiful people - You just raised more than a quarter of a million dollars for refugees in less than 24 hours!"
Early this morning (Jan. 31), the amount had surpassed $750,000. "This is such a testament to how proud we are of our beautiful country and how fired up we are to #resist our new president's dangerous policies with solidarity and love. Thank you! The donor page remains open, so keep it up!"
Google has created a crisis fund that could raise up to $4 million for four immigrant rights organizations.
Google has confirmed a USA Today report that it is funding an initial $2 million for the fund that can be matched with up to $2 million in donations from employees. The money will go toward the American Civil Liberties Union, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the International Rescue Committee and the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Company executives are also donating separately to the effort.
Google says in a statement that it's concerned about the impact President Donald Trump's order to temporarily suspend immigration from seven Muslim majority nations will have on the company's employees and their families.
Google CEO Sundar Pichal
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, an Indian/American, wrote a memo to staff about the ban, which was obtained byBloomberg.
“It’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues,” Pichai wrote. “We’ve always made our view on immigration issues known publicly and will continue to do so.”
“We’re concerned about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the US. We’ll continue to make our views on these issues known to leaders in Washington and elsewhere.”
"The ACLU took Trump to court. Let's stand with them. Reply with donation receipts from today and I'll match to $25,000," venture capitalist Chris Sacca tweeted on Saturday. As replies poured in, Sacca doubled and tripled his match offer, then said he was "matching my own match and giving $150,000."
Other tech companies have offered support as well. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on Twitter that the company will provide "free housing to refugees and anyone not allowed in the U.S.," and ride-sharing service Lyft announced it would donate $1 million to the ACLU over the next four years.
Other major companies that took positions against the ban included Microsoft, Apple, Uber and Tesla.
“As an immigrant and as a CEO, I’ve both experienced and seen the positive impact that immigration has on our company, for the country, and for the world. We will continue to advocate on this important topic.”
