Silicon Valley: Race trumps gender; Asians bump into bamboo ceiling

Asians find it difficult to move into leadership positions in Silicon Valley.

A NEW REPORT concludes that Silicon Valley high tech companies have a long way to go to reflect the workforce of the San Francisco Bay area, one of the most diverse regions in the country and Asians consistently bump up against the proverbial bamboo ceiling.

Although a large percentage of Silicon Valley workers are Asian, they are the least likely to be promoted to managerial or executive positions, in spite of being the largest minority group of professionals and the most likely to be hired.

The Illusion of Asian Success, a new report from the Ascend Foundation, a nonprofit Pan-Asian career lifecycle organization, spotlights the evolving challenges for Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and minority women in climbing the professional ladder to success.

While the Bay Area is home to one of the most diverse populations in the U.S., researchers found that diversity in technology leadership roles has generally stagnated over the last decade. 

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The Ascend study finds that "it was clear that that efforts to promote more Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics have made no meaningful impact to the minority glass ceiling," said Buck Gee, a former vice president and general manager at Cisco Systems who is an Ascend executive advisor and a study co-author. "That said, we saw progress made by white women, so we know tech companies can change. Now it's time to do the same for minority men and women."

Other key findings in The Illusion of Asian Success:

• Race is an increasingly more significant impediment than gender to climbing the management ladder, with Asian women and Hispanic women most affected.
• Asians are the least likely to be promoted to managerial or executive positions, in spite of being the largest minority group of professionals and the most likely to be hired. In particular, Asian women are the least represented group as executives, at 66% underrepresentation.
• White men and women are twice as likely as Asians to become executives and hold almost three times the number of executive jobs.
• Even though white women are now substantially more successful in reaching the executive level than ALL minority men or women, white men are still 47% more likely than white women to be executives.
• Both Blacks and Hispanics have declined in their percentage share of the professional workforce despite efforts to hire more underrepresented minorities.

Co-author and Ascend executive advisor Denise Peck, a former vice president at Cisco, stated, "Minority women continue to bump against a double-paned glass ceiling. The data show that a general focus on developing women leaders has not addressed the distinct challenges for Asian, Black, or Hispanic women. This has been an unspoken truth in the minority community, and we hope that our report opens a long overdue dialogue. We encourage all companies to take a hard look at their minority pipeline and ask how they can do better."

READ: The Illusion of Asian Success

It’s part of a larger problem with diversity programs, said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a diversity solutions firm in Oakland.

“Because they are not thinking of women of color, they are not addressing the problems they face,” she said. “Disproportionately, the beneficiaries of these initiatives tend to be white women.”

Among the authors' recommended solutions are:

• Company programs to attract and retain talent should focus on black, Hispanic, and white women. Special emphasis should be given to retaining black women.
• Company programs to develop and promote leaders should focus on both men and women in the black, Hispanic, and Asian workforce. Special emphasis should focus on Hispanic and Asian women.
• Having previously analyzed national EEO-1 reports from 2014, 2015, and 2016 made public by individual Bay Area technology companies, we determined that our analysis of pipeline diversity at the Bay Area aggregated technology sector level in this report is entirely consistent with what we saw at individual company levels. The consistency, along with the scant progress for women and minorities in the Bay Area sector, suggests that the diversity challenge is a region-wide sector problem that should be addressed by the leading companies working collectively rather than each technology company working individually.
• The need for a collective effort has recently been recognized at the national level with the recent announcement of Fortune 500 CEO-led alliance “CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion” as a forum for sharing best practices. Many in the Bay Area have already joined the alliance, including CEOs from Adobe, AMD, HPE, Cisco, Netapp, and Salesforce. But as the next step, our clarion call is for the leading technology companies to join together in a cooperative effort to aggregate and analyze their internal data by race and gender; proactively enlist their minority leadership and employee community involvement; and develop joint and individual metrics to bend the curve in the Bay Area’s ability to attract, retain, and promote talented women and minorities. 

"In spite of companies investing in their recruiting and hiring of Asians, Blacks and Hispanics, advancement to senior corporate ranks and corporate boards is still highly limited," said Anna Mok, executive vice president and national board member of Ascend. "To make the systemic changes that positively impact and advance results, CEOs, their executive teams, and corporate boards need to actively lead change and drive solutions."

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Kal Penn, Silicon Valley raising funds for refugees, ACLU

Kal Penn was on President Obama's staff.

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 by Bloomberg.

“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.

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella added his own statement via LinkedIn:

“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.”

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Women in STEM; MIT team invent text-to-Braille converter

Team Tactile, from left: Chandani Doshi, Jialin Shi, Bonnie Wang, Charlene Xia, Tania Yu and Grace Li.

SIX ASIAN/AMERICAN students from MIT won a student technology competition by designing and building a device that translates the written word into braille - in just 15 hours.

The tight-knit friends, known as Team Tactile, are now among four groups of innovators accepted into the new Microsoft #MakeWhatsNext Patent Program, giving them the chance to get the legal help they need to navigate the complicated and often expensive process of obtaining a patent.

“There are a lot of potential barriers for women entering tech and staying in tech, from not enough exposure as children to lack of encouragement as they grow up,” said student Tania Yu. “This program makes it a lot easier for women to pursue what they’ve been working on, instead of just dropping a project because they feel like they couldn’t get intellectual property rights.”

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Besides Yu, the other members of Team Tactile are Chandani Doshi, Jialin Shi, Bonnie Wang, Charlene Xia and Grace Li.

The idea for the competition came earlier this year, when Microsoft connected with girls in New York for International Women’s Day, and young students were asked to name an inventor. The answers came quickly: Ben Franklin. Nikola Tesla. Thomas Edison.

But when they were asked to name a female inventor? The question was met with uncertain silence.

The #MakeWhatsNext Patent Program seeks out industrious women, or groups that include at least one female member, who are working on advances in technology that could make a real difference in the world. 

The Tactile prototype is the size of a candy bar.

It then connects them with Microsoft patent lawyers and a newly formed Patent Board of senior company leaders, researchers and technology experts to provide them with mentorship and connections across Microsoft and the tech industry.

With the help of the patent lawyers, Team Tactile formally applied for a patent for their real-time text-to-Braille converter, called Tactile, last September. 

Although there are already translation devices available for the blind, their cost is in the thousands of dollars and the devices need to be hooked up with a PC and a scanner. The Team Tactile invention would cost only a couple of hundred dollars making it more accessible to more people and it's the portable invention is the size of a candy bar.

The Tactile team would love to see the invention help boost Braille literacy around the globe. They hope it can help many people gain more independence, and they’ve even been discussing how they could make it available to schools that don’t have the budget for expensive technology.

“The thing that’s really pushed us is there’s not really something like this yet in the world… and it’s something that’s needed,” said Li. “That’s really motivated us to continue to develop this and make it happen.”

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