Thread by @axios

💻📱🎮 RACE AND TECHNOLOGY IN AMERICA (🧵)

The technology industry is famously determined to change the world — but its efforts to diversify its workforce and remove bias from its products haven't changed nearly enough.
axios.com/race-and-techn…

The tech industry likes to cast its failure to diversify as a "pipeline problem" — one that would vanish if only more such people studied tech skills and entered the field.

But fixing the pipeline won't solve tech's race problem.
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The hard truth is that filling up the pipeline won't help, as long as employees keep quitting their jobs, being forced out or leaving the industry.

Critics say these work environments are rife with harassment and discrimination.
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📈 In the mid-2010s tech's biggest companies started publicly reporting diversity statistics, and the tale these annual numbers tell since then is one of progress — but very slow and very slight.

Go deeper: axios.com/tech-employmen…

🎮 A quarter of the 200+ million video games players in the United States are people of color.

But the executive ranks of the industry, as well as rank-and-file game development and the power players in games media, are less diverse.
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Asians make up the majority of Silicon Valley's tech workforce at roughly 57%. Yet they're vastly underrepresented at the leadership level:

• 27% at Apple

• 40% at Google

• 25% at Facebook
axios.com/tech-asian-wor…

The industry’s rhetoric around Asians has long obscured disparities that affect Black and Latino workers. It also overlooks Asians’ precarious place in the system — and tech's long history of anti-Asian bias.
axios.com/tech-asian-wor…

💰 Tech's leading companies — like the rest of corporate America — responded to the murder of George Floyd by police in part by pledging to give big to racial justice groups.

Our analysis of these companies found that, by and large, Big Tech paid up.
axios.com/big-techs-dona…

From Palantir to Ring, to body cameras and GPS databases, technology has transformed policing — and incorporated the biases of its creators.

These advances can fight but also foster racial discrimination.
axios.com/technology-pol…

AI algorithms employed in everything from hiring to lending to criminal justice have a persistent and often invisible problem with bias.
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One solution could be audits that aim to determine whether an algorithm is working as intended, whether it's disproportionately affecting different groups of people and, if there are problems, how they can be fixed.
axios.com/algorithmic-au…

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