Facebook Wants to Close the Diversity Gap in Tech

“Diversity is central to Facebook’s mission of creating a more open and connected world – both because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s good for our product and business”, Maxine Williams, the company’s global director of diversity, noted yesterday in a blog post.

The initiative, Facebook notes, is a result of its own understanding about diversity and a research by Mckinsey on the participation of underrepresented minorities in programming careers. Available in English and Spanish, the website is useful to anyone, but Facebook hopes it will also reach out to more future employees.

With TechPrep, the company intends to curate resources to meet the needs of people accessing them be it parent’s guardians or student’s.

“We understood there was great underrepresentation for people like me who come from communities of color, where exposure to computer science was nonexistent and there was no way for me to even make that [career] choice”, Williams said. It also involves community events, with a focus on providing parents and guardians the tools and information they need to foster their kids’ interest in computer science and technology.

“Though they are sharply underrepresented in the tech industry, Blacks and Hispanics aspire to careers as programmers, according to research Facebook conducted with consulting firm McKinsey”. But the same survey found a majority of those teens and parents were hampered by a lack of knowledge, or misconceptions, about how to get started.

Apple’s second annual report notes the company has hired more than 11,000 women around the world over the past 12 months, a 65% jump from the amount of women it hired the year prior.

Compared to the 4.5 percent of Black college graduates with a computer science degree and the 6.5 percent of Latinos with the same, Facebook looks to be behind the curve. Aimed particularly at women and minorities, it’s created to help youngsters find a trajectory into the world of tech – with the help of their parents.

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“One person will refer the person that they went to school with, and that school happens to be Stanford”, Ms. Gomez said.

But Facebook is clearly not happy with the current situation, so it’s working on getting to the root of the problem: the standard tech pipeline. So it takes everything together.