Intel wants to be less male and white. Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich pledged on Tuesday to spend $300 million to boost the diversity of the workforce at Intel, which, like many other technology companies, has been criticized for employing woefully few women, blacks, and Hispanics. By 2020, Intel hopes, women and underrepresented minorities will be fully represented in its workforce.
Intel’s ambitions are admirable. The company may well be the first tech giant to publicly set aside this much money to tackle workplace diversity, even as others—including Facebook and Microsoft—have paid lip service to the topic in recent months. Yet it would be premature to consider the battle anywhere near won. Making a large company more diverse is harder than most people think.
“Diversity isn’t something you can buy quickly. It has to be an investment, and it has to take time,” says Marilyn Nagel, CEO of Watermark, a nonprofit working to increase the representation of female leaders in companies.
The first problem is one of mathematics. Intel, according to its 2013 EEO-1 (Equal Employment Opportunity) report, has more than 57,000 employees in the U.S., 57 percent of whom are white and 29 percent of whom are Asian. Just 8 percent of its employees are Hispanic; 4 percent black; 1 percent multiracial; 0.5 percent American Indian; and 0.2 percent native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Women are outnumbered 3 to 1 by men. The racial and gender disparities are even more stark at the top of the company, where white men hold 133 of 187 executive and senior management positions and white women hold an additional 23.
Intel hopes to attract more women and minorities to its ranks by funding engineering scholarships and working more closely with computer science departments at historically black colleges and other schools. But realistically, Intel will have to recruit and hire thousands of qualified software engineers and developers before it makes a dent in its percentage of minority and female employees—a venture that will take years, not months, to carry out.
(Bloomberg Businessweek)
