Engineering and technology firms alike can gain insights into possible solutions for gender and racial diversity, thanks to a new report from Intel showing how it is dealing with issues around staff diversity.
Both the technology and engineering industries face issues with the under-representation of women and minorities within both individual companies, and the sector on the whole.
Intel is one of the few companies providing transparency and metrics into how it is progressing on diversity measures. Other companies tend to cite internal confidentiality issues in declining to publicly revealed measurable goals and progress when it comes to dealing with diversity issues.
The latest report from Intel reveals mixed results in this ongoing effort.
In 2015, Intel set a goal to ensure 40 percent of new employees are women or under-represented minorities. The report reveals it managed to exceed this goal, with 43.1 percent of new diversity hires. In 2016, the goal has increased to 45 percent, with an additional target of 14 percent hiring rate for underrepresented minorities. In the longer term, Intel aims to reach “full representation” by 2020.
Despite the progress, Intel has a way to go: its employees are currently 75 percent male, and 86 percent white or Asian.
According to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, companies need to get serious about diversity, and actually “engineer” diversity. For that to happen, data is key, which is why Intel decided to compile and release the report.
"When you're engineers you need that data to understand the problem," he says.
According to the Intel report, the issue lies with company policies, rather than the availability of good candidates who are female or belong to under-represented minorities.
Another aspect of importance is the retention of a diverse base of employees. The Intel report found that the company is losing black employees at a faster rate than other workers.
A possible reason is work culture, where African-American staff leave because they are not progressing up the corporate ladder quickly enough. This could be because senior executives are not meeting with and sponsoring them, and building relationships and conversations that organically lead to promotions and coaching.
Another potential problem has to do with the “culture fit” issue, where new engineers that may come from a diverse background not only have to be competent in their areas of expertise, but have to pass a culture fit test.
Recruitment specialists say that this is not real diversity, since such policies effectively insist that someone from a different racial, ethnic, cultural, or gender background be culturally identical to the existing workforce of white and Asian men.
Diversity, says Krzanich, is a major challenge for both technology and engineering firms. These companies, long accustomed to dealing with hard problems in physics, involving measureable and firm numbers and results, are thrust into the deep end when faced with diversity issues, where even hard data is subject to biased interpretation.