Posted on 03/27/2014 10:01:29 AM PDT by null and void
Edited on 03/27/2014 12:25:29 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson led a delegation to the Hewlett-Packard annual shareholders meeting on March 19, 2014, to bring attention to Silicon Valley's poor record of including blacks and Latinos in hiring, board appointments and startup funding. Jackson's strategy borrows from the traditional civil rights era playbook of shaming companies to prod them into transformation. Now, he is bringing it to the age of social media and a booming tech industry known for its disruptive innovation.
"We're talking about a sector that responds to future trends," says Ronald C. Parker, president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council, a group of current and former African-American Fortune 500 executives who work to increase diversity at the top levels of American business. "He's speaking at one organization. I'm sure the people at Hewlett-Packard have and will continue to put some focus on it. Whether it will accelerate is to be seen. But it's a start."
Earl "Butch" Graves Jr., president and CEO of Black Enterprise magazine, says Jackson is shining a light on the fact that technology companies don't come close to hiring or spending what is commensurate with the demographics of their customers.
"Hopefully, what Rev. Jackson is doing will bring attention to the 800-pound gorilla in the room that nobody wants to talk about. It's high time that gets addressed," Graves says.
It's widely recognized that the tech industry lacks diversity: About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent census data.
"Technology is supposed to be about inclusion, but sadly, patterns of exclusion remains the order of the day," Jackson wrote in a letter released March 17 to Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Google and others.
Jackson said March 18 that he isn't singling HP out, he's just using the company's annual meeting to highlight the broader issue.
"This is not exclusive to Hewlett-Packard," he said.
As recently as 2011, Allstate, in alliance with Jackson's RainbowPUSH organization, recognized HP for its commitment to diversity.
"While we certainly agree that diversity is an important issue in corporate America, we're puzzled by Rev. Jackson's sudden interest in HP," said HP executive vice president Henry Gomez in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. "Today, HP is the largest company in the world with both a female CEO and CFO and nearly half of our leadership team and Board of Directors are women and minorities. Additionally, nearly 50 years ago, HP established the first Minority Business Program in the United States."
Gomez also points out that in 2013, HP spent nearly $1 billion with almost 500 minority business enterprises in the U.S. and an additional $500 million with businesses owned by women.
"We look forward to seeing Rev. Jackson at our shareholder meeting," Gomez says.
Apple and Google declined to comment on Jackson's grievances. Facebook and Twitter didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Of course, the technology industry isn't without a handful of high-profile black executives. Microsoft named John Thompson, an African-American, as chairman of its board last month after he led a search that culminated in the appointment of Satya Nadella as the software maker's new CEO. Thompson, the former CEO of security software maker Symantec, joined Microsoft's board in 2012.
Excerpt, read more at scientificcomputing.com
lol
Popcorn. YES!!! This thread needed popcorn! Thanks!
pm shot at you
common core will fix that. 2+2=65
“Someone needs to fight for Americans, and at least JJ is fighting for some of them.”
No he isn’t; qualified blacks are hired along with other qualified Americans (companies would be fools to ignore a real talent pool), while JJ is out to get unqualified tokens on the payrolls (as he did with Obama in the White House).
“When worked in IT, we always reveled in the fact that all the network admin folk, and our IT dept was a conservative. No libtards at all! We always joked about how it was because it took brains to do IT work. Just sayin’...”
IT certainly takes brains, but I would assume the conservative bent was from paying income taxes (some libs have brains - they are the brains behind the schemes that delivered the White House to President Token twice).
I work in a large hi-tech company and literally, there are more trans-gender engineers than there are African-American. Of ‘Black’ engineers I work with, most of them are foreign, from Nigeria, Cuba, Cape Verde or South Africa. In those countries, being successful is not ‘acting white’, it means not starving.
Need any wafer fab guys?
lemme guess.. he rasis, she rasis, dey rasis and the only route to absolution is to give me money..
shakedown bump for later..........
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