Building a Diverse Workforce Starts from the Ground Up

In the past few years, diversity, equity and inclusion have come into greater focus in the tech world. Concerted awareness efforts by underrepresented groups on social media have increased public awareness of the diversity problem within the tech industry. Research has illuminated why these gaps can be detrimental to innovation and reduce a company’s ability to outperform its peers financially. 

Collectively, corporations have committed billions of dollars toward their DE&I initiatives. However, progress towards greater diversity has been slow and uneven. 

Google hired more women in 2022 than in the past two years, but females still only made up 37% of their overall hires. Facebook was only able to increase its number of Black employees by an eighth of a percent in five years. There must be a reason why these giants, with all the resources, brand recognition, and soft power in the world, cannot make appreciable gains in diversity. 

“It’s just a question of talking the talk but not walking the walk,” says Worth Davis, SVP of Enterprise Solutions at global IT solutions firm Calian. “Committing to diversity means a true transformation of the recruitment and retention efforts. It’s important to embrace professional development and non-traditional “tech” backgrounds so that our technology can be useful for the broadest population possible.”

Embracing and cultivating diversity can look different for every organization. The efforts should start within the recruitment process, using technology that makes it less likely for hirers to succumb to personal biases. LinkedIn, for example, recently introduced its AI-powered Diversity Nudges tool, which is aimed at improving gender parity in the gender composition of talent searches. This tool informs recruiters when their search results are less than 45% female and offers suggestions for broadening the search range the present a more equitable bevy of candidates.

Investing in initiatives at the educational level that support and empower underrepresented populations to enter STEM is another great way to improve diversity statistics. Public high schools, with their diverse populations, often don’t have the resources to offer their students computer science classes. Women hold significantly fewer computer science degrees than their male counterparts at universities that produce the most computer science graduates, and HBCUs produce a quarter of the U.S.’s Black STEM graduates. While the racial reckoning of 2020 put more corporate interest - and dollars - into these institutions than in years past, HBCUs alone cannot fix the dearth of Black tech workers.

“It takes partnership — between public and private entities — to make any meaningful difference in efforts like this,” says Davis. Calian, for its part, joined forces with other IT and philanthropic partners in 2020 to launch its cybersecurity refresh program specifically for hundreds of HBCUs across the United States. The goal of the effort is twofold: to bring the cybersecurity postures of these schools in line with the NIST cybersecurity framework that guarantees important federal funding and to create a pipeline of future qualified tech employees from these institutions. STEM students are allowed to participate in paid IT internships with corporate partners while gaining valuable certifications that can be used throughout their careers. 

Actions like this have long-term benefits for the individual participants and the tech industry at large. They facilitate the development of an ecosystem of diverse talent that can inspire and continue to be perpetuated for generations. Tech is too universal, important, and transformative to be created, disseminated, and gatekept by a single group. 

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