Want to Close the Racial Wealth Gap in America? Diversify the Tech Industry

This is the first entry in our California Column, a
summer series by the New America CA Fellows.

I
recently spent a day wandering Stanford’s campus, surrounded by hundreds of
entrepreneurs from all over the world. It was the Global Entrepreneurship
Summit, hosted by President Obama. I went to Stanford and have worked in the
Bay Area tech sector for half a decade, so the setting was familiar. But the
faces were not.

The diversity that the White House had brought
together was impressive because the GES entrepreneurial melting pot isn’t what
you usually find when gathering a group of founders in the Valley. You’ve
probably seen the statistics. In the US, only eight percent of VC-backed
tech company founders are female and only one percent are black. The
data around employees isn’t much better. At top tech companies like Google and
Facebook, engineering teams are around
five percent black and Latinx.

There has been much heated conversation about the
lack of diversity in tech. Tech company detractors once dismissed the lack of
representation of black and Latinx individuals as a “pipeline problem” (that
is, “someone else’s problem”) until research showed that the pipeline was much
larger than the pool of talent that companies were hiring (case in point: 18
percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees are awarded to black and Latinx
students each year—that is a good deal higher than any of the
numbers above).

At that point, the conversation shifted to
one that acknowledged flaws in companies’ recruiting strategies and unconscious
bias in their hiring and retention. Nevertheless, the conversation
around diversity in the tech industry has largely been confined to a
conversation about the culture, policies, and practices of individual companies
and the goal has been framed as creating companies that better reflect the
available workforce. This is important, but it obscures the larger context,
which has nothing to do with any individual company, and everything to do with
the way opportunity and wealth are distributed in the United States and who we
want to be as a country as we move through the digital revolution and the 21st
century.

A few summers ago, a group of black and Latinx
students interning as software engineers at top tech companies in the Bay Area
through the organization I co-founded, Code2040,
found themselves in the surprising position of making more money each week as
undergraduate summer interns than both their parents combined made after
decades of working one or more jobs at a time. The students—some of whom were
only 18 or 19 years old—suddenly realized that the future unfurling before them
might look quite different from the past—for them and for their families.

This scenario has repeated itself every summer since
at Code2040 as we bring new classes of Fellows together (we have nearly 90 this
summer). That’s because the average salary of a tech
worker is more than the median household income of a black family and a Latinx
family combined. In a country where the median net worth of a
white family is about 15x the median net worth of a black family or Latinx
family, the chance to earn nearly six figures coming out of college
in an industry with an unemployment rate around
half the national average is
huge for the individual, their family, and their community.

This isn’t an argument for redistribution. Nobody is
arguing that we should take jobs from one group and give them to another. Analysts project 1.4 million
jobs open in tech in 2020 but only 400,000 graduates with corresponding degrees—there
is more than enough opportunity to go around. Ensuring that those jobs that are
filled are filled by a healthy representation of black and Latinx people could
break the cycles of poverty that we’ve seen persist for decades in this
country, providing meaningful opportunity for communities of color to build
generational wealth. Not doing so could ensure the preservation of an
unacceptable status quo.

The tech industry as we know it today didn’t exist
even 15 years ago. In the next 15 years, we’ll see increasingly accelerated
change. There are many reasons that it’s important for black and Latinx
Americans to be involved in shaping the companies, products, and technologies
of the future. Chief among them is that the tech industry is the economy of the
future, and if only five percent of the economy of the future is black and
Latinx, America’s future will look much too much like its past.

If we want to see the wealth gap
in the United States narrowing, not widening, over the coming decades, nailing
diversity in the tech sector must be a critical component of any economic
equity movement or strategy. This is about more than just moving the needle on
company diversity numbers. This is about taking a proactive stance on racial
equity in the economy, and therefore the society, of tomorrow—today.