The Unsettling Hum of Silicon Valley’s Failure to Hire More Black Workers

Tech companies know that they have a race problem. But their efforts to address it have so far yielded little. Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet inc unit's efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates. Among 8 of the largest U.S. tech companies, the portion of black workers in technical jobs rose to 3.1 percent in 2017 from 2.5 percent in 2014. The latest data from the U.S. government, released in 2016, reinforces the point: Blacks made up 7 percent of U.S. high-tech workforce, and just 3 percent of the total Silicon Valley workforce.