Diversity

This Public Notice serves as notice that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has appointed chairs for the three working groups for the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment (ACDDE):
Henry Rivera, Senior Advisor, Emma Bowen Foundation, will chair the Broadcast Diversity and Development Working Group.
Heather Gate, Director of Digital Inclusion, Connected Nation, will chair the Digital Empowerment and Inclusion Working Group.
Marc H. Morial, President and CEO, National Urban League, will chair the Diversity in the Tech Sector Working Group.

Chairman Pai previously designated Julia Johnson, President, NetCommunications, LLC, to serve as Chair of the ACDDE, and Diane Sutter, President/CEO, ShootingStar Broadcasting, to serve as Vice Chair. The ACDDE will hold its first meeting on Monday, September 25, 2017.

So far in 2017, the lawyer Douglas Wigdor, a conservative Republican, has filed 11 suits against Fox News for defamation, sexual harassment and racial discrimination.

Television viewers have long been familiar with Fox’s public product, but for more than a decade, there have also been persistent glimpses of its private culture as numerous women have come forward accusing men like Roger Ailes — or the host Eric Bolling, who was ousted this month after sending lewd text messages to female colleagues — of predatory sexual misconduct. As Ailes did before he died in May, Bolling has denied the allegations. The accusations by Wigdor’s clients — former news anchors, former news analysts, former accounting department employees — have only deepened the portrait of a toxic culture. One of the people he represents, a regular guest political commentator, says the network retaliated against her after she lodged a rape claim against a Fox Business host. Another, a Bangladeshi payroll worker, says a colleague once referred to him as a “terrorist.” In lawsuits that run to nearly 300 pages, there are charges that the network fired a freelance reporter at Fox 5 News, its New York affiliate, after she became pregnant; that Fox’s former comptroller repeatedly ridiculed black and Hispanic colleagues; and that some Fox journalists conspired with the White House to produce fake news.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai selected Julia Johnson, president of a consulting firm called NetCommunications, to lead the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment, a group Chairman Pai said he established to champion the voice of every American, “no matter their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.” Despite the laudatory title and mission of the diversity committee, Johnson is a consultant who perfectly embodies the corporations-first agenda of President Donald Trump’s FCC.

Johnson has long worked on behalf of industry groups seeking to undermine consumer regulations and promote the interests of large corporate clients. Johnson also chairs the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council which is funded by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and other large telecommunications firms. MMTC’s pro-Trump administration statements, cast as being made on behalf of communities of color, are typical of Johnson’s approach. Over the years, Johnson has used racial minorities as a cudgel to disingenuously lobby on behalf of industry. Johnson’s history of “astroturfing,” a term for lobbying using fake grassroots groups, goes back more than a decade.

Ellen Pao has a message for Silicon Valley: It's time for the white male-dominated tech industry to "reset" itself.

"When I use the term reset, it's really that we need to shake out the people who don't believe in inclusion and bring in the people who have been excluded," she said. Pao says she figured hard work and her "super power" (sleeping remarkably few hours a night) could overcome the inequities thrown in her path. "It's not something you want to believe. It takes a lot to shake that belief out of you," Pao said. But, when she had trouble getting investments approved and to holding onto companies that were doing well, she noticed she wasn't the only one being denied opportunities that came easily to men. "There's a point where I realized that other women were doing much better work and had much more successful investments than the men," she said. "It made me realize the system really wasn't fair and it really wasn't based on merit."

For the last 20 years, Boxed In has tracked women’s representation in prime-time television. The project provides the most comprehensive historical record of women’s onscreen portrayals and behind-the-scenes employment available. The study examines dramas, comedies, and reality programs appearing on the broadcast networks, basic and premium cable channels, and streaming services.
Overall, 68% of the programs considered featured casts with more male than female characters.
Across platforms, females comprised 42% of all speaking characters.
Females accounted for 42% of major characters on broadcast network, cable and streaming programs.
The percentage of female characters featured on broadcast network programs was the same in 2016-17 as it was nearly a decade earlier in 2007-08.
Across platforms, programs are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse.
Regardless of platform, gender stereotypes on television programs abound.

Blacks and Hispanics remain less likely than whites to own a traditional computer or have high-speed internet at home, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2016. But mobile devices are playing important roles in helping to bridge these differences.

Roughly eight-in-ten whites (83%) report owning a desktop or laptop computer, compared with 66% of blacks and 60% of Hispanics. There are also substantial racial or ethnic differences in broadband adoption, with whites more likely than either blacks or Hispanics to report having a broadband connection at home. (There were not enough Asian respondents in the sample to be broken out into a separate analysis.) But despite these inequalities, blacks and Hispanics have mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers in shares similar to whites. There are differences between Hispanics born inside and outside the U.S.: 88% of native-born Hispanics own a smartphone, compared with 62% of Hispanics born abroad. About three-quarters of whites and blacks own a smartphone. Mobile devices play an outsize role for blacks and Hispanics when it comes to their online access options. About two-in-ten Hispanics (22%) and 15% of blacks are “smartphone only” internet users – meaning they lack traditional home broadband service but do own a smartphone. By comparison, 9% of whites fall into this category. In addition, blacks and Hispanics are also more likely than whites to rely on their smartphones for a number of activities, such as looking up health information or looking for work.

A law firm representing James Damore, who was fired from Google earlier in Aug for writing a controversial internal memo, is asking other former and current employees to come forward with “illegal employment practices” at Google. A blog post from Damore's firm specifically solicited those who had been reprimanded for “refusing to comply with the political orthodoxy at the company” or had faced retaliation over their political views or whistleblowing. “On behalf of current firm clients, Dhillon Law Group is investigating Google’s employment discrimination against employees on the basis of their political views and other protected characteristics, as well as retaliation against employees for complaining about these violations of labor laws,” the firm wrote in a blog post on its website.

While tech’s crackdown on violence-inciting white nationalist sites came rapidly following the turmoil in Virginia, it took years of cajoling by activists and advocates to get Silicon Valley ready for action. “We put out our first report about cyberhate in 1985,” says Brittan Heller, director of technology and society for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2012, the ADL inaugurated its Working Group on Cyberhate. “This was one of the first bodies to get organizations across the tech industry to talk about these issues,” says Heller. The ADL doesn’t publish a list of its members, but Heller says it includes “all the major tech companies like Facebook and Google, Apple and Microsoft, Twitter.”

In 2014, the Working Group put out best-practice guidelines for tech companies to handle online hate—like clearly explaining terms of service for users and providing mechanisms for people to report abuse. That same year, the Southern Poverty Law Center began its Silicon Valley push. “In 2014, we decided that we needed to at least make an effort to work with the tech companies to de-monetize hate,” says Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

Google was rocked by condemnation from both left and right after firing an employee who highlighted gender differences to explain women’s under-representation in tech. But the scandal over Silicon Valley’s diversity shortcomings did little to shake the Alphabet Inc company’s positive public image, nor its stock price. According to Morning Consult Brand Intelligence, it dipped four percentage points to 86 percent favorability in the days after Damore’s memo circulated, but remained solidly within its long-term average. By comparison, the industry average hovers around 40 percent.

Some artificial intelligence (AI) systems are learning to be prejudiced against some dialects. And as language-based AI systems become ever more common, some minorities may automatically be discriminated against by machines, warn researchers studying the issue.

Anyone with a strong or unusual accent may know what it’s like to have trouble being understood by Siri or Alexa. This is because voice-recognition systems use natural-language technology to parse the contents of speech, and it often relies on algorithms that have been trained with example data. If there aren’t enough examples of a particular accent or vernacular, then these systems may simply fail to understand you. The problem may be more widespread and pernicious than most people realize. Natural-language technology now powers automated interactions with customers, through automated phone systems or chatbots. It’s used to mine public opinion on the Web and social networks, and to comb through written documents for useful information. This means that services and products built on top of language systems may already be unfairly discriminating against certain groups.