Can Code Help Silicon Valley Find And Retain Minority Engineers? SAN FRANCISCO - - If lack of diversity is Silicon Valley’s problem, is there a tech solution? While creating a diverse workforce with proportionate women and minorities may seem like the ultimate human problem, some believe there's a fix that involves code. KLR650 parts and accessories, Supermoto Wheels, Suspension Kits, Cargo Racks, Plastic Fuel Tanks, Jet Kits, Chains & Sprockets, Corbin Seats, Lowering Links, and much. Great Features Make Great Games. Bally Technologies is known for its brilliant and distinctive features it puts into games to make customer experience absolutely. Find the latest business news on Wall Street, jobs and the economy, the housing market, personal finance and money investments and much more on ABC News. TESTING and REPAIRING PHONE LINES. You can't rely on the Phone Company to test phone lines for you. They don't care whether your customer is happy or not! A new breed of startups has emerged over the past year and a half, part of the so- called diversity solutions market that some see creating its own mini- bubble, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to multiple experts in the space. Out of the gate, there are more than a dozen startups in this sector, addressing diverse talent pools, making it easier for companies to create environments welcoming to women and people of color, and helping tech workers eliminate their unconscious biases.“Diversity leaders can sell these things to our recruiting teams fairly easily because they’re going to serve up the diversity that our recruiters may not have the time to go and seek out,” Rachel Willams, Yelp's chief of diversity and inclusion, said. Door of Clubs is a startup that gives companies access to specific student clubs at school across the country. Above, is the club page for the Society of Women Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Photo: Door of Clubs. Tinder, But For Diversity. There are already a handful of players in this market, and diversity leaders said they hope these tools can help the industry deliver better overall diversity progress reports in 2. Google, Facebook and Yahoo presented this summer. For example, 1. 0- month- old Blendoor shows companies a candidate's qualifications but not their names or photos, forcing recruiters to judge solely on merit and eliminating most forms of bias. Blendoor, which has raised more than $5. Tinder, so if recruiters like what they see from candidates, they simply swipe right to match. Similarly, Gap. Jumpers lets companies vet candidates by putting on blind auditions where prospects must take on a challenge and code or design a project similar to what they’d work on if they were hired. Companies can then screen and hire candidates based on the caliber of what they create and not on their name, appearance or resume. The startup raised $2. Jopwell, meanwhile, gives companies access to a database of talented and diverse candidates and counts notable tech firms like Salesforce, Box, Adobe and Square among its client base. It's basically Linked. In for people of color. Door of Clubs lets companies contact specific student clubs at schools across the U. S., such as UC San Diego’s Academic Connection of Engineers, a diverse club featuring engineers of all specialties and backgrounds.“It’s definitely way more direct contact with companies than we could’ve ever hoped for,” Hanna Salis, a nanoengineer senior and the club’s networking advisor, said. 007 Submitter Pro v1.5.41 : RegNum: 8602-482ST543 RegKey: 440131931P 1 Animation Builder v1.0 : s/n: (1001) Key: (558074). Before “we would just shoot emails into the dark and they would rarely catch, but with Door of Clubs we’re actually getting responses.”Kanjoya’s Perception software lets businesses measure and analyze the data of specific groups of employees. In the screenshot above, high performering workers are grouped by gender to illustrate their respective engagement levels. Photo: Kanjoya. Weeding Out Racists, Sexists Using Software. Perhaps the most cutting- edge tool is a product called Perception by the company Kanjoya. This technology parses through individuals’ writings - - in surveys, job reviews, tweets or any kind of open- ended text - - and analyzes the content, picking up on a person’s sentiments. The way Kanjoya pitches the product, Perception could be used to identify and proactively resolve any potential employee issues. Company executives, for example, could use Perception to analyze the morale of employees at their San Francisco office and compare that to employees in New York. Similarly, the tech could break down employee sentiment and morale by gender, ethnicity, managerial team, department and much more.“Whether we’re talking about something as silly as a survey or something as important as a performance review, all that language that’s being put there - - people are hoping to be heard and understood,” Armen Berjikly, CEO of Kanjoya, said. At its most extreme potential, Perception could be used by companies to identify individual managers with clear, data- evidenced biases toward women, underrepresented minorities or any other group. Berjikly and his team do not advocate using Perception in that manner, but they don’t deny that it is possible should a company be so inclined. Kanjoya counts Microsoft, Salesforce, Nvidia, Uber and Fitbit among its Perception clients, even though the tool became available commercially just this month. At one particular company that received early access to the tool, Perception was able to highlight that male managers within the engineering department had bias against female employees. Perception found that at the most basic level male managers were using passive language when reviewing other men such as “they” and “they’re,” as in “they are doing a good job” or “they’re sometimes late to meetings.” However, when reviewing women, the language became more confrontational with wording like “you” and “your,” as in “you are doing great” or “your work needs to improve.”“These highly educated, highly- compensated people . They need to be convinced. So someone standing on a podium once a year saying we need to address our inequality problem is dismissed outright,” Berjikly said. Photo: Textio. Spell Checking, But For Diversity. Another tool that has proved popular is Seattle- based Textio, which optimizes a company's job listings by parsing through the text and highlighting any wording like “rock star” or “crazy” that may cause female candidates to self- select themselves out of a potential job. Textio raised $1. July, it already counts tech giants like Twitter and Microsoft among its paying subscribers. Aubrey Blanche, the global diversity programs lead at Atlassian, an enterprise software firm, is a Textio subscriber and uses it to teach recruiters and managers at her company how to write inclusive job postings. With that information, the software learns what kind of wording discourages candidates from applying and helps users like Blanche create the best job postings possible. Going forward, Snyder said Textio will learn how to optimize job postings to attract candidates of all ages and then later it will learn how to do the same for underrepresented minorities. Can Data Solve A Complex, Human Problem? While most tech diversity experts welcome these solutions and hope they can help the industry see more rapid progress, there are concerns over whether it can actually solve a problem that is inherently human. For some, these solutions are viewed as helpful tools that will aid in bringing more diversity to Silicon Valley, but they should not be seen as an instant fix.“Some see it as . Textio CEO Snyder said many major tech companies are now accepting that diversity is something they need, but fewer companies are putting real resources behind those efforts.
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