How CODE2040 is Breaking the Color Barrier In Silicon Valley

Virtually everyone agrees that people of color are vastly underrepresented in today’s technology companies. CODE2040, a nonprofit cofounded in 2012 by Laura Weidman Powers and Tristan Walker, is working to change that. The organization took its name from the date some people predict minorities will become the majority in the United States, and its goal is to help make sure minorities will be proportionally represented by that time in the tech sector.

CODE2040’s mission is timely. Technology companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, have been visibly struggling with the lack of diversity in their workforces. Despite some highly publicized efforts by large companies like Facebook and Google to recruit people of color, there has been very little progress in changing the numbers. In 2014, diversity reports from four leading companies revealed that technical workers were on average 56 percent white, 37 percent Asian, three percent Hispanic, and one percent black.

So what exactly are the stumbling blocks to hiring underrepresented minorities?

One theory is that there is a problem keeping minority candidates in the pipeline. According to a 2016 New York Times article, “Why Tech Degrees Are Not Putting More Blacks and Hispanics Into Tech Jobs,” there are more black and Hispanic students majoring in computer science and engineering than currently work in tech jobs. The authors of the article, Claire Miller and Quoctrung Bui, suggest that some of those who enter the candidate pipeline fall out somewhere along the way, in part due to the culture, and in part due to recruitment methods.   

Data would tend to support this argument. While 40 percent of young Asian graduates go into tech jobs, only 16 percent of black graduates and 12 percent of Hispanics do so. Interestingly, the numbers are reversed when it comes to office support jobs. Ten percent of black computer science and engineering graduates take office support jobs, compared to five percent of white graduates and three percent of Asians.

Some critics have pointed to the cultural barriers that exist at many tech companies. Maya A. Beasley, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, believes unspoken cultural norms often discourage minorities from applying for jobs. In her book “Opting Out: Losing the Potential of America’s Young Black Elite,” she points out that black students are less likely than white students to stick with their majors if they feel they are underperforming, and that those who do stick with their majors are often less likely to apply for technical jobs. Instead, says Beasley, they opt for business jobs or non-profit work because they’ve heard negative things about tech companies and can see how few black people work there.

Explains Beasley, “Any student of color looking at the numbers from the tech giants is going to be turned off and wary about taking a job there, because it tells you something about what the climate is. They don’t want to be the token.” Sadly, this fear that tech company cultures are unwelcoming was reinforced recently when unidentified employees at Facebook crossed out the slogan “Black lives matter” and replaced it with “All lives matter” — an action CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized as “malicious and deeply hurtful” in a company memo.

Tech company recruitment strategies are also a major issue. Companies tend to limit their candidate searches to schools like Stanford and M.I.T., rarely pulling from historically black colleges. Even if minority students do go to colleges that tech companies typically recruit from, Miller and Bui say students who aren’t white or Asian may not be connected to networks that know about opportunities at tech companies.

Tristan Walker, Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of Directors | Credit: CODE2040.org

Tristan Walker points to himself as a typical example: He didn’t even know Silicon Valley existed until he arrived at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business at the age of 24. He places the blame squarely on the companies themselves. “Tech companies need to look into more places to find students outside the mainstream,” he said in a February, 2016 interview with Jonathan Chew of Fortune.

Cofounder Powers agrees, pointing out that when technology companies come to campus to recruit, black and Hispanic students often don’t show up for information sessions. She adds that students she has talked to say they are more likely to go to workshops on writing resumes or preparing for interviews, because those activities allow them to feel as if they are being valued and are not just hearing a sales pitch.

If students do get to the interview stage, cultural differences can hinder their performance. For coders, tech companies often use what is called a “whiteboard interview.” Black and Hispanic students are often less familiar with it, so they are less prepared.  According to Powers, the procedure itself is uncomfortable for some minority students. “There’s still a dominant narrative in black and Hispanic communities that you have to be twice as good, and just keep your head down and work hard,” she explains. “That does not translate to Valley culture, starting with the whiteboard interview, because it requires people to work through errors in front of the interviewer, as opposed to presenting only the right answer.”

Recent research has shown that there is an even more distressing explanation for the lack of diversity in hiring — the unconscious bias. Several studies have looked at how hiring managers react to identical resumes with different, ethnic-sounding names attached. According to those findings, hiring managers often react negatively to black-sounding names on resumes, while looking favorably on candidates who seem familiar to them — people with whom they’d want to “hang out.” The result of this often unconscious prejudice is that employees who get the jobs more often than not look and act like the people who hired them.

To counter this problem, companies have now turned to tools that can strip resumes of biographical information or analyze job descriptions for language that unconsciously  excludes certain groups. Some have also instituted mandatory training sessions on recognizing unconscious bias, including hiring executives specifically to head up those programs.

Other strategies are being tried as well, including using standardized interview questions; evaluating hiring managers on whether or not they bring in diverse candidates; working with networking groups for minorities, which offer Rolodexes of potential black and Hispanic hires; and hiring more than one minority member in each batch of new hires so new employees come in with a support network.

Not all of these approaches have been effective, which has left the door open for advocates like Walker and Powers to push for a more direct approach. At CODE2040, the emphasis is on finding existing tech talent in communities of color and funneling it to some of the biggest tech companies in the world.  

CODE2040’s flagship Fellows Program places top performing black and Latino/a college-level computer science students from around the country in an intensive summer accelerator in the Bay Area. The students intern at top tech companies and participate in a series of career building sessions as well.

The program has been successful. Since its launch in 2012, the CODE2040 Fellows Program has graduated more than 80 Fellows who are now working for companies such as Facebook, Google, Oracle, Uber, Intuit, Jawbone and Foursquare. In 2015, it received $1.3 million from Intel, as part of the company’s commitment to diversity. The money is being used to expand student participation in the program by more than 100 percent this year, and also to strengthen the CODE2040 initiative, Technical Application Prep Program, which provided more than 3,000 students with retreats, workshops, webinars and an online toolkit in 2015, and hopes to reach more than 5,000 students in 2016. “We are very proud of the multi-year partnership with Intel to create access, awareness, and opportunities for black and Latino/a engineering talent,” says Powers.

CODE2040 has also started a Residency Program that is designed to help black and Latina/o entrepreneurs build companies while cultivating diversity in their own communities. Thanks to a 2015 partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs, which provided $775,000 to fund two residency programs, CODE2040 has expanded its work from three pilot tech hubs in 2015 to seven cities nationwide in 2016. The one-year residency provides participating founders with a $40,000 no-equity stipend, as well as support from CODE2040, Google for Entrepreneurs, and their hometown hub. Participants also receive tech hub workspace for the resident and his/her team, along with mentoring by experienced entrepreneurs and investors in the CODE2040 and Google for Entrepreneurs networks.  

Although the Residency Program aims to give entrepreneurs the tools and resources to build their own companies, it also enables them to improve diversity and inclusivity in their larger communities by tapping into local entrepreneurial ecosystems and talents underrepresented in mainstream tech and entrepreneurship.

Laura Weidman Powers, Co-founder and CEO | Credit: CODE2040.org

According to Powers, when she and Walker united to form CODE2040 not much was happening in terms of building bridges from education to placement. That, she says, has changed, and CODE2040 now has some very impressive partners looking to tap into its pool of candidates. In addition to Google and Intel, the organization’s supporters include Andreessen Horowitz and the Knight Foundation, which  gave CODE2040 $1.2 million in December, 2015. Apple has jumped on the bandwagon as well, offering paid internships to 10 participants in CODE2040’s Fellowship Program.  

It remains to be seen if CODE2040 can change the face of Silicon Valley. But Powers and Walker intend to try, and their passion is infectious. As one Fellow in the program put it, “I’ve connected with people at the center of innovation and technology who are working on important causes and executing great ideas. This has started a fire in me to expand my choices and create a path to success.”