The India ‘old boys’ club’ versus diversity in IT globally
How heels continue to be dug in against change, even among India’s own…
Across the planet Indians have shown a pattern of discriminating against non-Indian employees. With the growth in numbers of Indians in IT, this is often a major problem for local workers worldwide, primarily in the US.
There’s also overwhelming evidence to suggest that they also discriminate against fellow Indians working in IT abroad whom they often see as not compatible in team situations primarily due to their background and class designation. One bitter Indian worker who contacted Blind described his experience as follows:
“Many Indians in IT firms don’t just discriminate at the national level, many of them discriminate on a religion, race or caste-level. It usually starts like this. They first look at your name in the resume. Is it a “cool” sounding Brahman name? (like Anand Gopalakrishnan). Or is it a Punjabi name? (Parminder Singh). Or perhaps, it’s a Telugu name (Sudheer Reddy). Or does your name sound totally unheard of, hard to pronounce and possibly from a lower caste? (Pazhanimuththu Kanakadas). Godforbid, hopefully it isn’t a Muslim name (Imtiaz Khan), an Indian Christian name (David Kamaraj) or a Chinese name (Pang Pang).”
Not in the right caste
This illustrates that even Indians that are not in the right caste or have the right religion from the dominant group receive discrimination. The employment in the US of Indians is not from all parts of India. It is very concentrated in specific areas of India and from distinct castes, with Bhraman being the dominant caste. As Blind points out, the US anti-discrimination laws are centered on race. First, they are only usually enforced for minority groups against whites. There is virtually no concern for discrimination by minorities against whites or other minorities. Second, Indian discrimination is more complicated than racial discrimination.
Indians have a complicated discrimination modality that is sub-race and is a combination of Indians from specific areas and beyond that caste. Indians prefer a type of scenario which they had back in India. The preference is from Brahmans to be at the top of the organisations. For most outsiders, their divisions are invisible. Each of the groups is seen as “Indian” by Western eyes (or at least all by the most trained). But for Indians, these divisions are highly important. They determine who can be hired into what role, how they relate to others, who have status over others, and so on.
Another quote to Blind from a second disgruntled Indian worker runs as follows: “If you are Black, Asian or from the middle east, the answer is obvious. Racism. If you are white, it’s not so much the case that hiring you is expensive, as it is that you are a flight risk. American locals wouldn’t take kindly to the authoritarian and abusive management style of Indian managers and Indian managers are aware of it.”
Indians do not create environments that non-Indians want to work. They are hostile environments. The major Indian consulting companies, for instance, Infosys, WiPro, HCL, Cognizant, and TATA or TCS, employ mostly Indians in the US but are only occasionally subject to well-known discrimination lawsuits. Various Indian firms play settlements to the US Department of Justice, as covered in the following quotation:
The settlement, which the U.S. Justice Department said was the largest in a case of alleged civil fraud over visas, was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Infosys, India’s second-largest IT services exporter, agreed in the settlement that it committed civil violations of US employment law, but it was not required to admit and did not admit widespread further wrongdoing.
Have you witnessed discrimination in the workplace?
Have you witnessed or experienced discrimination in your workplace asks Blind? In your daily round, one would be surprised if you haven’t because in these so-called days of equality for all, prejudice and discrimination still abounds, as our friend has described.
Often there’s a ‘natural’ — even an inherent tendency in many of us — to form assumptions concerning those that appear completely different to ourselves. Those with whom we work, live and socialize. As the saying goes, all the fingers of the hand aren’t the same. Maybe it stems from some primeval instinct for self-preservation. However, one shouldn’t discriminate against anyone because of their race, color, gender or personal circumstances. Society ought instead to encourage others to seek inspiration from others who strive to work towards goals for the betterment of the many.
India has a diverse culture. There are huge multilingual differences but diversity in India can be distinguished in four areas — race, religion, language and caste. As there are different religions and casts levels in India, so too the education system is based on what’s often termed the reservation system.
The Indian Institute of Technology, for example, which is one of the most prestigious education institutions in India, there are places always reserved for students who are not particularly academically bright they just happen to come from the right caste background. There are also those who have good grades and have done well academically in their early education but due to the reservation system they fail to get into the institution. Perhaps you should ask yourself how the education system in your city, town or region has influenced your attitude towards diversity, stereotypes and discrimination.
India’s diverse culture
Due to the diverse culture in India, discrimination does exist. When there is a reservation caste system, issues like being unfair to a group of people or an individual exist. Partiality may be on the basis of race, age or sex. When you talk about education in India, women and minorities are the biggest losers. In Indian society parents discourage their daughters from taking education for various reasons but the prime one is marriage. When a girl gets married she has to leave her parents’ house and move into husband’s home. The parents believe that after she gets married, she will not bring any returns to the family, so it was hardly worth investing in a decent education for her in the first place.
This historically male chauvinistic attitude still courts the belief that, even in the 21st century, a woman’s role is to give birth and do household work and because of this they feel that there is no need for her to take higher education. What they fail to understand is that if a woman is properly educated, she will in turn educate the future generations in India — and elsewhere for that matter.
But why does discrimination still exist in India today asks Blind? Maybe it’s because of nepotism, either in part or section specific or in its extreme, in some sectors including IT, completely hostile. Should a young person manage to slip through the reservation system on personal merit, he may well then find himself ostracized if he finds a position among fellow Indians in IT abroad, particularly in the US. The old boys’ network from home may well have preceded him there.
If he’s lucky enough he may find himself working in Silicon Valley. The technology industry here is stepping up its quest for diversity and inclusion.
While the diversity and inclusion movement here has made some progress in recent years, it has still suffered traumatic setbacks the team at Blind have discovered. On one hand, tech employees are recognising their immense power when they speak up and organise. On the other hand, those accused of sexual harassment and misconduct are too often facing too few consequences. Meanwhile, people of colour and women still receive too little venture funding, and tech companies are inching along at a glacial pace toward diverse representation and inclusion.
According to Freada Kapor Klein, co-founder at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center in Oakland, California “Where we are now is a leap forward from the past 10 years but several steps sideways and a few steps backward” where social impact is concerned. She tells Blind: “At any point you can make in a positive direction, there’s a countervailing negative one in the wings. Similarly, any time you can raise a criticism, somebody can point to something hopeful.”
Much has been written about the problems regarding diversity and inclusion in the IT industry. But with all the sincerest efforts to fix the range of diversity and inclusion issues, the problems will never really be sorted to the satisfaction of all because the industry is a reflection of our own society. A society still strung up on issues of race, gender, class, ability, age and sexual orientation.
However, those at Blind remain optimistic. With all the diversity problems out there, it doesn’t mean all hope is gone. The future of IT is in the hands of its worker bee employees, new start-up founders and investors prepared to look forward with a fresh pair of eyes. It’s clear that this commitment from the top is not optional — it’s written in stone.
Light at the end of the tunnel?
To reach the light at the end of the tunnel, the tech and IT business needs to come to terms with how it got to where it is today. It needs to put in place an independent and unconscious bias training on D&I matters, and to really take it on board where it needs to go.
But at this moment in time Silicon Valley remains a predominantly white, men-led industry that has a poor reputation for welcoming and celebrating people from diverse backgrounds. This dynastic ‘old boys’ club’ has put people of color and women at a disadvantage since the earliest days of the industry.
This is greatly highlighted in the paper The Old Boys’ Club is for Losers by Anil Dash, current Glitch CEO and then-co-founder of ThinkUp, the first analytics tool for social media. In his diatribe Dash describes how those who defend the status quo of the white male in tech are defending a culture of bigotry. He argues: “Those who are reaching out to include all members of their community, who are seeking out new ideas and voices, are not only winning, they’re the only ones who will continue to win. You may succeed in defending the boys-only nature of your tree house but you’ll be dooming yourselves to irrelevance.”
So, can things change asks Blind? Dash wrote his paper 13 years ago. At that time mainstream techies had a different understanding of diversity — so different in fact that Dash was in fear that, with his publish and be damned move, the end of his time in IT was nigh.
Facing career end
“I was lucky enough to have a platform and then a profile to be able to say something,” Dash says. “I was also convinced that was the end of my career. I was like, ‘well, the hell with this, I’m done. I’m leaving San Francisco so I might as well burn some bridges.’ It’s funny now, because I think a lot of people would say there’s an old boys’ club in Silicon Valley. And it’s very exclusionary, and these are things we’ve got to tackle.”
Dash says he remembers exactly where he was sitting when he hit publish button on the post. That’s because he thought no one would let him back into the industry. Fortunately for him, that has turned out to not be the case. He adds: “The Overton window has shifted a little bit in a way that is interesting and meaningful. At the same time, the problem hasn’t shifted. The difference is that we can talk about the problem, but that doesn’t mean we’re fixing the problem.”
In its diversity and discrimination investigation Blind also highlights the case of Ellen Pao. She is co-founder at Project Include and was thrown into the spotlight glare during her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. In 2012, Pao filed a lawsuit against her then employer alleging gender discrimination and workplace retaliation. In 2015, a jury denied Pao’s claims of discrimination.
She confides: “When I sued, people called me outright crazy and treated me like a liar. That was the first-time people were really hearing about it in a public light and they couldn’t process it. Today, so many people have told their stories and so many people have called attention to the problem that people are admitting it’s a problem.”
“What’s different today is that the attitudes have changed from “let’s ignore it to let’s do something about it. I think there’s still a ton of work to do,” Pao says.
Change in attitude
“The change in attitude and the fact that people are actually responding to people sharing their experiences is a huge change, but it’s far from sufficient,” she concludes.
Blind further points to the case of black Tesla solar factory workers in Buffalo, New York last year. This was described as a culture of racism and discrimination where the ‘n’ word was frequently used among other racist activities.
When tech giant Google released the industry’s first diversity report in 2014, it kickstarted a diversity and inclusion strategy rooted very little in action. Today, many people refer to that phenomena as lip service, which is when people talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. In effect, it had no balls.
Google reported that year that it was 61.3 percent white and 69.4 percent male. Fast forward to today, and Google is 54.4 percent white and 68.4 percent male. Six years and the numbers have barely moved. Looking at both FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) and A-PLUS (Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, Uber and Slack) companies today, tech employees are still predominantly white and Asian.
At Facebook, there has been little change to its employee demographics in terms of the proportion that underrepresented minorities make up of the entire employee population. But Facebook Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams points out that there has been quite a lot of change within individual groups. For example, Williams told Blind Facebook has increased the number of black women by 25x and black men by 10x over the last five years.
“There has been a lot of change,” Williams says. “Has there been as much as we want? No. And I certainly think we have the issue of when we started focusing on D&I in a very deliberate way. The company was already nine years old with thousands of people working here. The biggest takeaway is that the later you start, the harder it is.”
That’s the general state of the tech industry as a whole. While there has been some improvement in representation at these tech companies, there has not been nearly enough.
Discounting Apple and Amazon the company closest to achieving full representation of black and Latinx employees is Lyft. Lyft is 9 percent Latinx and 10.2 percent black, according to its 2018 diversity numbers.
Since gender is non-binary, at least 5 percent of a company’s workforce should identify as such and the remaining 45 percent should identify as female. But one diversity scandal after another proves a couple of things.
Representation and structural issues
One is that there’s still not enough representation. The second is that there are still structural issues in place that create non-inclusive work environments and can fuel imposter syndrome. These structural issues entail things like an inconsistent performance review process, unclear and arbitrary paths to promotion, an ambiguous process for reporting bad behaviour and secret conversations known as backchanneling. These private backchannels can create exclusive environments that prevent open, productive conversations.
Again, we go back to Google. The company is on its third head of diversity since 2016 and has some of the more outspoken employees who are fed up with the megalith’s culture.
“Let’s just call it like it is,” says a bitter Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager at Twitter, Google and Apple. “Google just can’t keep a D&I person for long.” Google’s chief diversity officer, Danielle Brown, left the company last April to join payroll and benefits startup Gusto. Google brought Brown on board following Nancy Lee’s exit from the company in 2016. At the time, it was understood that Lee was retiring but has since joined electric scooter startup Lime as its chief human resources officer. Lee, however, tells Blind she was not sure if her retirement would be permanent or not.
“It’s a thankless job,” Miley says. “I think at most companies it’s thankless. Danielle Brown is a really good example of this. You’re criticised by people for not doing enough, criticised by people for trying to do too much. There will always be a fight for resources, accountability. And when you’re at the intersection of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, that makes a lot of people fundamentally uncomfortable. And it just wears on you.”
Another major factor in the overall lack of diversity in tech is the lack of funding that goes to under-represented founders. Last year, female founders brought in just 2.2 percent of US venture capital dollars. It also far from helps that less than 10 percent of decision-makers at VC firms in the US are women.
“I want to also share that it’s not just a lack of funding, it’s that women are treated differently,” Women Who Tech founder Allyson Kapin is quoted at Blind.
Kapin points to a survey that her organisation conducted a couple of years ago that found, of the 44 percent of women who reported harassment, 77 percent of them said they experienced sexual harassment as founders. And 65 percent of those sexually harassed reported being propositioned for sex in exchange for funding, she explains.
“There is not an even levelled playing field,” Kapin adds. “You can have incredible traction, but women-led startups face barriers in terms of how critiqued they are and now you bring in a whole other level of sexism, sexual harassment and grossly propositioning women for sex in exchange for funding.”
Black female founders
Unfortunately, it’s an even starker picture for black female founders. While the number of black women who have received more than $1 million in investment is growing, the number is still small. In 2015, there were 12 black women who had raised more than $1 million in funding, according to digitalundivided’s new Project Diane report. In 2017, there were 34.
Still, the median amount of funding raised by black women is $0. That’s because the majority of startups founded by black women receive no money. Of the black women who raised less than $1 million in funding, the average raised amount is $42,000. In total, according to digitalundivided, black women have raised just .0006 percent of all tech venture funding since 2009.
Backstage Capital, which is designed to exclusively invest in black founders, closed its first $5 million fund toward the end of 2016. The organisation is in the process of closing a second $36 million fund to continue investing in people of color. Since its inception, Backstage Capital has invested in more than 60 startups led by under-represented founders.
It’s a stark fact that while white founders may have the support of their wealthy parents or grandparents during the early days, people of colour don’t always have that to fall back on. There is some hope, however, with presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren has called out venture capital for failing diverse founders and unveiled a plan to support founders of colour. The plan would provide cash to founders of colour who don’t have access to the generations of wealth to which their white counterparts have. A case of one step forward, two steps back perhaps.
When 20,000 Google employees walked out last November, they were protesting about the company paying $105 million to two executives accused of sexual harassment. They also made five key asks, but Google has only followed through on one.
Google and discrimination
In February, Google ended forced arbitration for its employees as it relates to any case of discrimination. While technically a win, it didn’t apply to the temporary contractors Google employs. Meanwhile, Google did not meet the other four demands, which entailed committing to end pay and opportunity inequity, disclosing a sexual harassment transparency report, implementing a process for people to anonymously report sexual misconduct and elevating the chief diversity officer to report to the CEO.
Since then, however, things have spiraled down even more. Google employees were forced to organize yet again reports Blind when workers staged a sit-in to protest the alleged retaliation toward employees at the hands of managers.
Two Google employees accused the company of retaliating against them for organizing the walkout. Meredith Whittaker, the lead of Google’s Open Research and one of the organisers of the walkout, said her role was “changed dramatically.” Fellow walkout organiser Claire Stapleton said her manager told her she would be demoted and lose half of her reports. At the time, a Google spokesperson said:
“We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. To make sure that no complaint raised goes unheard at Google, we give employees multiple channels to report concerns, including anonymously, and investigate all allegations of retaliation.”
Since then, Googlers have demanded Alphabet CEO Larry Page step in and force Google to meet the demands of its employees.
Google’s not the only company that has faced inner turmoil following reports of harassment. Employees at Riot Games similarly walked out over harassment issues in May.
The thing with harassment, unfortunately, is that even if the accused admit to wrongdoing, they have a way of bouncing back. And sometimes they get paid millions of dollars on their way out. It all relates back to the old boys’ club.
Bad behaviour
Many of the people in this old boys’ club tend to face few consequences for their bad behaviour. Dave McClure stepped back at 500 Startups following sexual misconduct allegations, which he later admitted to. Today, McClure is reportedly raising money for a new fund. Then there’s former SoFi CEO Mike Cagney, who was ousted from the company following a sex scandal and went on to start another company and raise $50 million for it last year. Earlier this year, Cagney raised another $65 million.
Despite the hashtag Me Too in Hollywood, and then its reverberations in venture capital, and in tech, we have seen a remarkable rebound effect for harassers. They tend to land on their feet much more easily than the people who accuse them. And that’s a big problem.
A question that came up at the time of these sexual harassment allegations — and the eventual comebacks of harassers — relates to whether people can change and redeem themselves. The biggest question is if these people should be allowed to stay in the tech industry or be forever blacklisted.
Rather like Gandhi’s march to the sea, it’s a long, sometimes hopeful, sometimes hopeless march. But Blind agrees it is a steady march toward critical mass. But until we reach critical mass, there are some urgent tasks at hand. These comprise:
• Implementing clear diversity representation and inclusion goals, and a comprehensive approach to achieve them
• Investing more money in folks of colour and female founders
• For workers, continuing to organise and speak out against tech employers
• Cross-company executive collaboration
It’s a pretty straightforward list, but one that will take intent, organisation and work to tackle.
Some final words from Leslie Miley, ex-Twitter, Google and Apple:
“I think we may have hit the limits of easy wins and everything else now is hard. It’s hard because it’s not which program you can sponsor, it’s not having an apprenticeship program, and it’s not increasing the types of people in your pipeline. It’s the hard work of transforming your workforce to understand the value people bring to the table is not necessarily your path. You sit and go through what people say in Blind about people lowering the bar, people wanting to maintain the culture. They hold onto it like they’re constipated. I don’t get it.”
About Team Blind…
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