Amazon ?another lack-of-diversity-in-tech story?

Amazon quietly released statistics on race and gender within the 150,000-worker online retailing and data company. As Tech Crunch said, “It’s another lack-of-diversity-in-tech story. Of which there have been many already this year.” Such as Google, Facebook eBay, Apple, Pandora and others.

As Tech Crunch laconically notes, “The big unsurprise is that, globally, Amazon’s workforce skews toward white men, with an overall workforce that’s 63 percent male to 37 percent female.” Worse,  three-quarters of managers are men.

Factors of race and ethnicity are no more impressive. “Overall its U.S. workforce is 60 percent white but this rises to 71 percent of U.S. managers. Tellingly just 4 percent of U.S. Amazon managers are black, although 15 percent of the U.S. Amazon workforce is black.” And another four percent of managers are Hispanic.

Actually, for a tech firm, Amazon has a respectable percentage of black employees, even if they are clustered toward the lower ends of the pay scales. Google and Facebook, for instance, are only two percent black, even though blacks make up 10 percent of the U.S. workforce. And are just four percent and three percent Hispanic respectively.

Overall, tech companies are terrible employers of people of color, compared to telecoms. Of wireline workers, some 14 percent are black and 11 percent Hispanic. Wireless is in the same bracket: 12 percent black and 12 percent Hispanic.

This has to change, and corporate intentions have to be backed by the force of law. The bounty of the tech revolution must be spread more equally among all sectors of the population.

Diversity at Amazon (Amazon website)

Amazon’s Diversity Report Is Another White Male Dominated Tech Story (Tech Crunch, Nov. 3, 2014)

Tech employment of African Americans and Hispanics (CWA)