BLACKS, LATINOS, WOMEN, (and whites) lose ground at Silicon Valley Tech

Date: Thursday, February 18, 2010 11:40 PM
Companies

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 2086 -- 2/18/2010 >>>>>

web version:
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/02/18/blacks-latinos-women-and-whites-lose-ground-at-silicon-valley-tech-companies/

According to the headline on a Mercury News article by Mike Swift, Blacks,
Latinos and women are falling behind the employment curve at Silicon Valley
tech companies.[Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech
companies,By Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News, February 13, 2010].

Oh, and buried deep into the article you will discover that whites are losing
also. It was almost mentioned as an afterthought. tsk! tsk!

According to Swift, the Mercury News did a Freedom of Information Act request
(FOIA) to get the data for the article. The Mercury shares only a portion of
the data, so readers are left to assume Swift is competent enough to analyze
the data correctly. Bad assumption!

Upon close reading it s not very obvious what kind of data the government gave
the Mercury because high-tech employers refused to divulge their demographic
data. These excerpts should raise a big red flag about the credibility of the
data:

Cisco declined to released its most recent race data in detail

"Most recent" is a major understatement, but it gets worse:

Following an appeals process that stretched over nearly two years,
five of those companies -- Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and
Applied Materials -- convinced federal officials to block public
disclosure.

The data included on the sidebar of the article is mostly meaningless because
it covers the boom in high-tech from 1999-2005 while ignoring the popping of
the bubble after 2005. Nothing was provided about the rate of job loss versus
race but the one thing that becomes obvious is that whites are not necessarily
a majority at Silicon Valley companies. Companies such as Intel and Solectron
actually have more Asians than whites. Most of the data seems to support a
conclusion that minorities are over-represented in Silicon Valley. You have to
wonder if Swift and his pals at the Mercury would complain about diversity
problems if the companies were 100% Asian!

Actually Swift never explains what Asian is -- a major blooper that could be
considered racist by Asians. Since Swift didn t bother to speculate on what
Asian means, let me take a stab: most "Asians" in Silicon Valley are Indian
followed a distant second by Chinese. I base that on the theory that the H-1B
nonimmigrant guest worker program is largely responsible for the dramatic
demographic changes taking place in Silicon Valley (not counting illegal
immigration of Hispanics). Approximately 45% of all H-1B visa holders are from
India followed by 10% from China (among computer/IT related H-1Bs the Chinese
are losing ground to those from India). For more info read: "On the Need For
Reform of the H-1B Visa" by Dr. Norman Matloff.

Swift begins by writing that Silicon Valley is not diverse enough -- which is
the only accurate statement in the article, but not for the reason he thinks.
The truth about Silicon Valley is that the area has been flooded with H-1Bs
for such a long time there has been an ethnic cleansing of anyone that isn t
Indian or Chinese. Most people who live there tell me that their neighborhoods
look like New Delhi and Hong Kong, or even Tijuana.

Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley s computer

workers

in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data

shows,

even as their share grew across the nation. Women in computer-related
occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even smaller
proportion of the work force here.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention what Swift wrote about white folks --
because it s so easy to miss.

With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000,
Asians were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in
computer-related occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they
hold only about one in six of the nation s computer-related jobs.

Swift managed to produce numerical statistics for all the racial groups in
question except for whites. That omission is probably to hide the inconvenient
truth that whites are doing as bad or worse than non-Asian minority groups. Of
course it s anybody s guess what is happening in relative terms since Swift
never shows whether whites are gaining or losing ground compared to the other
racial groups.

One thing for sure, Swift ignored his own data! The sidebar data shows that in
2005 whites were 44% of the employees in the ten high-tech companies surveyed,
but combined Asian, Hispanic, and blacks were 56% of the workforce. There must
be truth to the rumors that the education system in California is broken if
writers and editors in one of the state s major newspapers thinks that 44% is
more than 56%!

One more thing about that data -- between 1999-2005 whites lost 1% of their
share of the techie population since 1999 and so did blacks, but blacks went
from only 3% to 2% of the techie population in 1995 so they lost
proportionally more. Hispanics didn t fare much better as they went from 7% to
5%. Listed in order below is the groups that are getting clobbered the worst
by the importation of Asian H-1Bs:

1. Blacks -33%
2. Hispanics -28%
3. Whites -2%
4. Asians +8%

Of course my calculations are based on the flawed and limited data provided by
the Mercury, and it only includes the boom times. I decided not to consider
females because their racial breakdown wasn t provided, which probably skews
the data. My guess is that since 2005 the percentage of Asians has gone up
even as total employment goes down. One thing for sure is that things have
only gotten worse since 2005, and as companies struggle to cut costs they tend
to favor the importation of cheaper foreign labor.

Swift makes a lame attempt to explain why Silicon Valley lacks diversity.
He quoted a Cisco diversity expert as follows:

Silicon Valley lags the nation in hiring -- and perhaps in
retention -- of African-Americans and Latinos are varied
and complex, researchers and observers say.

So, just what is so complex about African-Americans and Latinos compared to
whites, and why are Hispanics and Latinos lumped into the same category?
From the slant of the article it would be easy to conclude that whites are
easy to figure out because they are merely racists and sexists who won t hire
women, African-Americans, and Latinos. Whites, which the data illustrates, are
the majority race when it comes to corporate management, don t seem to
hesitate when hiring Indians or Chinese so it seems that the behavior of
whites is far more complicated than Swift realizes.

Theories are fabricated to explain why whites are being pushed out of Silicon
Valley. The education button is pushed in order to explain that there aren t
enough Americans that are educated in high-tech, and notice the subtle
implication that Americans just don t cut-the-mustard compared to hard working
foreigners. One of my favorites is used -- Americans aren t able to hit-the-
road-running fast enough for fast-paced global corporations. The one thing
Swift is good at is the way he can hurl so many insults at Americans in so few
words.

Other reasons, experts say, include a history of valley companies
hiring well-trained tech workers from the Pacific Rim, a weak
pipeline of homegrown candidates, and a hypercompetitive business
environment that leaves little time to develop workers.

The next paragraph answers why the demographics are changing, but it doesn t
seem like Swift understood his own message. This next one might be the best
blooper of them all:

Aristotle Saunders, a 32-year-old Marvell engineer, volunteers with
school kids in Oakland, dissecting iPods to interest them in a tech
career. He thinks the lack of visible middle-class minority
neighborhoods in Silicon Valley makes it even tougher to recruit
minorities to tech jobs here.

Since women are considered minorities does that mean that Silicon Valley
neighborhoods don t have enough women? Could it be that Swift is confusing
Silicon Valley and San Francisco when it comes to the percentage of males?

When I was a kid all of us boys replaced vacuum tubes on TVs. Dissecting iPods
is sissy stuff in comparison because tubes were powered with hundreds of volts
of electricity. We even had to walk ten or twenty miles in the snow to test
the tubes at the local 7-11 or Circle K store, and we had to be able to read
those big cross reference manuals. It was a high risk activity because putting
one of those multi-pinned tubes in the wrong socket could cause a fireball
with smoke clouds. We even got training on time management because every
minute the TV didn t work was another minute we couldn t watch Superman or the
Twilight Zone. My theory is that girls didn t get into engineering because the
boys are the ones that did the TV tubes. One thing for sure is that we learned
a lot more than the kids nowadays that educate themselves by unscrewing
something from a cell phone and sending brainless text messages.

Meg Whitman gets the top shill honors for this shameful historical breach of
truth. One of the few female high-tech CEOs should know better than to try
something like this! How much you want to bet that Meg never changed a vacuum
tube when she was a girl?

At a time when eBay was headed by one of the few high-profile
female CEOs in Silicon Valley, Meg Whitman, the share of the
company s managers and top officials who were female declined
to 30 percent in 2005, from 36 percent five years earlier,
according to federal employment data.

"No global company today can stay competitive without persistently
recruiting, retaining and developing a diverse work force "...
eBay believes workforce diversity is critical to achieving our
growth objectives and serving our millions of customers globally,"
the company said in a statement.

The evidence shows just the opposite: as high-tech companies in Silicon Valley
became more diverse the high-tech industries that once dominated the area have
been in a steady downward spiral. That entire area has been transformed from a
shining star on the planet Earth, admired by diverse populations around the
world who wanted to emulate its success, to a sad example of economic
distress, blight, and Balkanization. Silicon Valley was built by the blood and
sweat of hard working Americans who were mostly Caucasians with the brains and
intellect to invent an entirely new economy.
Ironically the Silicon Valley dream is being destroyed by stupid white people
that want more diversity and by smart Asians that want to rule the world.

Is it possible that Swift couldn t connect the obvious dots together when he
was writing the article, or was he blinded by shills? The answer to that
question becomes obvious towards the end of the article when the Indian
supremacist Vivek Wadhwa was quoted. Many people nickname him "Professor
Fraudhwa" for a good reason and it looks like he got another notch on his belt
by fooling a major newspaper! Actually Swift got double teamed because he also
talked one of the queens of shortage shouting: AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the
school of [mis]-information at UC-Berkeley.

LINKS:

Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14383730

"On the Need For Reform of the H-1B Visa", by Dr. Norman Matloff
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf

Vivek Wadhwa
http://www.wadhwa.com/index.html

Professor Fraudwha's Bogus Brain Drain
http://www.techinsurgent.com/post/Professor-Fraudwhas-Bogus-Brain-Drain.aspx

AnnaLee Saxenian
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/annaleesaxenian

Self Service Tube Tester
http://www.tuberadios.com/eico660/Eico2.jpg

multi-pinned Vacuum tube
http://artdc.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tube-3.jpg

Vacuum Tube cross reference manuals
http://home1.gte.net/res0fab4/files/nixdat.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14383730?nclick_check=1

Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies

By Mike Swift

mswift@mercurynews.com
Posted: 02/13/2010 04:00:00 PM PST
Updated: 02/13/2010 07:15:45 PM PST

The unique diversity of Silicon Valley is not reflected in the region's tech
workplaces -- and the disparity is only growing worse.

Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley's computer workers
in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data shows,
even as their share grew across the nation. Women in computer-related
occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even smaller
proportion of the work force here.

The trend is striking in a region where Hispanics are nearly one-quarter of
the working-age population -- five times their percentage of the computer work
force -- and when dual-career couples and female MBAs are increasingly the
norm.

It is also evident in the work forces of the region's major companies. An
analysis by the Mercury News of the combined work force of 10 of the valley's
largest companies -- including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay and
AMD -- shows that while the collective work force of those 10 companies grew
by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, an already small population of black
workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined
by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based
workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.

The share of women at those 10 companies declined to 33 percent in 2005, from
37 percent in 1999. There was also a decline in the share of management-level
Advertisement jobs held by women.

"It's just disappointing," said Shellye Archambeau, the African-American CEO
of MetricStream, a Palo Alto-based company that provides governance, risk and
compliance support to global corporations such as BP and Pfizer.
"The valley is a very strong place, but the fact that we are so lacking in
female leadership, in African-American leadership, and frankly in Latino
leadership in tech, you just sit there and say, 'Imagine what it could be.'
"

With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000, Asians
were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in computer-related
occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they hold only about one in
six of the nation's computer-related jobs.

Among the findings:

# Of the 5,907 top managers and officials in the Silicon Valley offices of the
10 large companies in 2005, 296 were black or Hispanic, a 20 percent decline
from 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor work-force data obtained by
the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request.

# In 2008, the share of computer workers living in Silicon Valley who are
black or Latino was 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively -- shares that
had declined since 2000. Nationally, blacks and Latinos were 7.1 percent and
5.3 percent of computer workers, respectively, shares that were up since 2000,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

# The share of managers and top officials who are female at those 10 big
Silicon Valley firms slipped to 26 percent in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000.

Cisco Systems is among companies that say they are taking steps to improve
diversity by forming diversity councils and employee resource groups and by
tapping organizations such as the National Society of Black Engineers for job
candidates. Cisco declined to released its most recent race data in detail,
but said the number of black and Hispanic workers had "remained stable" since
2005, when about 6 percent of its local work force was either black or
Hispanic.

"Cisco believes an inclusive culture promotes creativity, innovation and
drives collaboration," said Ken Lotich, a company spokesman.

The reasons Silicon Valley lags the nation in hiring -- and perhaps in
retention -- of African-Americans and Latinos are varied and complex,

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