Google, Twitter & Facebook Combined Have Over 40,000 Employees - Less than 1% or 1,000 Are African American

From [HERE] The vast majority of African Americans own a smart phone and an equally large percentage of black households contain a computer.

Yet while African Americans are leading the way in terms of consumer trends in the tech industry, they’ve been shut out of the job market when it comes to careers with Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Twitter or Facebook, the CEO and president of the National Urban League said Friday.

“African Americans trail when it comes to employment in these West Coast tech firms,” said Marc H. Morial, who has served as the National Urban League’s CEO since 2002.

Morial addressed reporters during a press event Friday at the Shenango Valley Urban League to discuss the organization’s annual State of Black America report, released May 4. The report uses an equality index to measure how blacks fare when compared to whites in areas such as housing, education, economics and social justice.

The CEO also served as the keynote speaker for the Shenango Valley Urban League’s 50th anniversary banquet, held Thursday evening.

This year’s report devoted a special focus to digital inclusion, finding that while black consumers are helping to power the country’s tech industry, the number of African Americans employed in tech jobs is far fewer when compared with whites.

According to the report, about 90% of African Americans own smartphones and 89.3% of black households have a computer. Yet the percentage of blacks actually employed in the tech industry is quite small, Morial said.

“Google, Twitter and Facebook combined have over 40,000 employees,” Morial said. “Less than 1,000 of them are African American.”

Less than 5% of the overall workforce of the country’s major tech companies is black, the report continued, while nearly 50% is white. The lack of inclusion to high-paying tech jobs in turn has an impact on the overall household income of African American families. In 2018, the average median income for white households stood at $63,155 compared to just $38,555 for African American households.

On the other hand, those companies considered “legacy” firms, such as broadband providers Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon and Charter, have embraced diversity and have embedded diversity programs within their human resources departments.

“They’re not perfect,” Morial noted. “But if these companies can achieve diversity, so too can Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

“We’re encouraging these companies to embrace diversity and to hire in a way that reflects America and also in a way that reflects their consumers,” he said.

The report also sheds light on racial inequality in other sectors, and notes that slight improvements have been made in economics and education since the previous year’s survey. However, African Americans suffered slight setbacks in health care.

Still, the overall status of black Americans hasn’t changed much, especially in the context of the current political environment, said Morial, who served as Mayor of New Orleans during the mid-1990s.

He said people are becoming more aware of this because digital technology has enabled rapid communication across social media platforms.

Headline-grabbing incidents such as the arrests of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia for sitting in the café without ordering drew widespread attention because the episode was recorded on a cell phone and went viral.

“The fact that many of these incidents are more transparent forces people to be more accountable,” Morial said. “I think it was remarkable how quickly Starbucks responded to the incident.”

Morial said the company demonstrated the sort of corporate responsibility that others should emulate. Yet the political and policy winds in Washington are complicating issues for the country’s most vulnerable.

“There’s no question in this political environment, hate incidents have risen,” he said, citing figures compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and incidents of hate crimes every year. “There are many public policies offered that would do damage to civil rights progress, that would do damage to economic justice progress. We’re on the front lines pushing back those efforts.”

Morial said it doesn’t make sense to cut programs – such as the Women, Infant and Children, or WIC – for people who need them the most when Congress has approved a tax cuts that benefit corporations and the wealthiest Americans. [MORE]