Congressional Black Caucus Begs Apple For Its 'Trade Secret' Racial Data

theodp writes: In Silicon Valley this week, Rep. Barbara Lee called on Apple and other holdouts among the nation's tech companies to release federal data on the diversity of their work forces. She was with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus to turn up the heat on the tech industry to hire more African Americans. "If they believe in inclusion," said Lee, "they have to release the data so the public knows that they are being transparent and that they are committed to doing the right thing." Apple has refused to make public the EEO-1 data that it routinely supplies to the U.S. Dept. of Labor on the demographics of their workers. In the absence of the race and gender data, which Apple and others historically argued were 'trade secrets' and thus not subject to release Freedom of Information requests, tech companies were free to make unchecked claims about their Black employee ranks (Google's 2007 Congressional testimony) until recent disclosures revealed otherwise. The National Science Foundation was even convinced to redirect NSF grant money specifically earmarked for getting African American boys into the computer science pipeline to a PR campaign for high school girls of all colors and economic backgrounds.

Comments

Re:WTF

[Gravis Zero]

It's pretty obvious that all the tech companies are trying to increase diversity but the talent simply doesn't exist in the industry. There needs to be more minority and female students taking computing science in university, which means better recruitment for girls coming out of high school and better schools for minorities in general.

but why do there need to be more minorities and females in IT? forced diversity is blatant prejudice.