Federal regulators call on tech companies to improve diversity

Diversity advocates called for greater government intervention in the tech industry Wednesday in an effort to close a looming worker gap and address the lack of women and non-Asian minorities.

Federal regulators picked apart diversity data and questioned representatives from tech companies in a bicoastal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hearing Wednesday.

Several panelists at the commission meeting, which was held in Washington and joined on videoconference by the agency’s San Francisco office, suggested that the commission create mandates for tech companies’ employment practices and alter the way it tracks diversity to include characteristics beyond race and gender that are underrepresented in tech fields — like age and disability status.

Kapor Capital partner Ben Jealous, a civil rights activist and former leader of the NAACP, implored the government to “create a national mandate” that would require companies to interview a more diverse array of American workers for open positions.

Laurie McCann, a senior attorney with the AARP Foundation, suggested that the federal agency begin asking companies for age data in their annual reports and take action against firms that explicitly list ages, graduation years or “maximum years of experience” in job listings, which McCann said is discriminatory.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which scrutinizes employment practices in an effort to root out discrimination, said that addressing tech’s diversity and inclusion problem is among its top priorities.

The hearing, which lasted three hours, covered a broad range of factors that experts believe contribute to the disparate treatment of women, people of color and older tech workers.

Jealous spoke about the trickle-down impact of venture capital firms that are even less diverse than the startups in which they invest.

In response, many began publicly releasing employee diversity data and implementing programs designed to limit biased recruiting.

Erin Connell, a partner at San Francisco law office Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe who represents several big tech firms, and Camilla Velasquez, head of product and marketing at human resources software startup JustWorks, said tech companies have made a concentrated effort in recent years to address its diversity problem.

The hearing was coupled with the release of a commission study on the demographics of the tech sector that was generated using the agency’s own data, which companies of 100 or more employees are required to report.

“Diversity in High Tech,” focuses on gender, race, ethnicity and national origin — the categories the agency requires employers to track — but did not include data on age or disability status.