Is Silicon Valley Racist? Only 2 Percent of Google Employees Are Black

The vast majority of people working for the high-tech giants are white males. An African-American sues Apple: “Denied a promotion because I’m black.”*

Silicon Valley is not a town for African-Americans. In fact, judging from the latest data, the digital technology paradise is finding that it might have a racial prejudice problem.

The first negative news arrived from Google, which embarrassingly revealed data on the diversity of its 46,170 employees. African-Americans amount to barely 2 percent of the total, Hispanics 3 percent and women 30 percent. In other words, the vast majority of people working for the leading online search engine are white males. “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be in terms of diversity,” commented Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of [people operations at] the company. “It is difficult to resolve these problems if we do not speak openly about it.”*

In the meantime, it has been discovered that an African-American Apple employee has sued the company because he was refused a promotion due to the color of his skin. Andrew Dupree, 31, worked in a store in Orlando, Florida. According to the case presented on Dec. 18, 2013, the manager of the Apple store where he was working openly told him that “black employees don’t reach management in this market.” He therefore immigrated to Australia, where he achieved good results, increasing store sales by 14 percent in Sydney, where he was employed, using the [company’s] easy pay program. According to Dupree, all of this deserved a promotion, but once again it did not happen. He therefore decided to return to Orlando. However, even though he was promised a transfer, the local store refused to employ him.

On Aug. 28, 2013, Andrew turned directly to CEO Tim Cook via email, and they responded that the following month he would see a human resources representative. The meeting took place in October, which did not achieve anything, and he therefore decided to sue. Apple has admitted that the proceeding exists, but has not commented on any details. While waiting for the case to run its course and that truth to be verified, summing up this event and Google’s, we must ask ourselves whether discrimination does exist in the American digital sector.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.