- Rankings usher in new era for active and ongoing accountability for Latino D&I in Silicon Valley
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 05, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AT&T, HP, Verizon, Dell and Facebook are the Top 5 Companies for Latino inclusion and diversity of the inaugural Hispanicize Silicon Valley Rankings that were unveiled at Hispanicize L.A., the multi-industry Latino trends event that took place in Los Angeles yesterday.
The rankings, timed to coincide with Hispanic Heritage Month, were compiled by a blue ribbon panel of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, academics, marketing professionals, non profit organization directors and journalists, as well as leaders from the Latino Business Action Network, the Latino Startup Alliance and Cal State Fullerton. Hispanicize 2018 co-chair Claudia (Gonzalez) Romo Edelman, a rising national Latina leader who recently received the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Multicultural Leadership Award, spearheaded this research.
The methodology used to rank the companies included up to four sets of data to generate the results: corporate surveys, public information disclosed by the companies, news reports and Big Data analysis from CulturIntel. Of the 25 companies that were rated by the blue ribbon panel, only four participated in the call to complete a survey that requested each corporation disclose information about their U.S. Hispanic D&I efforts.
WHAT THE RANKINGS MEASURE
The rankings measure all the efforts companies are making to integrate Latinos into fabric of Silicon Valley in a holistic fashion that includes: 1. Workforce Diversity, 2. Retention and Recruitment, 3. Marketing Investment, 4. Community Outreach, 5. STEM Efforts, 6. Supplier Diversity, and 7. Diverse Representation in the Boardroom. In order to be constructive, the rankings this year deliberately did not focus on the overwhelmingly poor workforce diversity issues that Latinos face among most of the companies surveyed.
Added Romo Edelman: “Our results show that while Silicon Valley is taking steps towards diversity and inclusion, Latinos barely register as a real priority of the diversity and inclusion efforts of the tech industry. A fundamental concern that is apparent and that is supported by looking at D&I initiatives across most of the 25 companies is that generally speaking, Latinos are bunched into ineffective and incomplete efforts, a sort of “huevos revueltos” of the diversity mix. Companies have to focus and tailor specific efforts for Hispanics in their D&I efforts.”
A NEW APPROACH EMERGES
The report ushers in a new era and opportunity for the Latino community.
“These rankings are an important first step for an evolving methodology and dialogue that we believe will help Silicon Valley measure but also activate their D&I efforts for Latinos in a credible fashion,” said Romo Edelman. “We are calling on the tech industry to work collaboratively with us to improve the process and the methodology of this ranking to bring better results.”
“We are now ready to galvanize our community’s media, organizations and elected officials to make sure Silicon Valley reverses its present course of inaction towards Latinos,” said Manny Ruiz, founder of Hispanicize Media Group and an organizer of the rankings. “From this point forward, we will unite our community’s media and voices to make sure this situation begins to change faster. We can’t afford to be left behind.”
WHY SILICON VALLEY INCLUSION MATTERS TO LATINOS
There is a lot at stake for Latinos in this discussion. First, with the majority of the nation’s population growth being fueled by Latinos, the country stands to become stronger and more competitive if Hispanics are part of the technology sector. Second, and perhaps most alarming, Latinos currently fill a large percentage of the jobs that will continue to be displaced and disrupted by Silicon Valley so it is vital to address this issue now. Third and more importantly, when a company’s workforce is diverse, it is more innovative, creative and impactful, which in turn is great for the economy.
BIG DATA INSIGHTS
One of the metrics judges used for the overall rankings was a Big Data, award-winning, Harvard published method called CulturIntel. The easy to scan report includes a positive, negative and neutral index of each company evaluated as a place to work by Latinos and Non-Latinos, therefore, highlighting gaps in affinity or interest across segments.
"Unlike most traditional industry rankings, which rely heavily on self-reported data, we incorporated the Big Data and AI method from CulturIntel to gain insight straight from the voice of the people," says Lili Gil Valletta, CEO and Cofounder of CIEN+ and CulturIntel, Cultural Intelligence innovator and Big Data partner to the effort. "We mined a total of over 2.9 million data points about careers in the tech sector scrapped from career, blog, review and social sites, where social networks only represented 11 percent, therefore going well beyond social listening to provide a more comprehensive understanding of sentiment and potential drivers and barriers faced by Latinos versus the overall."
"This marks a pioneering effort that should be benchmarked as a novel method to bring diversity insights and cultural intelligence to the way companies seek to target and develop candidate-centered strategies for inclusion," concludes Gil Valletta.
An in-depth report for all the companies is available by special request by emailing CulturIntelReport@hispanicize.com.
WHY MARKETING INVESTMENT AND COMMUNITY OUTREACH MATTERS
Another component judges evaluated was the potential involvement - or lack of involvement - companies had with the Latino community through grassroots initiatives and/or marketing. This was an interesting piece to gauge because the majority of the companies surveyed - even iconic brands - have done little to nothing to engage with or market to Latinos.
“The reason this matters is because marketing and community outreach initiatives at least open the dialogue with the Latino community which in turn fosters a belief that those companies care and/or want Hispanics to be part of their story,” said Romo Edelman. “Companies that are friendly to our community are corporations that earn our trust, respect and belief that they want to collaborate with us. We are here for good—we will continue working on this industry until we get the representation and involvement that is adequate.”
ABOUT THE TOP 25 COMPANIES
This year’s ranking consisted of 25 companies that are almost all PHYSICALLY located in Silicon Valley and that are disrupting the world as we know it - and by extension, the lives of Latinos and diverse communities, in general. These are the companies who are likely, as of today, to change the way we live, work, connect and communicate.
The inclusion of companies that are physically based outside of Silicon Valley reflects the fact that tech disruptors like Microsoft and Dell, among others, are not solely based in California. It is fundamentally flawed and elitist to believe that all technological innovation and disruption solely happens in California when that is clearly not the case.
THE SURPRISING REASON FOR TELCOS
The blue ribbon panel also deliberately included telcos because they impact where Latinos who work in tech are heavily concentrated at today, are themselves acquiring or evolving into companies that are not traditionally just about the telco business (Verizon recently bought Yahoo), and telcos are also responsible for literally powering almost every device and/or app that is changing the world.
One of the most important insights, for example, is that contrary to popular myth, there IS plenty of Latino tech talent. The real issue is that much of this talent is heavily clustered in the telcos because those companies are generally committed to finding and competing for their services. AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint are some of the largest recruiters of Latino tech talent, a fact that flies in the face of of many traditional Silicon Valley companies that complain they can’t find Hispanics.
THE FULL RANKINGS REVEALED
Although no Latinos sit on its diverse board of directors, AT&T scored very high marks across every area the judges examined, indicating that many of its corporate practices, policies and initiatives could be instructive to many innovative tech companies on the Top 25 list and beyond.
Below is the full list of the Top 25. Note that in the spirit of being constructive, the Hispanicize Silicon Valley Rankings highlight at least one positive thing about all of the companies on the list. Only the CulturIntel scores - but not the overall scores - are disclosed.
| RANK | CULTURINTEL RANK | COMPANY | COMMENTS |
| 1 | 17 | AT&T | Across every category measured, AT&T excelled for its diverse tech workforce, marketing, community outreach, supplier diversity, STEM. While it is true AT&T has the huge advantage of being around for almost a century, this does not discount the fact AT&T could serve as a terrific model for inclusivity and diversity. |
| 2 | 18 | HP | HP's commitment to diversity is so bold under CMO Antonio Lucio that they have instructed all their marketing agencies to reflect diverse employment practices and account representation or risk not working with them. |
| 3 | 21 | VERIZON | Verizon has the most diverse board of directors in the nation and consistently ranks as one of the most diverse companies - tech or otherwise - to work for. |
| 4 | 3 | DELL | Dell participates with an impressive plethora of diverse organizations in support of growth and development of small, minority and women-owned suppliers. |
| 5 | 14 | Mark Zuckerberg's recent outspoken support for DACA students rallied the Silicon Valley industry around an issue that is dear to many Latinos. This and a series of other Facebook initiatives indicate the company is making a sincere effort to become known as a leader of D&I. | |
| 6 | 11 | SALESFORCE | Tony Prophet is chief equality officer of Salesforce. He leads the company’s equality initiatives, focusing on gender, LGBTQ and racial equality to ensure that Salesforce reflects the diversity of the communities it serves. He is a member of the company’s executive committee, reporting to Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. |
| 7 | 19 | INTEL | Perhaps no company in the ranking spends more money trying to hire diverse talent and reflecting a diverse culture. |
| 8 | 4 | AMAZON | |
| 9 | 6 | NETFLIX | Netflix places a high priority on featuring films, shows and series with diverse storylines and characters, many of which impact culture and perception of Latinos. |
| 10 | 12 | SPRINT | Sprint's CEO is Latino. The company is also a large employer of Latinos and is one of the top companies marketing aggressively to U.S. Hispanics. |
| 11 | 23 | Google for Entrepreneurs stands out as one of their top diversity initiatives impacting Latinos. Google has also worked towards increasing representation of Latinos in tech by leveraging strategic alliances with Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and hearing from faculty first hand. They have also focused on deepening digital inclusion among Latino small businesses through the Digital Coaches program, exposing them to new ways of doing business on the digital space. | |
| 12 | 15 | T-MOBILE | |
| 13 | 5 | MICROSOFT | Microsoft has one of the most comprehensive list of Employee Resource Groups among all the companies surveyed. |
| 14 | 7 | EBAY | eBay deliberately moved its University Recruiting team to report into the Diversity and Inclusion team to ensure that D&I is an inherent part of its student recruitment strategies. |
| 15 | 13 | APPLE | This is a surprisingly good showing considering that Apple is notorious for not doing any direct outreach to U.S. Latinos. Their recent hiring of a chief diversity officer indicates those efforts are sure to intensify over the course of the next year. |
| 16 | 10 | IBM | One of the eight Fortune 100 boards that has more than 50% of its board seats occupied by a woman or a minority. |
| 17 | 2 | SAMSUNG | Samsung achieved the second highest score of the CulturIntel Big Data report as a company Latinos trust and would want to work at. Even though they are Korea-based, Samsung has a huge footprint in the United States. |
| 18 | 1 | INTUIT | Intuit scored high points for its diversity hiring policies and numbers. |
| 19 | 24 | AIRBNB | Next year, Airbnb’s goal is to increase its overall percentage of employees from underrepresented employees from 10% to 11%. In order to get there, Airbnb says it has expanded its efforts to recruit people from historically black colleges and universities, as well as from schools with large Latino populations. |
| 20 | 22 | LYFT | In 2017 Lyft released its first ever diversity report, transparent to the problems they have. The company has pledged to quickly accelerate its diversity recruitment. |
| 21 | 16 | UBER | Uber was hurt by the huge sexual harassment scandal that ousted its CEO but was lauded for employing many drivers of diverse backgrounds. However, Bernard Coleman III took the job as Uber’s diversity officer in January, previously Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as the chief diversity and human resources officer. Coleman said in his interview with Nasdaq, “Staff needs to fully understand there is a real value associated with diversity and inclusion.” |
| 22 | 25 | METRO PCS | |
| 23 | 20 | SPOTIFY | Spotify's multifaceted commitment to STEM efforts received among the highest marks of all the companies rated. |
| 24 | 8 | TESLA | While Tesla is notoriously insular, Tesla's lead investor and board member is a man of Latino descent. The innovative company also recently added Linda Johnson Rice of Ebony to its board of directors. |
| 25 | 9 | While most of the effort comes from its millions of U.S. Hispanic users, Twitter is positively cited for enabling vibrant community action amongst Latinos like few platforms can. |
ABOUT HISPANICIZE L.A.
Presented by Prudential Financial and created in collaboration with the CCNMA, the Hispanicize L.A. event features a jam-packed but practical agenda that will include case studies, discussions, and keynotes that this year includes celebrities like Kate Del Castillo, Luis Guzman, Flavor Flav, Maurice Benard and more. Event co-chairs are Robyn Moreno of Latina and Roxana Lissa of ROX United.
HISPANICIZE L.A. SPONSORS
Through today, confirmed sponsors so far include Prudential, Microsoft, JCPenney, Ford, United Airlines, Carnival Corp, Telemundo Network, Best Western, Starkist, Oi2Go, Got Milk?, Curacao, CNET En Español, City National Bank, Golin, the AIDS Health Foundation, and Fuente Latina. Facebook is official technology partner of the event.
MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS
The Hispanic Heritage Month edition of Hispanicize is being produced in partnership with the California Chicano News Media Association, DiMe Media, the Hispanic Public Relations Association, Latin Heat Media, Black Hollywood Film Fund and Latino Filmmakers Network.
Other media partners include: SBS/LaMusica, Latina Moms.com, Hispanic Kitchen, and, the Hispanic PR Blog.
About Hispanicize Media Group
About Hispanicize Media Group (HMG) Hispanicize Media Group (HMG) is a multi-platform media company for multicultural millennials and Generation Z. HMG works with leading brands and advertisers to navigate the rapidly evolving, $1.7 Trillion U.S. Hispanic market by offering branded media opportunities, brand integrations, celebrity endorsements, digital marketing campaigns and social influencer management. HMG’s Hispanicize Week is the largest annual event for Latino trendsetters and newsmakers in digital content creation, journalism, marketing, entertainment and tech entrepreneurship. http://hmgmedia.co .
Contact:
Katherine Johnson Gunn
Hispanicize Media Group
e: Katherine@hispanicize.com
T: 786.624.1864
