Corporate America, Your Future STEM Professionals Aren’t Attending Career Fairs Anymore

Like the Western black rhino, hieroglyphics and video stores, college career fairs may soon be a relic of the past - particularly when it comes to recruiting software engineers.

Undergraduate enrollment in computer science programs continues to rise impressively, growing by double digits year-over-year. Pair that with the fact that employer demand for computer science majors is very steep - with CS majors earning some of the highest starting salaries in the country - it's obvious that computer science and engineering knowledge is more valuable today than ever before. So why are universities and employers alike scrambling to keep up? Why is it seemingly so difficult to find skilled developers?

Read the rest of this TechCrunch article.

What Do Pandora, Indiegogo and Ferguson Police Have in Common? Unable to Hire Black Folks!

Both Pandora and Indiegogo released diversity reports today that highlight an absence of African American employees. The companies join a bandwagon of tech brands that have been releasing similar reports throughout the summer.

At Pandora, approximately 3% of its 1,300 or so employees are African American and 4% are Hispanic.  That is the same percentage of African Americans as you find in the Ferguson, Missouri police department ... and we see how that worked out!   The low numbers are notable given that the company is located in Oakland, where about 28% of the total population is African American and 25% is Hispanic. The percentage of African Americans is even lower in leadership and tech roles, where they represent only 1.1 and 2.8% of employees. In contrast 6.3% of Pandora's leadership is Hispanic.

At Indiegogo, a company of slightly more than 100 employees, only 2% of total employees are African American, and the group is not represented in leadership or tech positions.

Read the rest of the TechCrunch article.

Video Interview - 'Diversity in Tech' (Chamillionaire and BlackFounders.com)

Soulclap to Adria Richards for challenging African Americans and other people of color to get engaged in the technology industry. She took some time at TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 to discuss obstacles and opportunities of participating in networking and educational events.

There are many ways to increase diversity in the technology space. Check out her video interview.

Race And The Web: Going After Niche Markets Or Practicing Digital Segregation?

I met Angela Benton and Markus Robinson at the 1st annual Blogging While Brown conference. They are co-founders of Black Web 2.0, a site that covers the Internet industry from an African American perspective. TechCrunch published an interesting article from Angela and Markus that I thought BETF-Blog readers would enjoy:

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The release of Blackbird, an African American focused web browser sparked quite a bit of controversy this past week. The TechCrunch post about it elicited reactions from both sides of the aisle (it has 275 comments and counting). Some argued for the value of niche audiences while others debated that the idea of a Black browser is in and of itself separatism, racist even. But catering to niche audiences online is nothing new. In fact, browsers that focus on a specific market segment isn’t all that new either. For example there’s Gloss, a women focused fashion and beauty browser created using Flock, the social media browser. But what makes the launch of Blackbird both a controversial and sensitive topic, is that it is focused towards an ethnic segment versus a special interest group. Race is still an extremely touchy subject in America, and the Internet and web are not immune to this sensitivity regardless of how open it is. But aren’t most businesses, especially web businesses, started in this “Web 2.0″ era defined by catering to a particular niche?

Really, if race-based niche sites are racist, then this inflated “Web 2.0 bubble” has played a major role in the segregation of the web overall. Many of the sites we all follow right here on TechCrunch, like Digg, Techmeme, and Mixx, were built and launched to service a niche, therefore fragmenting the web making it so we all think it’s “more personal” and “more authentic.”
Remember when Global Grind was once the more authentic counterpart to Pageflakes for the hip-hop culture? Or how about the collaborative advice site for parenting Minti that was described by Mike Arrington as a “walled garden” even though he “…like(s) to see niche content sites spring up that use Web 2.0 ideas - these services will help the masses start to use and understand things like tagging, ajax, etc.”

Read the rest of this article here.

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