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Kapor Capital People Ops Tech Forum 2016
December 7, 2016 @ 10:00 am - 3:00 pm
Kapor Capital People Ops Tech Competition
Two years following the push for the high tech industry to release their employee demographics, the numbers remain grossly stagnant. In 2016 only 2% of Google’s employees were African American, and 3% were Hispanic/Latinx. The stats are nearly identical for Facebook.
Tech giants have blamed the lack of a pipeline as the problem, but it’s much deeper and more multifaceted than that. According to USA Today, “top universities turn out black and latinx computer science and engineering graduates at twice the rate the leading technology companies hire them.” These students are overlooked in the hiring process, lack the advanced coding expertise to land the roles or opt-out from pursuing technical careers all together. What’s more, women and people of color that are hired are leaving the industry in droves due to inhospitable cultures inside of these firms.
Pattern matching and other biases have allowed these trends to persist for decades, making the HR/People Ops sector ripe for disruption. People Operations Technology (POT) is helping to change this narrative from decisions based on human hunches to a data-driven science leveraging technology.
“Given the changing demographics of the U.S., given the renewed attention to diversity and inclusion, we think this will raise the floor for what companies have to be doing,” says Freada Kapor Klein, partner at Kapor Capital and founder of the Level Playing Field Institute. Instead of throwing up our hands and saying “it’s just a pipeline problem that the schools need to fix” or “there is no pipeline problem, it’s a tech culture problem”, it is time to look for rigorous solutions at scale.
On December 7, 2016, Kapor Capital, will host the second annual “People Ops Tech Competition” in Oakland, CA, which aims to continue to grow the sector of people ops tech solutions to mitigate bias at scale. The competition will bring together leading entrepreneurs and investors with diversity and inclusion experts, all striving to help tech and other sectors remove biases from their People Ops practices.