After years of advocating for diversity and inclusion, and telling tech companies how to improve in that area, the Anita Borg Institute has released a diversity report of its own. The Anita Borg Institute, the organization behind the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, is on par with the likes of the tech companies it critiques when it comes to diversity.
The organization’s staff is 93% female, 59.5% white, 17.5% Asian, 9% black, 9% hispanic, 1.5% American Indian and 3.5% multiracial, according to its report. At Grace Hopper, just 30% of the speakers were women of color.
Where ABI excels is in its representation of women across its employee base and keynote speakers at its annual conference. But there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to representation of people of color both inside the company and at the annual women in computing conference.
“These numbers, while not perfect, are not terribly far from the overall representation in the U.S. population at large and are substantially better than the technology industry overall,” the organization wrote on its blog. “Regardless, we know there is room for improvement.”
Notably absent from the report is the status of LGBTQIA people on the team as well as people of color in leadership roles. Back in October, former and current ABI employees told me that there was a major lack of people of color in leadership roles at the organization. Some said that certain members of the leadership team felt that racial diversity was not important.
But even without hard numbers from ABI about people of color in leadership roles, anyone can go to their site to see that there are very, very few and that white women make up the majority of the leadership team. The Board of Trustees, for instance, has more men (10) than it does people of color (one). As with all companies in the tech industry that are attempting to tackle diversity and inclusion, ABI has a lot of work to do.