I’ve written before about how the lack of diversity in the companies that are shaping our world is literally hurting people. I specifically referred to Eric Meyer being confronted with his deceased daughter. Facebook does realise their lack of diversity is also hurting their business. So they’ve started an internal course to battle what they term unconscious bias. They’ve put an interesting set of videos of the course online. From their blogpost:

To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook. Diverse teams have better results, so this is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for our business.

and:

One of the most important things we can do to promote diversity in the workplace is to correct for the unconscious bias that all of us have.

Google is focusing on unconscious bias too.

I am aware that so-called affirmitive action has gotten a bad reputation, but if I were to change a company’s culture on this topic, this isn’t where I would start. To really make an impact these information giants will have to start directly addressing the structural societal problems that lead the lack of diversity.

Interested to learn more about diversity in the technology sector? Check out these resources.