Blameful Post Mortem: Cowardice and Blatant Unwillingness

Blameful Post Mortem

Amazon released its diversity data following disclosures by other major tech companies… but unlike them, neglected to break out the makeup of its tech workforce. The diversity data it has released tells an all-too familiar story of white male dominance, particularly and disproportionately in management roles. Ultimately, Amazon’s decision not to break out the diversity data of its tech staff shows both cowardice and a blatant unwillingness to participate in the community discourse around diversity in tech.

Shame on you, Amazon.

Tech, Culture and Diversity News

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In our news blog, we cover CollectQT, a queer/trans tech collective, and their crowdfunding campaign to build a new social network. “Quirell is unique in being a community-supported social network by and for marginalized people, with social justice principles built into the foundation of its team and infrastructure.”

Adrian Roselli discusses accessibility and open source in the post “Learn to Do It Yourself”.

Relevant to tech events, here’s a post by Dorothy Kim on conferences, microaggressions, sexual harassment and community accountability: “…serial sexual harassers are not going to stop harassing young women at conferences unless there are consequences… Along with a clear set of resources, conference organizers must be clear about conduct expectations and then what the rules are if these expectations are broken.”

Here’s a profile on Nancy Lee, Google’s director of diversity and inclusion.

Scheduled for mid-2015, an important update to emoji: “People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone… Five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji are planned for Unicode Version 8.0.”

Applications to CODE2040’s summer 2015 Fellows Program are now open. The program “places high performing Black and Latino/a software engineering students in internships with top tech companies and provides them with a mentorship and a leadership development curriculum.” 

Facebook is now accessible over Tor.

“A woman believed to be in her 30s was found dead in Port Orchard, Washington Tuesday night, and police are investigating a possible, albeit tenuous, link to a 4chan user.” (Content warning). 

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