US tech companies have been able to sustain growth and expansion in an economic landscape with few really bright spots in employment opportunities. There has been an ongoing debate about the difficulties that women and minorities face in breaking into the tech club. One thing that has often complicated the discussion is the sizable presence of Asian men in the industry. That keeps it from appearing to be a white boys only club.
The standard response of the tech industry about the lack of women and minorities other than Asians is that there just aren't enough of them in the pipeline. Before examining the situation of the Asian men, it is useful to look at some new information about the pipeline argument.
Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired
Top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
Technology companies blame the pool of job applicants for the severe shortage of blacks and Hispanics in Silicon Valley.
But these findings show that claim "does not hold water," said Darrick Hamilton, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School in New York.
"What do dominant groups say? 'We tried, we searched but there was nobody qualified.' If you look at the empirical evidence, that is just not the case," he said.
As technology becomes a major engine of economic growth in the U.S. economy, tech companies are under growing pressure to diversify their workforces, which are predominantly white, Asian and male. Leaving African Americans and Hispanics out of that growth increases the divide between haves and have-nots. And the technology industry risks losing touch with the diverse nation — and world — that forms its customer base.
Tech companies are filling 2% of their tech jobs with black workers and 3% with Latinos. Yet, last year, of the new graduates with bachelors in computer science 4.5% were black and 6.5% Latino. Something doesn't add up here. The tech companies continue to claim that they are hiring all of the qualified black and Latino workers that they can find.
Now what about all those Asian men that are getting tech jobs. Have they been admitted to the white boys club on an equal footing? It doesn't seem to have worked out quite like that.
The Color of Money in Silicon Valley
Asians comprised a big chunk of the tech workforce -- 23 percent at Apple, 34 percent at Google, 41 percent at Facebook and 34 percent at Twitter. Asians were the majority at Yahoo, LinkedIn and eBay, coming in at 57 percent, 60 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
All these statistics make a recent compensation study from the American Institute for Economic Research showing that Asian tech workers earn less than women and most other racial groups a fairly surprising read.
Asian-American techies made $8,146 less in average annual wages than their white counterparts in 2012; $3,656 less than black employees; and $6,907 less than those who checked the box as “other” (which includes mixed-race people). Women in tech made $6,358 less than men in 2012. The pay gap was most egregious for Hispanics, who earned, on average, $16,353 less than white workers in 2012.
Columnist Jeff Wang makes some striking observations about the future prospects for most of these Asian men who take tech jobs at lower pay than other workers.
Maybe that's because these statistics aren't exactly what they seem. The numbers released for Asian engineers have lumped U.S. citizens and permanent residents together with foreign nationals working on temporary H-1B visas; over 40% of H-1B visa holders are Asian (India alone accounts for 25%), most of them employed by tech companies. Take out the H1-B visa employees, and the eye-popping numbers of Asian technologists drops by half.
There's also the reality that being an Asian technology employee can be a professional dead end. A gilded one, to be sure -- the average salary for a computer programmer is around $75,000 a year -- but the statistics on leadership-level employees show that most Asians in the tech industry hit a ceiling well before they reach management status.
The percentage of whites, blacks and Hispanics who are executives is the same as their percentage in engineering roles. Asians, meanwhile, are about half as likely to be managers as they are to be coders and hardware hackers.
The H1-B employees do not get permanent resident status and the green card that comes with it. They are bound to a specific job. Many of these front line tech jobs pay decent middle class salaries, so the people who manage to land them aren't starving to death, but they don't have easy access to promotional opportunities in corporations or to the investment capital necessary to start up new ventures.
The tech industry is a fast moving and very competitive scene. They do not lack for job applicants. The people at the top of it become billionaires. There are a lot of questions about what is happening to the people further down the totem pole. It has been held out as a land of egalitarian opportunity as opposed to older more established industries. Anybody with ability and initiative could strike it rich. When one digs beneath that charming Horatio Alger myth, the picture gets considerably more complicated.