At the 18th Annual Rainbow Push Wall Street Project Economic Summit, technology executives like Intel CEO Brian Krzanich spoke on topics that affected the minority community and its involvement in the booming technology workforce.
Intel Chief Diversity Officer Roz Hudnell is aware of the dichotomy between society and the insular technology community, and she knows how a diverse workforce can improve a company in more ways than one.
Hudnell spoke with Black Enterprise about Intel’s efforts to increase diversity and inclusion at the company.
Q: Three hundred million dollars is a lot of money, but is it enough money?
A: I spent all day yesterday with people who were asking, ‘How are you ever going to spend $300 million?,’ so at the end of the day I don’t know. What I do know is that the money is in support of the goal. I think that shows a sign of seriousness and allows us to put some resources into action.
But it’s all about reaching the parity of full representation in 5 years. It’s not just about money. Like you heard yesterday, part of this is exchanging how we make decisions, think differently, put decisions in the hands of different people, engage with different audiences, and be really creative like you would with an engineering product where you’re designing that product.
So, is $300 million enough? Time will tell. But it is enough to get started in a way that’s really serious. In some ways, if you think about it, some of the money is going to fund the pipeline. If you think about the pipeline and think about how deep one could go in really helping drive more technology education involvement and curricular teacher training, you could spend that $300 million in a day.
But the reality is that won’t necessarily help us in our pipeline in the next 5 years. We spend a lot of money on education already, but this money is really going to be much more focused, so you’ll see us go and target more investments in high schools. You’ll see us increase our support for scholarships and fellowships. Right now, we deeply fund scholarships through the United Negro College Fund and National Society of Women Engineers. This money allows us to go deeper for more and widen it at all three levels: masters, undergrads, and PhDs, and it allows us to fund more, and that will help our work.
Q: Do you think the commitment to diversity that you displayed is more an economical one or an ethical one?
A: Well, we could have gotten away with the ethical one for a lot less money. So it isn’t about ethics. When you think about what Brian said, the $5 billion on a plant, you have to think about that as an investment in the infrastructure of this country—that’s what it costs. But then you add jobs, right now in those jobs there are diversity goals, so that $5 billion doesn’t even count salary wages and the investment of bringing new jobs into communities. Bringing jobs into communities typically means more people buy houses, more people buy cars—now you have economic development in that community. Part of this money is also going toward investing in more minority businesses.
Q: How do minorities integrate at Intel? I wouldn’t want to be one of the only Black people on a team, for example.
A: Great question. Our African-American population is 4%. We have been focused on improving diversity in the workforce. We started publishing our data over a decade ago, so my first answer would be you aren’t going to be the only African American.
Ten years ago, we had zero vice presidents. Now we have 7 and that number is about to get bigger. Two of them are corporate vice presidents.
We have a Black Leadership Council, and we have a variety of initiatives [for inclusion]. The sense of isolation will still be there though—very much for most of us who are African Americans in this country, unless you’re in a certain few geographies, right?
You probably know this data more, but 60% of African Americans of the population in this country are concentrated in cities, right? So that sense of isolation exists in our lives, and we bring that sense of isolation into our industry, which is also isolated. You know the data. That’s why it’s so important to us to improve diversity in the workforce so people don’t feel isolated and people don’t feel excluded that’s when the best ideas come out.
Find out more on Intel, and the inclusion of minorities on the next page …
Q: Do you think that this money scares other companies into action?
A: I’ve got phenomenal peers who have been working— committed—who have been invested in this space for a long time, and in some cases we partner. We’ve done things together, and in other cases, we’ve gone our own way.
So, when I step back and look at this, what I really hope [is that] by us publicly announcing [this effort], it’s putting a stake in the ground that says we’re not going to [just] get incrementally better and we’re not going to just work on the pipeline. We’re going to actually say this is our goal, and we’re going to show you our data. We’re going to show you our progress [and] we’re going to measure it publicly.
We hope by doing that, we improve the feeling of comfort and safety by showing data and not being embarrassed by it, and we as an industry can move forward in it, so we really hope we haven’t scared people. I’ve gotten a lot of messages of inspiration. They’re probably pressured, but we are an industry which challenges each other. We collaborate, we partner, we compete, and it’s all about moving technology forward.
Q: In Silicon Valley, the story is if you don’t fit the culture you can’t fit there. Is there sort of a boys’ club at Intel?
A: Well you know, it’s interesting. What I think is that most people are more comfortable with people like themselves. It’s really subconscious, so therefore I think that exists and I think certain times that has played into our situation where you have a majority—any population—that majority most likely knows people just like themselves and feels comfortable with people like themselves, so I think that has existed throughout the industry. When it comes to Intel, I would be highly surprised if someone now hears, ‘You’re not a good culture fit,†at Intel. I think part of the goal in sustainability is going after great talent everywhere and ‘not a good culture fit’ is just not a good excuse anymore.
I can’t speak for other companies or the industry, but I know we have tried to go a long way in trying to address that. We are now doing micro-training. Eight years ago we did our first training around subconscious vibes. We’re trying to address it very openly, but I have to tell you as an engineering company showing data—the only people having data that shows how many applicants have applied to Intel, shows their background, shows their experiences, shows great talent. There’s great talent out there, we just haven’t done as good of a job as we should have in finding it, making it and hiring it.
Q: On the topic of diversity, recently Intel was part of a controversy an advertising controversy.
A: Gamergate?
Q: Yes. What is your feeling on that? Were you guys sort of blindsided by that whole outcry?
A: Well I guess bluntly, we unintentionally got ourselves into the middle of a really nasty debate, and you know, our ads are back up, by the way, and what we really want to do is rise above that. We really stepped back and asked, ‘What’s the fundamental issue,’ and it’s all about lack of diversity, inclusion and gaming.
And it was different but totally the same as lack of diversity, inclusion and technology, and the one minute it was diversity, inclusion and enough women going into computer science and becoming game developers and game development owners—and we step back and say this is actually all connected, so I think that was our learning in thinking about that broadly—so, yes we unintentionally got in the middle of something that was absolutely not positive at all.
Find out more on Intel, and the inclusion of minorities on the next page …
Q: Are you guys using the initiative to invest in gaming projects?
A: Yes, we are, and we’re using it to be a leader. We’re using it to provide forums where people can come together to address the issue of lack of inclusion in gaming. We’re using it to look at how we can fund more diverse gaming teams, how we can provide more funding to gaming companies that are owned and developed by diverse individuals, we have Robin Hunicke who is the founder and owner of Funomena, which is a gaming company, on stage with Brian Krzanich last week at a panel we did.
Q: How did you get started with Intel?
A:
I got recruited over 18 years ago. At the time, I was working for the Urban League, and I had developed jobs and skills training with UC Davis Med Center. My experiences primarily have been in that space, but I was brought into public affairs work for the company, and that was my first job in Folsom, Calif.I was on an advisory committee with Linda Wells-Hott, and she called and said, “We have a job here. Send me your resume.†I said, ‘I don’t have a resume. I don’t have time.’ She said, ‘Well make one. I’ve got to interview you.â€
So I gave her my resume. Lo and behold, I got hired, and it’s been an amazing career.
I’ve been blessed. I have had many times where people have called me to leave Intel, and a lot of people ask why I’m still there, and this is so perfect, I say because the ability to drive change in a technology company when you’re not a technologist and to do it at a scale like Intel is unbelievable. So my last big project, and I was much more junior than I am now, I had this idea for an after school program to invest more in brown and black communities after-school and my first mentor was Carl Everett the first vice president of the company, and we were sitting in the café and neither of us had any paper and I literally grabbed the napkin I wish I had kept, and we wrote and put it out and then tore it the first time so I got another one.
It ended up being the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network which we’re still invested in. We spent almost 30 million dollars on that program alone, we have two clubhouses here in Harlem, and the fact that this as I call it this little black girl from California could be given a platform and when you think about it, the scale that we drive as leaders in the industry is phenomenal. So the reason we could do what we did last week is because we have a CEO who stepped back and said when you see something that’s not going right for ten years we’ve made some incremental improvements, we’ve gone through from 0 to 7 and growing black VP’s in a company that primarily promotes, it wasn’t hiring, it’s retention, recruiting, progression, all that to say you know what? I’m not going to take another 10 years to improve by 1%.
What’s it going to take? Focus, commitment, goals, and resources like an engineer.