Everyone in America today is connected to the tech industry, and it's time for the sector to innovate new products aimed squarely at tackling inequality. At the same time, we must exercise executive leadership on what a truly diverse and inclusive workforce looks like, factoring in gender, race as well as socioeconomic status.
For too long the Fortune 1000's hiring for culture fit has created mirror-tocracies instead of meritocracies, with a workforce that is not only overwhelmingly white and male, but also privileged and wealthy. This disconnect is why I created Unitive -- because the definition of an entrepreneurial workplace that puts talent above all else is essential to competing in a global economy.
Outlined below are five ways that the Fortune 1000 and tech sector can take on inequality:
1. Make socioeconomic diversity part of the diversity plan.
Diversity practitioners (yes, that is a new job title, folks) ought not overlook socioeconomic status as a critical metric in evaluating what reflects a truly inclusive workforce.
Recruiters and hiring managers should source candidates from non-traditional backgrounds like coding bootcamps or online training courses. Build rigorous systems and checks into your candidate screening process to disrupt bias in hiring decisions including preference for certain universities and backgrounds. To narrow our society's gap between the haves and have nots, we must integrate our workplaces and create job access for all.
2. Diversity will drive an increase in employment of women and people of color who are disproportionately lower income -- it'll increase upward mobility too!
Four years after Occupy Wall Street, our country continues to see an enormous divide between the mega rich and everyone else. In America today, you are more likely to inherit your dad's social status than his height; this fact in and of itself stifles the "striver" ambition that drives Silicon Valley style innovation.
The new CEO focus on diversity in the workplace could have an extraordinary impact on inequality, not only because women and people of color are disproportionately lower income than white men, but also because a more diverse workplace will support policies like family and medical leave and subsidized child care that have an outsized impact on women's ability to thrive in the workforce.
But focusing exclusively on the largely white collar jobs in Silicon Valley is not nearly enough. We ought to make repairing Silicon Valley's hourglass of an economy (ballooning wages at the top, a shrinking middle class and a flat average wage increases at the bottom) a national challenge.
3. Remove barriers that limit immigrant entrepreneurial success.
Key to addressing inequality here and in most urban centers is a concerted and focused effort on elevating and supporting the 34.6 percent of the Silicon Valley population that is foreign born, the majority of which are Latinos.
One in ten Latinos is a entrepreneur and yet when they starting tech companies, they face worse odds in raising capital. We need to be intentional about removing this bias to help entrepreneurs get access to capital outside family and friends, create a stronger knowledge transfer, and connect them with resources that can transform a small business that supports four or five middle-income jobs into one that supports hundreds.
4. Harness engineering talent and innovation with a focus on battling inequality.
I sold my first cybersecurity company Silver Tail for hundreds of millions in 2012, but when I first started working in this area as an engineer, there wasn't a company or investor who thought there was a need for technology focused on limiting cyber crime.
The Sony firewall breach changed all of that -- can you imagine a company today not having cybersecurity software? Like the diversity analytics sector that Unitive is pioneering today, technology can scale quickly to address the problem it was designed to fix.
Leveraging all that Silicon Valley has to offer, including design thinking, relentless optimism and the best engineering talent in the world, ought to be the focus of accelerators and incubators who can pioneer and innovate new approaches and ways to level the playing field.
5. Transform and invest in public education: 0 to college.
While one no longer needs a 4-year degree from a top tier university to thrive in a great tech job, every baby born in the U.S. today must have access to enriched learning environments that stimulate and grow the adaptive and critical thinking minds we know we'll need in the next century.
That means supporting free preschool and interventions that support babies into the K through 12 setting and ensuring schools have the resources, including enough trained teachers to engage all students. It ought to be national priority to move California -- where one in every 6 American children is educated -- from 47th to first in per pupil funding.
The new tech diversity sector is making it easier for non-traditional candidates to make it in 21st century high paying jobs with an emphasis on skill and ability to do the job. But we can do much more, and as I prepare to join other experts at Closing the Gap, I'm eager to build a movement to leverage tech to tackle inequality.