Minorities in Oregon's Professional Workplace: The Employment Issue that Dares Not Speak its Name
Originally appeared in Commerce Magazine, September 2006
Part one in a three-part series.
It's the invisible elephant that no one wants to talk about. Four decades after the civil rights movement gained traction nationally, racial minorities and women remain underrepresented in Oregon's professional workplace. That fact is no secret. Yet, meaningful dialogue on the subject has been conspicuously absent. And nowhere does that elephant smell more than in the high tech sector.
From their education choices to their job search, Oregon's women and minority males—specifically African-Americans and Hispanics—are not exactly lining up around the block to seek careers as programmers, network engineers and the like. The result is that Oregon's high tech sector remains what it has been for many years: a predominantly white male environment.
Local companies don't necessarily like this situation any more than minorities themselves. There is a very real financial incentive for companies to hire women and minorities. Federal government General Services Administration (GSA) contracts often require companies to maintain certain minimum levels of minority employees in order to be eligible for these contracts. Lacking qualified applicants from the local population, companies have little choice but to recruit such workers from out-of-state or miss out on bidding opportunities. Either way, local minorities and women can get left behind.
Enter Terri Voshell who believes training is one key to the solution.
As President of software training firm Touchstone Technology, she has experienced first-hand what it's like to be a woman engineer in the high tech industry's predominantly male environment. And while she has observed some gender prejudice, she believes a bigger and more crucial deterrent for women and minorities is their assumption that a high tech career is simply not an option that is open to them.
During the last ten years, Voshell has helped hundreds of students gain entry-level training in Linux, Red Hat, Novell and other software applications—most of them white males. Of the exceptions, she says, "there have been about two black men, one Native American man, two Asian women, and about a dozen other women."
Voshell would like to see those numbers rise. She's even willing to commit resources to help the shift, but she realizes she can't do it on her own.
The kind of outreach that she envisions almost certainly needs corporate support that was once commonplace, but that has all but disappeared, says Steve Bissell.
Now the president of a local tech training firm, Axian, Bissell recalls an earlier era when corporations, in partnership with universities, did just that. Bissell, President of tech training and development firm Axian, describes the path that many took to enter the computer industry in the early '70s. As a student at DeVry University, he saw representatives from DeVry approaching high school students one-on-one to get them excited about a career in engineering. Students who may have been drifting in school and at risk of settling for low-skill, low-paying jobs were given opportunities and resources that they may not have otherwise had. And they succeeded. Says Bissell, "One reason [DeVry] had a high percentage of graduates who landed good jobs is because they were working closely with Hewlett-Packard, GE Medical, and others to make sure they were teaching their students the subjects and skills that the hiring companies really cared about." Such strategies are now all too rare. Yet, it is here that Bissell sees a solution to the problem of minorities in the workplace.
"Companies," he says, "ought to be reaching deep into the school system to identify minority students who would make good candidates for jobs at their company—and then begin drawing them through the system to come work for them." He admits that such an approach has its obstacles. "In order to do this, companies need to be thinking six or seven years down the line. Intel recently announced huge layoffs in the IT department. It's hard to imagine that they're giving much thought to whom they will hire in several years." Perhaps. Smart IT managers and CIOs, however, are even now drawing up succession plans to aid the transition of knowledge and skills to the next generation of employees. Those plans have a special urgency right now.
According to the Oregon Department of Employment, for at least the next four years, the 45-to-64 age group will grow faster than the 25-to-44 age group; over the next ten years, that aging group will be reducing its workload and retiring. This presents an opportunity now for minorities and women to fill jobs that will soon be vacated by those oldsters.
In order for that to happen, however, a dialogue needs to be opened up to candidly discuss these issues. And that is easier said than done.
After all, whites don't necessarily have a personal stake in the subject; conversely, fearing that they will be marginalized as activists or radicals, minority workers hesitate to speak up. Then again, the discussion itself is a minefield that could easily threaten politically correct sensibilities. After all, proposed solutions often center on such reverse discrimination tactics as hiring quotas and Affirmative Action—solutions that whites and minorities alike find distasteful.
Meanwhile, women and minorities continue to be left behind for the best high tech jobs in Oregon. And the state's economy is the worse off for it.
Reprinted from the September 2006 Commerce Magazine. ©Daily Journal of Commerce. All rights reserved.
