We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Take a look around your IT shop and notice the racial and gender makeup of your employees. What would you say is the percentage of employees who aren't Caucasian? How many are women? If you're working for a company that's in the tech industry, then ask yourself the same questions about your employee population at large. Notice how many are non-white and women, and then compare that to the population makeup in the United States. Then note that, in the tech industry and in IT jobs, non-white employees are underrepresented. The same is true of women, who make up slightly more than half of the US population. The numbers, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF), are surprising: African-Americans make up about 5 percent of employees in science and tech fields, even though they make up slightly over 12 percent of the US population. The NSF says that women are similarly underrepresented, despite the fact that they earn the majority of degrees in science, tech, and related fields. So what does this have to do with you? Perhaps you're part of the problem if your company has something known as the so-called "bro culture." This is a tendency for human resources (HR) or hiring managers to look primarily for employees who look like them and have similar life experiences. So, for example, white managers from wealthy backgrounds who tend to look for people with those same traits. And because they have those similar backgrounds, they form a corporate culture in their own image once they're hired. This tends to exclude non-whites and women. If you now recognize that your company has this problem, then you're probably finding that your helpdesk or IT department is understaffed, you're short of engineers and business intelligence (BI) experts, and you don't have the scientists you need to invent the next thing you're going to sell. Why? Because you're limiting your hiring talent pool. At SXSW, PCMag Editor-in-Chief Dan Costa and Kimberly Bryant, CEO and founder of Black Girls Code, discuss how she wants to have one million black girls coding by 2040, the perils of artificial intelligence, and more. Business Risks Managers who continue to build teams according to bro culture guidelines do so at their peril. The risks involved are partly business-related and partly legal. If you aren't hiring the best talent because you're unwilling to hire someone who's different from you, then your company will lose out to a competitor that's willing to hire the best. And if you avoid hiring certain people because of how they look, then you could be breaking the law. The same is true if you do hire someone, but then treat them differently because of how they look. And you can easily find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. A classic example is the case of Aaron McCormick, who alleges in his complaint that he was excluded from a number of important meetings and functions at his employer Optimizely, a privately held, San Francisco-based software company. McCormick also alleges that Optimizely refused to pay him commissions, despite landing Apple as a customer. Robert Ottinger, McCormick's attorney, said that they're planning to ask for damages in the "seven figures" for those practices as well as for violations of whistleblower protection and other labor laws. Ottinger said that McCormick was the company's only African-American employee out of about 400 total staff. He also said that the company set different performance standards for McCormick than for other sales staff. If those unfair practices seem somehow familiar, it's because they harken back about 55 years, to a time before the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited such things. Unfortunately, such things as the bro culture are bringing them back, not as written rules, but as social practices that have become part of the way business is conducted. Legal Repercussions But just because some corporate cultures, particularly in the tech sector, support it doesn't mean bro culture is accepted. The legal risk can be significant, even in cases where companies try to protect themselves with a web of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and arbitration clauses. While those clauses may make it difficult for an employee to seek redress, they don't make it impossible. The reason is that some of the laws that govern discrimination carry criminal penalties. So, while it may be that suing a company is difficult, there's nothing that prevents your local District Attorney (DA) or Attorney General (AG) from filing charges, and an NDA is not a protection against testimony in a criminal trial. Edward L. Allen is President of the Richmond, Virginia-based personal injury law firm Allen, Allen, Allen & Allen. According to Allen, companies that put themselves at risk though such practices have no protection from those employment agreements. The reason, he explains, is that the charge is being brought in the name of the people of the state or of the US, and they're not a party to the agreement. Of course, there are other reasons as well. A number of organizations, notably the federal government and most state governments, specifically prohibit racial and gender discrimination in their contracts. As a former federal contracting officer, I've negotiated many such contracts, and all of them contain such a phrase, or they contain a phrase in which the company being contracted agrees to follow all federal and state non-discrimination laws. Had a company I'd placed a contract with violated terms like that, I could have terminated their contract. Changing Bro Culture Practices Thinking about your own company's line of business, if you find that you lost even one customer because of employment practices or overall culture, then you've already lost too much. But aside from the practice being potentially expensive, it's also, quite frankly, just plain stupid. Why limit yourself and your company by only using half of the available talent pool? However, changing the culture at your company can be challenging even if current practices seem obviously flawed. There are three basic steps that most companies should be able to take fairly quickly to help move a culture shift along: Get official buy-in from the C suite. While this may be difficult at some companies, it's a key step in making any organization focus on diversity. An official pledge by C-level executives that the company takes diversity seriously is often a critical step in making this issue relevant to non-minority workers. Work with your HR department to keep diversity a top-of-mind issue. This means not only examining your hiring practices, but adding diversity training to your employees' list of annual tasks. You can create a course yourself and simply make it available on your company's internal learning platform, or for companies that lack such a platform, they can check out services such as Udemy that make all kinds of skill training, including cultural diversity, available on a managed service basis. Encourage or even help organize diversity support and leadership groups. Making this effort will help women and minority workers, who may feel alone in their specific departments, realize that there are others facing the same issues. This helps these employees feel more secure and can foster outreach to the rest of the company and more organized mentoring practices for diversity hires. The combination of limiting your talent, risking legal trouble, and exposing your company to a needless level of risk are problems that will concern not only investors but also customers. Additionally, they will, over time, raise red flags that are almost certain to eventually draw the attention of regulators. While ignoring the problem may be easier in the short run, taking just a little time to put basic diversity steps in place can mitigate these risks and add many long-term benefits (especially around talent retention) for what is a relatively small, upfront investment.

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