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Intel hits target: 27% of staffers are female? Apparently that's 'full representation'

Chipzilla less pale and male – report

Intel has hit its target of "full representation" among staffers who toil stateside, and said the diversity push has resulted in a hike in the proportion of its employees who are female or minorities.

When it comes to Chipzilla's "full representation" metric, this means achieving parity with "market availability" of skilled candidates in the American populace at large. It crunches this number using various data drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources.

The chipmaker's Annual Diversity and Inclusion report, released this week, said 26.8 per cent of its workers are women – up just 0.3 percentage points from the 26.5 per cent of last year – and around 14.6 per cent are minorities – up from 13.2 per cent in the 2017 report. The new numbers mean Intel hit its 2020 target early, as it predicted it would in December last year (PDF).

The current diversity push began in 2015, when former Intel CEO Brian Krzanich chucked $300m at the problem, tying exec incentives to achieving specified goals.

Women now occupy 23.9 per cent of all Intel's US technical roles, up from 20.1 per cent in 2015, when the diversity push kicked off, and they make up 20.7 per cent of its leadership. Minorities make up 14.2 per cent of its techies, up 2.3 percentage points from the 11.9 of three years ago, and comprise 9.2 per cent of the bosses.

As a point of comparison, Microsoft's female workforce makes up 19 per cent of its techies, and 19.1 per cent of all leadership roles are taken up by women.

As far as the gender pay gap in Britain goes, IBM could do much worse

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Just 17.3 per cent of techies working on relative newbie Twitter's 3,000+ workforce are female, although women do take up what would unfortunately be regarded as a comparatively large 32.5 per cent of its leadership roles.

There are circa 51,350 staffers in Intel's US workforce – judging by its latest annual report, which states the chipmaker employs nearly 102,700 worldwide.

Tech and science biz law firm Fenwick & West, which makes a practice of tallying up such things, sifted through public filings from 1996 through 2016 to produce its most recent gender diversity figures for Silicon Valley (PDF), which show the number of women on boards, especially in larger companies, which tend to be more diverse, is climbing slowly.

Mind the pay gap

As of May this year, the final decision on whether US companies with more than 100 staffers have to provide annual pay data with their Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEO-1) reports has not been made by the Federal Office of Management and Budget. This was an Obama-era push for US gender pay gap reveal that was put on hold in August 2016.

However, in the UK, the government compels firms with more than 250 employees to reveal their pay gaps, requiring them to publish comparisons of the average pay of men and women across the organisation. We know that Intel Corp UK Ltd (PDF), for example, has a median hourly pay gap of 32.6 per cent in favour of men, comparing pretty poorly to the UK national median pay gap of 18.4 per cent.

As the businesses would be quick to point out, the pay gap is not to do with equal pay for equal work, but rather reflects that there are more women in lower-paid positions. At Chipzilla, for example, the upper-middle quartile pay bands were 81 per cent male and the top quartile 87 per cent.

Apple UK (PDF), on the other hand, has a 5 per cent mean (in favour of men) and 2 per cent median (in favour of women) gender pay gap. The median pay gap at Microsoft UK was 8.4 per cent, with a mean pay gap of 6.6 per cent, compared to IBM UK's 15.9 per cent mean and 14.6 per cent median gender pay gap – also released this year.

Obviously the reported UK figures for tech firms do not reflect their US ones.

Intel's full Annual Diversity and Inclusion report is here. ®

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