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🗞️Diversity and inclusion news🗞️
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🎖Timnit Gebru🎖
Yep the big news in D&I was how it got to the point that one of the industries leading voices on AI ethics was let go (Google say resigned) for seemingly having a dispute over a research paper, and sending an internal email that expressed frustration at Google’s diversity programs😲.
The Guardian reported that a senior manager at Google told Gebru that she would have to either retract or remove her name from a paper that she had co-authored, which asserted that technology companies could do more to ensure AI systems aimed at mimicking human writing and speech do not exacerbate historical gender biases and use of offensive language👀. ( Read the paper here)
Understandably Gerbu wasn't happy and said she “felt like we were being censored and thought this had implications for all of ethical AI research,” she told Wired. “You’re not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and don’t point out problems. That’s antithetical to what it means to be that kind of researcher."💁🏿♀️
Gebru told Wired that she attempted to negotiate with Google, offering to remove her name from the paper in exchange for a full explanation of the company’s objections, as well as a discussion of a better process for handling such matters in the future. If the company declined, she would arrange to leave at a later date. and Google rejected her request, and – after Gebru sent the frustrated email about diversity efforts – the company emailed her team to say it had accepted her resignation. They also cut off her access to company email, Gebru said. Google has maintained that Gebru resigned🧐
Now make of that what you want, but More than 1,200 Google employees and more than 1,500 supporters from academia and civil society signed a letter of protest. Given this week's news emerged that Google had Broken US law by spying on and firing employees who organized a protest, it's a big deal😒
Folks have been less than happy with Google's response with Erica Joy Baker (formerly of Google and now at GitHub) getting more likes for this than Google's response👀
Techcrunch has some more coverage here
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🎖The latest data is here!🎖
The most comprehensive report on the state of European tech was released. It's well worth a read.
Some of the key Diversity and inclusion highlights are
- 💰From 2009 to 2019, all-white teams received nearly 76% of venture capital, while all Black founders received only about 0.24% of funding and Black women founders, 0.02%.
- 👩🏻💼While 41% of men respondents to the report believe that equal opportunity is available to all, only 19% of women respondents share the same sentiment. Most notably, however, 77% of Black/African/Caribbean participants disagreed with this statement.
- 👩🏼💼Men-only teams captured 91% of all capital raised and 85% of all rounds in 2020.
- 👨🏽💻2¢ for every dollar invested in venture capital over the past 10 years has gone to all-ethnic teams.
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📊Make your boards more diverse or get out❌
Yep that's what the Nasdaq said in slightly nicer terms👀
The rule, which still needs approval from the regulators, would require companies to have at least two diverse directors, including one woman and one member of an "underrepresented" minority group, including Black people, Latinos or members of the LGBTQ+ community😲Companies would also be required to report "consistent, transparent diversity statistics" 📊
Assuming approval, this could all come in within the next two years with non-compliance leading to company shares being delisted from the exchange.❌
Read more about it here
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🎖Tesla's turn🎖
Tesla has been one of the stock market's biggest successes in 2020 reaching a market cap of $600bn💰. But less is known about many of the people behind the wheel (pun intended)🚙
Well, the diversity report gave us some insight into the makeup of the ~50k employees, and much like the rest of the tech world, there is more to do.
- Men represent 79% of the workforce, 83% in leadership, 75% of new hires and 77% of promotions in 2020.🙍🏼♂️
- And surprise surprise, Black employees are underrepresented— only 10 percent of the workforce and 4 percent of leadership at Tesla are Black or African-American (which is better than a bad bunch)😒.
- Tesla says Black and African-American employees made up 12 percent of new hires at the company in 2020, which is a 9 percent increase from 2019.💰
They did note “We know that our numbers do not represent the deep talent pools of Black and African American talent that exist in the US at every level”🤦🏿♂️.
Elon Musk (Tesla CEO) has had a phenomenal impact on the world. Let's see if he is as influential at improving the diversity of the worlds most influential Automaker and society🧐
Read more about it here |
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🧠Things that make you go hmmm🧠
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👩🏾⚖️Slack and Salesforce 👩🏾⚖️
So we broke this last week, but now the dust has settled, we wanted to say that Salesforce is buying Slack💵.
Yep, Mark Benioff (Salesforce Founder and CEO) has been quite acquisitive over the years, and this one was rumoured for a while. Well, why Slack, well Salesforce for a while has wanted to bring together the bits of the data visualisation, CRM, workflow and tools it has together. This would be crucial in unlocking more enterprise spend and getting to that $1tn valuation 💰
Beyond that though a lot of people think it's about taking on Microsoft. MSFT teams has taken off spectacularly this well, and Slack probably hasn't had the stellar lockdown it would have wanted (Salesforce shares, on the other hand, are up around 25% YOY). Ultimately being a small fish in a big pond made it vulnerable both to competition and acquisition🦈.
This article also has some thoughts
So what?: The enterprise battles are heating up
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🎞The end of Cinemas🎞
This week, Warner Brothers announced they are pushing hard into streaming by releasing every single movie in 2021 simultaneously on the HBO Max platform😲.
Unsurprisingly, Shares in Cineworld, the world’s second-largest operator with 787 cinemas worldwide, saw stocks down by 9% alongside a range of other fallers.⬇️
It's been a weird couple of months for Cinema companies though. The Vaccine news saw Cineworld shares up 126% since the start of November and It’s been the best-performing UK share on the FTSE 350 in that time too so it may be swings and roundabouts🤔
Ultimately though this may be significant. After all, why go to the cinema if you can watch releases such as The Matrix 4 or the new Space Jam film (yes there is one) at home. Whilst it probably won't be terminal (cinemas are easy money makers), things may never be the same again🎞
After all the power lies with all the big film producers if cinemas no longer hold a monopoly on distribution, and with the likes of Disney plus going strong, we wouldn't be surprised to see them throw their weight further behind it💪🏾
So what?: Covid has accelerated the disruption of many businesses and it looks like it's the Cinema Industry's turn.
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👨🏽💻State of European tech 👨🏽💻
The most comprehensive report on the State of European tech was released. It's well worth a read.
We focused on D&I above but some interesting broader data points to note are
- 🇬🇧The UK is Europe's tech/venture hub - On a cumulative basis, capital invested into UK tech companies is just short of $50B since 2016, this is more than 2x the capital invested in Germany ($23B) and France ($19B).
- 🇺🇸North America is still the global hub at $141B in 2020, Asia is on the decline mostly due to a continued decline of investment levels into Chinese private tech companies (At $74B,), and Europes ($41B) still a little behind in terms as Total capital invested
- 🧠The biggest challenges for founders this year was maintaining mental wellbeing (over fundraising or motivating a team etc
- 💵Europe's startups projected to create 1.2M jobs over the next five years - no other industry can match this engine of job growth.
- 📈Europe is producing $1B+ companies as quickly as the US - seed-funded companies in both regions have ~1% chance of becoming unicorns.
So what?: Europe is a pretty decent place to be if you're building a startup these days🇪🇺
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🎧Apple's new headphones🎧
Remember when Apple bought Beats by Dre? Well, they've decided to go one up on that investment and launch their own over the ear noise-canceling headphones.😲
What is almost a sure-fire bet to be the latest SIlicon Round valley accessory, the new AirPod Max lands just before Christmas🎄. Apple is well and truly in the audio tech space and incumbents should be worried. Not so long after launching the Apple Watch it became the world's biggest watchmaker and has a whopping 55% market share of smartwatches with 2nd placed Samsung hovering just below 15%.⌚️
With a number of the market-leading headphones discounted for the sales and Black Friday, we might see price compression with this new expensive ($549 to be precise) incumbent in town🎧
So what?: Is this a late addition to your Christmas (or other wide festive) list🎅🏿
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📈 The tools behind the tech📉
📦Product📦
📏Design📏
👩🏿💻Code👩🏿💻
🏢The business behind the tech🏢
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🌐Events and opportunities 🌐
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💻Scholarships💻
Our partners Deepmind offer scholarships to get into AI (and after the story above, there is never a better time to have a strong ethical voice in this👩🏽🔬), but we also saw that the office for students are too, so do take a look here
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🙌🏾The latest from the Colorintech team🙌🏾
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💼Internships and Jobs💼
We're running a session on producing a great CV and Cover letter with Google Today 15.30 (London time). If you're interested you can still sign up here
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😎And that's the bottom line😎
👊🏾Let us know what you think if you have any feedback on the newsletter here👊🏾
📩If you think someone else would enjoy it, they can sign up here📩, you can forward it or you can share
  
🤗In these challenging times, we hope you and your loved ones stay safe.🤗
❤️Love, peace and happiness from the Colorintech Team!❤️
09/12/20
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