If you talk about leaders around the corporate diversity in tech, then Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) will be part of the group. But as you would have it, some of the company’s employees are apparently not happy about it. In fact, there has been a backlash within the company itself and some have gone even more severe by threatening the company’s senior leadership team. Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich told Rev Jesse Jackson at the PUSHTech 2024 conference in San Francisco.
Krzanich explained that as a white man, people worried about whether they were under a siege to a certain extent. “There’s been a bit of resistance. We’ve even had a few threats and things like that on some of our leadership team around our position on diversity and inclusion. We stand up there and just remind everybody it’s not an exclusive process. We’re not bringing in women or African-Americans or Hispanics in exclusion to other people. We’re actually just trying to bring them in and be a part of the whole environment,” he said.
With regards to the types of threats the company was receiving, one Intel spokesperson said that the whole context of was that once when you take on a big initiative it’s a journey that is aimed towards change and evolution.
The company has increased their underrepresented minority population by 30 percent over the last year. This brought up the total to 12 percent company-wide, the CEO explained. Krzanich also noted that the company hired 43.3 percent of its new hires as females or those who came from an underrepresented minority group, which surpasses the company’s hiring goals.
Intel plans to introduce employee pay data which would be broken down by gender and race, in its next diversity report.
Krzanich mentioned that they were going to go with the data and make it public. He goes on to say that he hopes there will be gaps in the salary department, mainly because it’s a problem he wants to fix. “I’m an engineer, I like fixing problems,” he says.
The news from Krzanich comes a little more than a year after Intel announced a $300 million commitment to diversity, which includes a lot of partnerships with some historically black colleges and universities and also the nonprofit organization, CODE2040. In regards to the “pipeline problem” in the tech industry, he said it was ‘bunk’.
“That’s just not true that you can’t find the good minority, women candidates,” Krzanich said. “If you send a diverse team to diverse colleges, you suddenly come back with a great pipeline.”
