Busting the Myth of the Meritocracy

By Gary Rivlin
The Industry Standard
February 28, 2000

Like a great many people eager to plug in to Silicon Valley, Paul Igasaki has made more than his share of trips to San Francisco International Airport in the past 12 months. Igasaki, however, has not been coming to peddle a business plan on Sand Hill Road or talk dot-com deals South of Market. He's vice chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and he's been scouring the Valley for evidence to prove what he deeply suspects: That despite the torrent of self-congratulation spewed about the color-blind, brave new world built in the tolerant, racially diverse environs of Northern California, the area's tech companies are no different than the other industries the EEOC keeps an eye on. "From what I've seen thus far," Igasaki says, "I wouldn't necessarily say racial discrimination is more problematic in the high-tech area than elsewhere. But I wouldn't say it's any less of a problem, either."

Consider Igasaki a headhunter of a different sort. Any company with more than 100 full-time employees, publicly held or private, must submit what's called an EEO-1, a kind of annual census form that breaks down its workforce by race and gender. "We're looking at [EEO-1] reports frequently and sifting through back reports to look for patterns," Igasaki adds. "We have some very deep concerns as far as the high-tech field is concerned. For that reason we've launched an ongoing review of racial hiring in Silicon Valley. This is very much a priority of ours." Based on his investigation, which is about a year old, Igasaki has concluded that there's a "disturbing lack of minorities working in high tech, especially black and Latino workers."

Igasaki bristles at the suggestion that the EEOC has "targeted" the technology industry. A lawyer by training and cautious by nature, he prefers the more bureaucratic term "ongoing investigation." A source inside the agency, however, is more blunt. "Of course we're targeting Silicon Valley," the source says. "We're busy looking under every rock we can, looking for a couple of high-profile companies we can hit with a suit. We want people throughout the industry to notice that we're here." According to this source, the agency has compiled a short list of celebrated companies that its attorneys believe offer the agency the best shot at a winnable lawsuit.

Several years ago, the EEOC's office in San Jose, Calif., housed a single investigator. Now this satellite of the agency's San Francisco district bureau is staffed by two full-time attorneys and six EEOC investigators. There have been staff increases in other San Francisco-area offices (in part because of the technology-related probe but also due to other projects under way), as well as in Seattle and other locales rich in companies focused on the Internet. "We've been beefing up our staffing in every place that we see significant economic growth related to high technology," Igasaki says.

Igasaki, a presidential appointee, served for a time as the EEOC's chairman, sitting in the seat formerly filled by Clarence Thomas. He's a long- time civil rights attorney who now has clout – and he seems determined to do something about what he describes as the "extreme disparities we're seeing between the number of blacks and Latinos working in high tech, especially at the professional and management level, and the presence of qualified black and Latino candidates in that geographic area.

"The law forbids me from saying anything specific about any company, or group of companies, we may or may not be investigating," he notes. "It may be that as we speak we have dozens of cases pending against technology companies. But I will say this: Anytime we take a look at an industry and see the kind of disparity that we're seeing in high tech, we take an interest."

Igasaki offers such comments in calm, even tones – but just below the surface lurks an implied threat aimed at any Internet company that doesn't place a racially diverse workforce on its radar screen: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

"Sometimes I think it's important to send a message to an industry that race discrimination is not something we'll tolerate," Igasaki says. "And from what we've seen so far, this is an industry in which a message may need to be sent."

Ask someone Caucasian about race in the Valley and the odds are good they'll gush about the rich jumble of people with whom they come into contact every day. Chris Holten Hempel worked at Netscape for four years before cofounding Spark Public Relations. "I don't get it," Hempel says when told that the EEOC is investigating Valley companies for alleged discrimination. "If you were talking about the lack of women, sure, but race? At most of the companies I deal with there's a pretty broad racial mix. Even at Netscape it was diverse across the board."

Perception, however, is a funny thing. Netscape's workforce, according to the EEO-1 the company filed in 1996, a year after going public, was 15 percent Asian. Yet just 1 percent of the Netscape workforce that year was black – and most of them were concentrated in clerical and other support-staff jobs. (Company reports of racial makeup are broken into four broad categories: management, professional staff, technical staff and factory/support personnel.) Similarly, despite a high concentration of Latinos in the Valley, Netscape's workforce was just 3 percent Latino, again with the highest concentration in the lower-rung jobs.

Sukhinder Singh is cofounder of a newly minted startup called Yodlee. A foreign-born national whose family hails from India, Singh offers a more nuanced view of race in the Valley. She worked on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch (MER) and at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. before going to work for Junglee, a company started by four Indians and later bought by Amazon. She declares the Valley "the most diverse environment I've ever been in my life." But when asked if that mix includes many blacks and Latinos, she pauses. "From my perspective, blacks and Latinos are a little under-represented," she says. "But I don't think that has anything to do with discrimination. The Valley is a place where if you have a good idea, your race or your gender – or even your age – doesn't matter. This is an environment where you are judged on the merit of your ideas rather than on the color of your skin. If a meritocracy exists anywhere in this country, then it exists in Silicon Valley."

Yet ask someone black or Latino about the vaunted Valley meritocracy and the chance is good you'll hear something like a snort. "That's just total BS," says Dwayne Walker, CEO and chairman of Seattle-based ShopNow.com. "Anyone who says that the Valley, or the Internet space generally, is this great meritocracy is just full of crap. The reality is that if you're black or Latino – or if you're a woman, for that matter – it's that much harder to prove yourself, starting with funding. This notion that anyone, irrespective of race and gender, can get a meeting on Sand Hill Road is nonsense. The bar is that much higher for African Americans, Latinos, women and other minorities. If you're black or Latino or a woman, every step of the way it's a challenge just to get people to take you seriously."

Walker, who is black, is not someone who could be dubbed a firebrand. An engineer by training, he tends to carefully measure his words, deliberately selecting softer words over harsh ones. Throughout the interview, he tempers most of his comments with cautious qualifiers: "The tech industry hasn't necessarily made as concerted an effort as it should and could to reach African Americans and Latinos." But the term "meritocracy" clearly pushes a button, prompting Walker, ShopNow's founder, to unload about the travails he faced in the company's early days (when it was called TechWave): "The number of extra hoops I was put through. The number of times people wanted me to call them back. The challenges at every step. I was prepared for tough questions. I'm mindful that starting a company is extremely difficult. I'm talking about questions that were polite ways of getting at my character.

"Keep in mind I spent seven years at Microsoft (MSFT) , so I had that magic credential. I at least could get in the door. I've spoken to enough African-American entrepreneurs to know I had it lucky," Walker says.

He doesn't doubt that anyone with a "9" or a "10" of an idea, regardless of race or gender, will receive ample venture funding. Nor does he doubt that someone with a "5" idea or below won't be getting funding from a respectable venture firm, no matter who might be presenting the business plan. For Walker, "it's the 6s, 7s and 8s when things get interesting. Who gets that money? That's when the filtering starts. That's when people wonder if they can take a chance on someone like you. ... It's my view that when an idea ranks between a 5 and 8, the playing field is not level for African Americans, Latinos and women."

How invisible are blacks and Latinos inside Internet companies? One black engineer, who works at a well-established Internet firm that employs thousands of people, not only insisted on anonymity for himself but also declined to allow his company to be identified. His reasoning? So few African Americans are on staff that he feared it would be obvious he was the one who had talked. "I can go a week or more at work and never see anyone African American or Latino," he says. "I mean zero, not a one." Adds a Latino who works for a large Valley-based software company: "The only time I see someone who looks like me [at work] is if a group of us goes out to lunch and there's a busboy clearing off dishes."

For his part, Walker has learned that when he gives a speech he can never say anything of substance within the first few minutes because people are distracted by the color of his skin. "You can see it on people's faces," says Howard Barokas, who heads ShopNow's outside PR agency. "It's like they're radios trying to tune in through all this static. All they're thinking is, 'He's black. Dwayne Walker is black.'"

Adds Walker: "As rare as it is to see a black CEO in the corporate world, it's rarer still to see a black CEO in the Internet space. And rare as it is to see someone black, it's even more rare to see someone Latino."

Conventional wisdom is that there just aren't enough blacks and Latinos to hire. One white CEO of a hot Internet startup (he, too, would speak only on the condition that neither his name nor his company were identified) repeats the enduring cliche that it doesn't matter if you're black, Latino or green with a set of Martian antenna – if you can code, you'll be hired in the current climate. His and others' assumption is that the lack of blacks and Latinos inside technology companies only reflects the lack of black and Latino engineers in the wider world. "We can't hire people if we don't get their resumes," he says.

It may be true that there are fewer blacks and Latinos in college engineering programs. According to George Campbell Jr., president and CEO of the New York-based National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, "African Americans, Latinos and American Indians comprise 30 percent of the college-age population and one-fourth of the workforce, but still receive less than 3 percent of the [engineering] Ph.D.s and only slightly more than 10 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering." One trade group, the Information Technology Association of America, estimates that African Americans, although they make up roughly 10 percent of the U.S. workforce, account for only 5 percent of the country's computer programmers. Similarly, around 4 percent of the country's programmers are Latino, while being 9 percent of the overall workforce.

Yet the majority of jobsat most Internet companies don't require any advanced technical knowledge. "A point you never hear in this debate is that most tech companies – and this is especially true with the Internet companies – have a broad range of employment categories," says Butch Wing, who heads the Silicon Valley Project, the West Coast beachhead of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition that Jesse Jackson created last year. "There's all sorts of good jobs at these companies that don't require software programming skills: public affairs, sales, marketing, finance and administration. You have the legal staff and secretaries and maintenance and technical support, which are typically entry-level or secondary-level jobs. At a lot of these Net companies, maybe 20 percent of the workforce is technically oriented."

Moreover, there's every indication that there are far more qualified, nonwhite, non-Asian engineers out there than the general scarcity of blacks and Latinos inside Internet companies would indicate. "A lack of qualified black and Latino engineers is enough of an excuse – if it's true," says the EEOC's Igasaki. "We don't take that as a given." NACME's Campbell bemoans the "alarmingly" high attrition rate among minority students studying engineering, but more than 10 percent graduate – a much higher rate of success than a casual stroll through most Internet startups would suggest.

"On the East Coast you see plenty of black engineers. It's nowhere near as rare as here," says Kevin Hinkston, an African-American engineer who worked at Hewlett-Packard (HWP) and IBM (IBM) before taking an executive position at NetNoir last December. "The Bay Area is a different place than back East. Maybe because people are more aware of race generally back East. Maybe it's because you see more African Americans in your everyday life [in the East], so the issue is right there in front of you. Here, it's like, 'If one walks in the door and is qualified, great, we'll hire. If one doesn't, well, I guess that means I don't have to deal with this issue.'"

The suggestion is that people in Silicon Valley are so proud that race isn't an issue in their lives that they pay it no mind – and, as a result, Silicon Valley becomes what one person called (ignoring, for the benefit of his punch line, the strong presence of Asians working the field) "the whitest place on earth."

Even the Valley's largest Internet firms are guilty of not trying very hard, if nothing else. Hinkston, who heads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Data Processors Association, makes it his business to attend the National Society of Black Engineers Conference held in Baltimore each year. "There's always between 20,000 and 30,000 college kids there," Hinkston says of the annual job fair. "I talk with a lot of them and always walk away impressed. It's like every resume I see, it's 3.5 or higher. These kids are all studying for an [electrical engineering degree], computer science, that kind of thing. It's a mix of kids from the historically black colleges and the usual East Coast colleges. All the big companies come: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, the telecoms, companies like Mobil (MINI) , the top 100 companies. But I've never seen a single Internet company there. These kids would love to work at a Yahoo (YHOO) or an ExciteAtHome, but those companies don't go to conferences like this.

"I don't doubt that many companies care about diversity, but I also recognize that it's just not a priority. To me the general attitude is, 'I've got the VCs on my case. I've got to build a company; I've got my competition breathing down my neck. Who has time for this?'" Hinkston says. "I also recognize that at a lot of companies, they just don't care. Their attitude is, 'If a talented African American pops up, I'll hire, but it's not my job to pursue anybody.'"

The Clinton administration recently embraced a Bay Area-born initiative, dubbed ClickStart, which, if funded, would make kids growing up in low-income homes eligible for a computer and Internet access at a greatly subsidized rate. A prime mover behind ClickStart is Wade Randlett, VP of business development at San Francisco-based Red Gorilla. Randlett, who is white, is quite a comer on the technology policy front. Last summer he helped organize a breakfast meeting for Jesse Jackson at the Hotel Sofitel in Santa Clara, Calif., drawing together more than a dozen CEOs to discuss potential solutions to the digital divide.

"The question is, how do you make tech more attractive as a career path, which mainly means asking how you get more kids interested in math and science," Randlett says. "The Chinese American community and the Indian American community, for a variety of reasons that are very complex and probably date back 1,000 years, put a lot of emphasis on math and science. Those groups consequently are well represented in Silicon Valley – in fact, you look around and say they're overrepresented, at least in terms of their proportion of the population. We want to get to the point where that same ethos is as strong in the black and Latino communities."

Yet even the 35-year-old Randlett, who has sat around and pulled apart the diversity question with the likes of Jesse Jackson and VP Al Gore, has to admit his own company has a long way to go. How many blacks and Latinos does Red Gorilla currently employ? "One of our most valuable people is this immensely talented Asian programmer," Randlett says. OK, but how many blacks and Latinos? "We had this one Hispanic programmer, on contract, who did all this absolutely great work for us. We begged him to take a permanent job." OK, but how many blacks and Latinos are actually on staff? Eventually he produces an answer: zero.

Red Gorilla is a small company, with only 25 employees. A company that small is unlikely to have a full-time personnel director, let alone a recruitment strategy or the resources to troll job fairs and conferences. Randlett, despite a life inside the crucible of an Internet startup, is taking the time to champion change in the wider world. And – it must be said – at least he was brave enough to return a phone call inquiring about his diversity policy.

Few others will. To get an idea of how different technology companies are faring on the diversity front – to see if the issue is even on the map of anyone but a small group of activists and government regulators – The Standard contacted a dozen Bay Area companies trying to cash in, one way or another, on the Internet. Seven of the 12 – Exodus Communications (EXDS) , Healtheon (HLTH) /WebMD, HP, Inktomi (INKT) , Network Associates (NETA) , Oracle (ORCL) and Webvan Group – never responded to messages. A spokesman for Sun (SUNW) Microsystems said his company would be taking "a pass" on the "opportunity" – a new VP of human resources would be starting in April, so of course the company couldn't comment until then. The head of PR at Yahoo responded only after a follow-up e-mail was sent to chief Yahoo Jerry Yang, but the answer was the same: no interview and certainly no breakdown of the racial makeup of Yahoo's workforce. The head of PR at ExciteAtHome promised to set up an interview with the company's human resources director, but she never followed through. "To be frank with you," eBay (EBAY) PR director Kevin Pursglove said, "the racial makeup of our workforce is something that's never come up." He, too, promised to set up an interview but never did.

For the record, The Standard's top brass also refused to give a racial breakdown of our own staff. "If we were to release figures, they'd not be entirely flattering," says CEO John Battelle. Finding qualified minorities has not been a priority until this point, Battelle adds, but a new HR director, who has specialized in diversity issues, is among the steps The Standard has taken to address the problem.

Martha Clark, VP of human resources at LookSmart (LOOK) , was among the few who returned a phone call. Clark readily confesses that LookSmart should be dedicating more of its energies to finding qualified minority applicants but so far a "massive Internet advertising campaign" has been the extent of the company's recruitment efforts. "When your priority is finding people immediately to make your company more viable, you're not in a position to initiate outreach and affirmative-action programs to the extent that you'd like," she says. Fifteen months ago, LookSmart employed less than 100 people. The company now has roughly 450 people working in its San Francisco main office and 650 employees worldwide. "We've had explosive growth in the past year," she adds. "We've been fighting for survival."

Clark says all the right things, including that the company is now starting to research ways of widening its pool of job applicants. "We are absolutely committed to bringing in more women and minority applications," she vows. She is particularly proud of the company's record in hiring and promoting women: Asked if she'd share a racial breakdown of the LookSmart workforce, she instead boasted that women account for 48 percent of the staff, including an impressive 47 percent of top management and executive positions. It turns out that 26 percent of the company's 650 workers are minorities: 15 percent Asian, 9 percent Latino, 2 percent black. That one in nine of the employees at LookSmart is either Latino or black might be a clue to why Clark was one of the few who bothered to call back.

"The key to change at a company is to have someone inside championing the cause," ShopNow's Walker says. "You need to have people already inside to raise awareness, and that will drive people's attention. If there's no champion inside a company, it's so easy to say, 'Oh, there must not be the talent,' and then move on to the next issue. ... To me, the business case is simple: There's this tremendous labor force available in African American and Latino communities that can drive tremendous value for shareholders of those companies."

Yet even Walker's company proved reluctant to share a profile of ShopNow's staff broken down by race. Walker had said he'd be happy to share the information, but follow-ups with underlings proved futile. The company is more than five years old and has been filing EEO-1s for several years running, but because the company has grown threefold in the past few months (mainly through acquisitions), a spokesman said ShopNow wouldn't share "outdated" information and that an accurate accounting would take at least a few weeks. But did we know that the company's president is Latino?

"Something I hear all the time when I talk to HR directors is that while there may be discrimination in this industry there's none at our company," Igasaki says. "But then when you ask why their numbers aren't higher, they say, 'We're doing all we can; the pipeline is dry.' But just as we're not going to take at face value the protestations of community groups, we're not going to take at face value the claims of these companies that say, 'We don't discriminate, we take whoever we can.' It's possible that these high-tech firms have blind spots, that they haven't looked all the places where people have the requisite skills. I also think it's possible that there are companies out there that just don't want to hire blacks or women or Latinos or older people or whoever. We can't say for certain that that's not the case until we have more facts in front of us."

The EEOC receives roughly 80,000 complaints a year from individuals alleging employment discrimination. Igasaki admits that only a tiny fraction of those are filed against tech companies. "We're talking about maybe a few dozen cases a year – if that," he says. Yet the EEOC is free to investigate any company – or any industry, for that matter – as it sees fit. "There are people saying that we shouldn't even look unless we get a specific complaint saying, 'This company and these people discriminated against me,'" Igasaki adds. "But that's not the way our law was written, so we go beyond that."

Igasaki can't recall what precisely prompted his agency to zero in on Silicon Valley, but the industry's attitude played a role. "Frankly, when I hear this claim that in high tech they don't discriminate, that makes me deeply suspicious," he says. "Why do people inside high tech think they can filter out their prejudices and only hire based on skill, when people in other industries can't? To my way of thinking, there's no industry or group of people who are beyond prejudice and free of discrimination. People naturally discriminate – we tend to associate with people like ourselves. So I think we need to be very aware of this tendency so we don't discriminate. Part of the way to deal with discrimination is introspection, which can't happen if you don't think there's any problem."

Igasaki cited some other factors behind the agency's interest: The "volume of complaints by community groups" was another factor, as was a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle in May 1998, headlined "High-Tech Boom a Bust for Blacks, Latinos." Written by staff reporters Julia Angwin and Laura Castaneda, the article was based largely on the EEO-1s (obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request) submitted to the federal government by 33 leading Silicon Valley firms. The article documented the obvious: Whites and Asians were overrepresented; blacks and Latinos were grossly underrepresented. The Bay Area workforce is 14 percent Latino, yet only half of that – 7 percent – worked at those 33 companies. Similarly, blacks make up 8 percent of the local workforce but accounted for only 4 percent of the combined workforce at these firms. Not surprisingly, blacks and Latinos were far more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to work in lower-rung jobs.

"These companies say they really want to hire black engineers, but they don't advertise in the black newspapers; they don't recruit at the historically black colleges; they don't participate in job fairs," says John Templeton, the moving force behind a group called the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley. "I'm always hearing these high-tech and Internet companies claim that they can't find any blacks who are qualified, but the truth is they never take the most basic of steps to reach the people they're supposedly so interested in reaching."

Inspired by the Chronicle article, Templeton, who is black, initiated a study of his own. He looked at the hiring records of 253 technology firms that filed EEO-1s in 1996 and 1997. His findings mirrored the Chronicle's. The same percentage (3.7 percent) identified themselves as African American, and there was the same dwindling of percentage as one moved up the corporate hierarchy: Only 2.8 percent of those employees classified as "professional" and 2.3 percent of those classified as "officials and managers" were black.

"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 225,000 African Americans out there working as systems engineers, programmers and systems analysts," Templeton says. "So in other words, black engineers are finding IT work in universities, government agencies, hospitals and banks – just not in Silicon Valley." Part of the problem, he maintains, is that technology companies are so quick to search overseas for talent that they don't stop to ask whether there are eager and qualified people of color closer to home. "When these companies advertise for programmers in Bombay but not in D.C. or Atlanta, guess what? They're going to be hiring a lot of Indian programmers but not many African Americans," says Templeton, who runs an Oakland-based publishing firm called Electron Access. He's also author of Silicon Ceiling: Solutions for Closing the Digital Divide, published last year.

In many ways, Templeton has been the shadow impresario choreographing the diversity debate, ensuring that the issue remains in the public eye, even as he has remained largely behind the scenes. He is among those with whom EEOC regulators met early on in its Silicon Valley investigation. He has also pressured the Labor Department and the Congressional Black Caucus to crack down on high-flying technology companies that have no affirmative-action plans in place, though they are required to do so by law. (All companies above a certain size that do business with the federal government must establish an affirmative-action recruiting plan.)

It also was Templeton who convinced Jesse Jackson to establish a Silicon Valley outpost, and hence he who was the mastermind behind the whirlwind of television and newspaper coverage of Jackson's high-profile visit to the Valley last February. (Templeton was assisted toward that end by Cypress Semiconductor (CY) CEO T.J. Rodgers, the Valley's resident loudmouth, who went on TV to describe Jackson as "the seagull that flies in, craps on everything and flies out." In case the rhetoric wasn't turned up high enough, Templeton subsequently issued a press release declaring chipmaker Cypress "a white-supremacist hate group.") The Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition this month is moving into an office in East Palo Alto, Calif., a turn of events certain to spark more news stories into the foreseeable future.

"To us, all of this comes down to a policy decision," says the group's resident activist, Butch Wing. "According to reports, there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in Silicon Valley. One alternative to filling that need over the next three to five years is to raise the [H1-B] quotas and bring in more people from abroad. But another possibility is to create a battle plan – to develop a plan with the community, with elected officials and with the help of groups like ours to train, educate and prepare youth and other residents from the local region to fill those jobs."

For the moment, Igasaki has mostly good news for Internet companies. "We're focusing mainly on companies that have been around a long time, because they have a long track record of hiring," he says. "Some of these newer companies, their hiring practices may trouble us, but they don't have a track record of hiring that we can examine over time. It's harder to make a case if we can't show a pattern of discriminatory behavior." If Igasaki's agency can demonstrate that, over time, a company has fallen consistently short of a workforce that reflects the talents and racial makeup of the existing local labor pool, the burden of proof switches from the EEOC, which otherwise would have to prove discrimination, to the company, which would have to prove its practices are not discriminatory.

Yet that's not to say that any individual company, no matter what its age, is in the clear. "We're looking for whatever information we can get," Igasaki adds. "It could be a young company or an established one – or it can have nothing whatsoever to do with race. So much of the concern raised in the media and by community groups has focused on race. But there's gender issues. There's also issues around age, which is something we're very concerned about, given things we're picking up on in these new industries, especially the Internet companies.

"Another concern relates to the so-called glass ceiling. There's certainly quite a pipeline of Asians and Asian American talent into high tech, but you don't yet see that reflected at the managerial and executive ranks. This is something else we're looking at closely. The numbers suggest that the same glass ceiling that stands in the way of women stands in the way of Asian Americans," Igasaki notes. ("In a way, Asians have to deal with the worst stigma in terms of breaking into management," says NetNoir's Kevin Hinkston, who has worked closely with upper-level executives at both HP and IBM. "The general stereotype you hear is that they're great technologywise but not good with people, so they don't make good managers.")

Companies that end up on the wrong side of the EEOC may think they have nothing to fear beyond a modest fine and a stern warning to do better in the future. That's what Mitsubishi presumed when the agency hit the company with a suit alleging widespread sexual discrimination at its Illinois plant. Mitsubishi ended up settling the case out of court in 1998, agreeing to pay $34 million in damages. It also agreed to strict EEOC oversight with hiring and recruitment – a concession that no doubt intrudes on the company's day-to-day operations.

"I've seen damages ranging from as little as tens of thousands of dollars to monetary awards in the tens of millions," Igasaki says. "It depends on the kind of discrimination we find and how overt it is. There's also the legal costs involved, not to mention the damage done to a company's name. If a company is selling a product to the public and suddenly that company is in the headlines for a charge of discrimination, I'd have to imagine that's going to hurt its image."

Typically, the EEOC is eager to settle cases out of court with companies it sues. For one thing, discrimination is difficult to prove; in addition, a legal imbroglio eats up resources, a prime consideration at an agency that must investigate at least 80,000 employment discrimination cases a year. "The idea is to resolve as many cases as possible, so the odds are always good that we'll settle a case," says the off-the-record EEOC source quoted earlier. "But in the case of the technology field, we wouldn't want to settle out of court. We would want press coverage. We would want people throughout the industry to notice we're here." When asked to comment about that statement, Igasaki would only say that "every suit will be looked at on a case-by-case basis."

Some might say Igasaki's office is guilty of grandstanding. Just as the suit against Microsoft immeasurably raised the profile of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, maybe a few high-profile employment discrimination cases would do the same for the EEOC. "Nothing would make us happier than to find out there's no discrimination in the high-tech field," Igasaki says. "We'd love to be proven wrong. But, let me add I also don't believe, based both on prior experience and through our investigation so far, that we're going to find that this is an industry above discrimination."

Even after a year of fact-finding, Igasaki is reluctant to elaborate further. "There's certainly a problem," he says. "There's a general lack of diversity that's obviously widespread. Yet whether that indicates there's discrimination remains to be seen. We don't assume just because there's a disparity that there's not a good reason for that disparity. So I'd say there's ample reason for concern when looking at the high-technology field – but it's hard to say how much of that is due to actual discrimination."

The term "high-technology field" seems only slightly less moldy than "information superhighway." But Igasaki seems nonplussed when asked if he really knows enough about this world to pass judgement. "I may not know much about technology," he says, "but we don't know much about making cars, either. Yet we go after the auto industry when we see employment discrimination. We know hiring. We know discrimination. And that's what we look for."