Nearly two-thirds of U.S. consumers surveyed in a new report said they feel like brands have done little to nothing to follow through on the anti-racism pledges they made last summer. Big name brands like Snapchat, adidas, Yelp, and PepsiCo made promises to improve their diversity and inclusion efforts following protests due to the murder of George Floyd. A year later and 34 percent of consumers said brands had done little to tackle their internal racial problems, while 27 percent of consumers believe they have done even less than that. “ Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were, by volume, the largest demonstrations in American history. As a result, they have had a serious lasting effect on both the national conversation around race, as well as the responsibility of businesses to do their part in tackling racism,” GWI Trends Analyst Doug Gorman said in a press release. “Now more than ever, consumers are actually holding brands accountable for their Corporate Social Responsibility...

One in three BIPOC tech employees feel discriminated against by their employers, a new report finds. While a third of minority tech workers aren’t feeling comfortable at work, 67% of them said their company has a diversity and inclusion team that’s supposed to be focused on making sure they feel welcomed and supported, according to information provided to AfroTech. These findings were published by global data and market research company Savanta. Lead researchers Sadia Corey and Daniel Garcia wanted to publish this report after the civil unrest that swept the nation last year. “We really felt like after the movement from the summer, George Floyd’s death and some of the protests that were happening, we wanted to keep the conversation going and bring some statistics to some feelings and sentiments that we already know about in the U.S. workplace,” Corey told AfroTech. As part of Savanta’s Black Lives Matter: Everywhere, Amplifying the voices of minorities in the workplace report, there...

This article was originally published on 04/17/2019 As artificial intelligence gains popularity, members of the public have started to notice how it seems to perpetuate discrimination. With situations like Google Photos misclassifying Black people as gorillas and Amazon’s recruiting tool that taught itself men are the preferred candidates, AI’s problems are clear. In a report released this year , researchers from AI Now stated the industry is facing a “diversity crisis.” Researchers also raised important questions about efforts to improve diversity and AI’s entanglement with old pseudosciences. According to the report, more than 80 percent of professionals in AI are men. At Facebook and Google, women make up only 15 percent and 10 percent of AI research staff, respectively. The data is even worse for Black workers, though, where only 2.5 percent of Google’s workforce is Black, while Facebook and Microsoft sit at 4 percent. Researchers caution that efforts to “focus on women in tech”...

A new U.K. government report has found that big tech companies — like Amazon, Google, and Facebook — are in need of some serious new antitrust rules. Commissioned by Britain’s finance minister, the Digital Competition Expert Panel’s report pushes back against the idea that digital platforms produce “natural monopolies.” Instead, the report points out how big tech companies are stifling competition and innovation, calling for the U.K.’s laws to be “updated for the digital age” because competition among digital platforms is “not only necessary but also possible.” Jason Furman, former chief economic advisor to Barack Obama, chaired the group behind the report. He told CNBC , “The digital sector has created substantial benefits but these have come at the cost of increasing dominance of the few companies which is limiting competition and consumer choice and innovation.” Take some of the recent mergers in big tech as an example — Amazon now owns WholeFoods plus Facebook acquired both...