[jcizzle]

Yes, it does. The number that matters is number of available black and hispanic tech workers versus the number of employed black and hispanic tech workers. If there was a large discrepancy between unemployment rates for technology workers along racial lines, then we could claim discrimination by companies.

Instead, what you and this article are talking about is that perhaps not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry. In which case, the failure would be on a lot of variables: community, family, schools, socioeconomic status, etc.

Blaming a company for not hiring non-existent people is sure great for Jesse Jackson's business model, though.

[DerpDerpDerp]

It's also possible that there is a legitimate reason (from a business perspective) they'd preferentially hired white tech workers, such as socioeconomic class leading to better training. (We see this effect in other places.)

I highly doubt that many of the confounding variables (age; exposure over time; socioeconomic status; etc) have been ruled out to come up with that statistic.

Not that I don't think there's a problem, just saying, the businesses might not be racist so much as minorities underperform (relative to their potential) because of socioeconomic factors. If that's truly what's happening, I'd argue that the place to combat that is the economics of the situation, and not attacking businesses for making prudent decisions.

[alukima]

I never, ever blamed the companies, I agree that " not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry".