Tag Archives: income inequality

The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

by NeilMcgehee Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law meant to close the wage gap between working men and women. But more than 50 years later, women on average earn just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. And according to a new report by the National Partnership for Women and Families that was released before National Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the persistent wage gap means women lose a combined $500 billion every year.

“It is unacceptable that the wage gap has persisted, punishing the country’s women and families for decades,” wrote Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership, in a press release. “At a time when women’s wages are so critical to the economic well-being of families, the country is counting on lawmakers to work together to advance strong, fair and family friendly workplace policies that would promote equal pay.”

The National Partnership used Census Bureau data to analyze the wages of workers in every state and Washington, DC, and broke down the numbers by state and congressional district, as well as by demographic information. Louisiana has the biggest pay gap (women there are paid 65 cents for every dollar), and DC, with just a 10 cent difference, has the smallest.

The gender pay gap is even larger for women of color. African American women are paid 60 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and Latin American women make even less, at 55 cents for every dollar. All in all, the pay gap amounts to more than $10,800 in lost wages for the average woman each year.

That’s costly for families, many of which rely on mothers as the sole or primary breadwinner. According to the National Partnership, mothers are the heads of households in nearly 40 percent of families. Yet the wage gap for mothers is even larger than for women overall: Women with children are paid 71 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, and single mothers make only 58 cents for every dollar to fathers.

Wage inequality got national attention in March when five high-profile players on the women’s national soccer team filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the US Soccer Federation of gender-based wage discrimination. The players—who last year brought in their third World Cup gold medal and are projected to rake in $18 million in revenue next year—say they are paid four times less than their male counterparts.

“Simply put, we’re sick of being treated like second-class citizens,” wrote Carli Lloyd, who scored a record-breaking hat trick in the final World Cup game against Japan last year, in a New York Times op-ed on her decision to file the complaint. “It wears on you after a while. And we are done with it.”

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The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

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Bernie Sanders to Speak at Vatican City About Social Justice

by LavernBousquet Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders has accepted an invitation to speak at the Vatican for a conference on social justice next week. The April 15 event, which will be hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, is scheduled to cover a number of the Democratic presidential hopeful’s signature campaign issues, including income inequality and the environment.

Sanders’ appearance at Vatican City will come just days before the New York primary on April 19.

“I am delighted to have been invited by the Vatican to a meeting on restoring social justice and environmental sustainability to the world economy,” Sanders announced in a statement on Friday.

“Pope Francis has made clear that we must overcome ‘the globalization of indifference’ in order to reduce economic inequalities, stop financial corruption, and protect the natural environment. That is our challenge in the United States and in the world.”

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Bernie Sanders to Speak at Vatican City About Social Justice

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San Francisco Just Did Something Really Cool for Working Parents

by JacobHaralson Posted on April 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, San Francisco became the first US city to require that all new parents—mothers, fathers, and same-sex partners—get fully paid parental leave for six weeks after giving birth or adopting a child. The new law follows the efforts by tech companies in the area, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Twitter, to offer employees robust parental leave policies in an effort to increase work-life balance.

California is one of only five states that already offers some form of parental leave, but this new city-wide law is one of the most generous in the country. Workers in the Golden State now get six weeks off, but they receive just 55 percent of their pay. New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws, and Washington state recently passed a parental leave law that has not taken effect. In March, the New York legislature approved a parental leave policy that will cover 12 weeks of paid time off, though the law will go into effect in 2018 and will initially cover only 50 percent of average pay.

The United States, which guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave, is the only developed country that does not guarantee all new parents paid parental leave. Expectant mothers get 18 weeks of paid leave in Australia, 39 weeks in the UK, and 480 days in Sweden.

For workers in both California and New York, paid parental leave was one of two victories this week. Governors in both states also signed legislation Monday that will increase the minimum wage in each state to $15 an hour, to be phased in over about seven years. The higher wages, which are more than double the federal minimum wage, will affect roughly 60 million Americans. President Obama responded to the wage increases by asking Congress to follow suit.

“Since I first called on Congress to increase the federal minimum wage in 2013, 18 states and more than 40 cities and counties have acted on their own—thanks to the strong leadership of elected officials, businesses, and workers who organized and fought so hard for the economic security families deserve,” he said in a statement. “Now Congress needs to act to raise the federal minimum wage and expand access to paid leave for all Americans.”

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San Francisco Just Did Something Really Cool for Working Parents

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Here’s a New Way to Judge Your State’s Schools

by WilhelmMunson Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last time I called Diane Ravitch, our country’s leading education historian and one of the most vocal voices in education reform, she was on another call with the producers of The Daily Show. It was 2011, and The Daily Show was about to air a segment about the low salaries that teachers earn and Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s intentions to cut teachers pay and reduce workers’ collective bargaining powers. The producers were calling to invite Ravitch to come on the show to talk to Jon Stewart about teachers and education reform.

At the time, reducing the power of teachers’ unions, promoting charter schools, and using standardized test scores to weed out “bad teachers” and close “failing schools” had become the most popular silver bullets of the education reform movement. Michelle Rhee, the former chief of DC schools, had become the most prominent public face of these kinds of education reforms—ones that Ravitch was critiquing on The Daily Show. Rhee had come out in support of Walker’s policies.

In 2010, Newsweek published a cover story called “The Key to Saving American Education: We must fire bad teachers.” That same year, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Rhee announced that she was forming a national organization called Students First to promote her ideology among state policymakers. In 2013, Students First came out with “report cards” that graded each state’s performance against the reform movement’s education agenda. The report cards, like the policies Rhee and her allies pushed, received frequent—and fairly positive—media coverage.

When commentators and reporters needed a countervoice, Ravitch became the go-to progressive critic. She was not the only prominent academic who questioned the attacks on teachers, but she was the most vocal, thanks in part to her media savvy and punchy writing—and her 125,000 Twitter followers. In 2013, Ravitch and her allies launched the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to counter what she calls the “right-wing propaganda.” Her organization pushed forward its own brand of education reform policies: more equitable school funding, early childhood education, integrated classrooms, reduced use of testing, and stronger professional development for teachers. This Tuesday, the Network for Public Education published its own version of state report cards, rating every state using 29 factors, such as policies on testing, school finance, teacher pay and rates of attrition, mentoring programs for teachers, and controls on charter school expansion, among others. No states received an overall grade of “A,” but Iowa, Nebraska, and Vermont got the highest grades. New Jersey was the only state to get an “A” for equitable funding. Alabama, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Vermont all scored high for rejecting the use of tests to punish teachers or students.

Things are not going so well for the proponents of test-based and market-driven education reforms, Ravitch wrote on her blog a few months before her group released its report cards. She then went on to cite research—much of it included in the report cards—showing the failed promises of Rhee-style reforms: Charter schools on average don’t produce higher test scores than public schools; online charter schools perform much worse than public schools; teacher evaluations that include test scores haven’t helped to “weed out the bad teachers” and identify the best; achievement gaps haven’t changed. “Michelle Rhee has stepped away from the national stage, into apparent obscurity,” Ravitch wrote, “even though her organization continues to fund right-wing anti-public school state-level candidates.”

My second call to Ravitch was this past Tuesday, to ask her about the organization’s report cards, and the surprises her team found. Ravitch was joined by Carol Burris, the executive director of Network for Public Education.

Image courtesy of the Network for Public Education

Mother Jones: Why are these new state report cards important?

Diane Ravitch: There were all of these state reports coming out from right-wing groups like Students First and the American Legislative Exchange Council arguing that the definition of success is getting rid of public education and taking away any right that teachers might have. These create a climate when there is report card after report card agreeing that the future should be privately managed charter schools. There is nobody on the other side other than the unions, which are immediately discredited. There need to be two sides to the debate. Right now the education conversation is presented as what Students First is promoting is all that works.

We felt it was important to set up this other criteria and show how effective school systems operate: They are adequately funded, have preschools; they make sure that their teachers are professionals, and they don’t give away their authority. This is how the best nations in the world operate. They don’t operate through vouchers and charters.

MJ: Why is New Jersey the only state that got an ‘A’ in “School Finance”?

DR: New Jersey had court rulings that required the state to adjust its school funding. They have done a lot of redistribution to make sure that poor districts get more resources. What they still haven’t done anything about is segregation. Today they have a group of districts—called the Abbott districts low-income districts that receive higher levels of funding per student than the average spending in the state—that get a lot of money but are intensely segregated. These schools remain in high poverty and segregated areas, like Newark.

MJ: How is New Jersey doing with improving kids’ test scores and closing the gap between black, Latino, and white students?

DR: If you look at National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP scores in New Jersey, it’s one of the highest-scoring states in the country, even though it has very poor, low-performing districts. When it comes to achievement gaps, there is nothing to brag about, but it is doing much better than Washington, DC. In 2008, we had a Time magazine story with Michelle Rhee on the cover telling us that DC was going to lead the way in how education reform should be done, but DC continues to have an achievement gap that’s twice that of other cities and twice that of New Jersey.

MJ: Your report says the gap in spending per student in poor schools compared to rich schools has grown 44 percent in the last decade. Why?

DR: One important reason is that the federal policy has tilted completely toward testing and accountability and away from equity. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was all about equity and equitable resources for low-income students, and then in the 1990s that began to change. In DC, policymakers think that if we can only have high enough standards, tough enough tests, and hold people accountable, we can close the achievement gap. And it hasn’t happened. Yet the new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is based on the same test-based and market-driven framework and ideology, except it lets the states do it.

MJ: Research consistently shows that when teachers are allowed to learn on their jobs and have a voice in decision-making processes, kids’ achievement improves. Typically, the presence of such practices is measured as the hours teachers are paid to collaborate and plan. That wasn’t in your report. Why?

Carol Burris: There are so many factors we wished we could have included, but couldn’t. Francesca Wilson, the researcher at the University of Arizona who worked with us, was able to get limited data from the National Center of Educational Statistics on this issue. But once we put the report cards out, we hope that people will suggest what other factors we should be including. In general, it was a challenge for us to find recent data and cross-national sources for everything.

MJ: Your report cards also don’t include any student test scores or graduation or college acceptance rates. Why is that?

CB: The point of the report card is not to judge individual schools or even to judge kids. We wanted to look at factors that states can control through policies. If you change specific research-based practices that we identified, then the outcomes that you can expect would be higher test scores. But to use something like NAEP standardized scores without proper controls for poverty, it didn’t make sense to us. We really wanted to look at the “inputs” of educational systems, such as funding or class size, that research shows increase achievement.

MJ: What impact do you hope to have?

CB: We hope the readers will think deeply about the path that we are on and engage in grassroots campaigns at the district or state house level. We need to make sure that policymakers who are truly committed to public schools move beyond popular silver bullets that have failed in the last decade and pay attention to policies that are actually effective.

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Here’s a New Way to Judge Your State’s Schools

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Surprise! Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Helps Donald Trump

by GiuseppBurgett Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in September, Donald Trump put forth a tax plan that pledged to help middle-class Americans and take aim at the “hedge fund guys.” That four-page proposal was criticized for being vague on the details. It also raised eyebrows with its promise to be revenue-neutral.

On Tuesday, an independent think tank weighed in and called bullshit on Trump’s populist guise.

The analysis, released by the Tax Policy Center, found that the Republican frontrunner’s proposal would largely benefit only the wealthiest Americans by giving the top 0.1 percent an average of $1.3 million a year in tax cuts. Middle class Americans would see their taxes reduced by just $2,700 annually.

The plan would also wipe out revenue by a staggering $9.5 trillion over the next decade, according to the TPC,

“The revenue losses from this plan are really enormous,” Len Burman, director of the TPC, said. “Basically it would negate all the economic benefits if we were running deficits anywhere near as large as we’re projecting here.”

This latest analysis proves, once again, Trump’s tax plan and his insistence that it would cost billionaires like him a “fortune” is, as our Kevin Drum noted, the Lie of the Year.

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Surprise! Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Helps Donald Trump

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These Schools Saddling Students With Tons of Debt Aren’t the Ones You Expected

by ChristiXYQ Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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The student loan crisis may bring to mind 22-year-old graduates from four-year colleges trying to figure out how to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And while this image may have been accurate before the recession, today’s reality is more complicated: According to a recent report released by the Brookings Institution, the rise in federal borrowing and loan defaults is being fueled by smaller loans to “non-traditional borrowers,” or students attending for-profit universities and, to a lesser extent, community colleges.

As Mother Jones has reported in the past, compared with four-year college graduates, nontraditional borrowers are poorer, older, likely to drop out, and, if they do graduate, unlikely to face bright career prospects. The median for-profit university grad owes about $10,000 in federal loans but makes only about $21,000 per year.

The report, based on newly released federal data on student borrowing and earnings records, shows just how much the economics of higher education have transformed since the recession. In 2000, the 25 colleges whose students owed the most federal debt were primarily public or nonprofit, with New York University taking the lead. By 2014, 13 of the top 25 were for-profit universities. In the same period, the amount of student debt nearly quadrupled to surpass $1.1 trillion, and the rate of borrowers who defaulted on loans doubled.

So what happened? During the recession, students poured into colleges to make themselves more marketable in a crummy economy. Community colleges, depleted from plunging state tax revenues, couldn’t expand to account for this exodus from the job market, so many students—and their loans—ended up at the quickly expanding for-profit universities, which promise short courses in tangible skills.

But students graduating from these colleges have notoriously dim job opportunities—some of the colleges have shut down in recent years after Department of Education probes found them to target low-income students and misrepresent the likelihood of finding a job post-graduation. So with the subsequent influx of students back into the job market—and, for many of them, into low-wage work or unemployment—thousands are stuck with debt.

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These Schools Saddling Students With Tons of Debt Aren’t the Ones You Expected

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This Chart Will Make You Even More Pissed Off About Your Ballooning Student Debt

by AlenaWhiting Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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For the tens of thousands of college students who are taking out another year’s worth of debt in preparation for the start of classes, here’s a rage-inducing data point: Many universities spend way more managing their investment portfolios than they do assisting students with tuition.

A New York Times op-ed published Wednesday by Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego, lays out this disparity. Fleischer cited Yale University, which paid its fund managers nearly $743 million in 2014 but gave out just $170 million in scholarships. He also noted that many universities, large and small, public and private, show the same imbalance in spending. “We’ve lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the primary beneficiaries of a university’s endowment,” he writes. “The private-equity folks get cash; students take out loans.”

Fleischer provided Mother Jones with more of his data, which is gleaned from tax forms, financial statements, and annual reports. Here’s how the numbers shake out at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. On average, these four wealthy, elite universities spend 70 percent more on managing their investment portfolios than they do on tuition assistance. (Complete scholarship data for 2014 was not available, and some investment management fees are estimated.)

That disparity is even more glaring when you consider the tax benefits fund managers derive from working with universities. Fleischer notes that investors typically pay their fund managers about 20 percent of their investment profits. That money, called carried interest, is taxed at a lower rate for fund managers, who can claim it as capital gains instead of income.

Some universities justify the high management fees by arguing that they ensure top financial performance for their endowments. It’s true that these portfolios have done quite well: Harvard’s endowment is nearly $36 billion, and Yale’s is more than $25 billion, a 50 percent increase since 2009. But, writes Fleischer, a little less endowment hoarding and a little more spending, both on financial aid and other educational goals, would still allow universities’ money to grow generously while eliminating the hefty tuition increases that force students to take on burdensome debt.

Fleischer proposes that when Congress moves to reauthorize the Higher Education Act this term, lawmakers should require universities with assets greater than $100 million to spend 8 percent of their endowment each year. Even doing that, universities would likely continue to get exponentially richer. As he notes, the average endowment has grown 9.2 percent annually for the past 20 years (after accounting for 4 percent annual spending), a more than respectable rate of return.

Elite schools do offer need-blind admission and some of the best financial aid for low-income students. But for many students, tuition increases still mean more loans: On paper, many middle-class students often don’t qualify for large scholarships, but their families also can’t afford more than $50,000 in annual tuition. More generous allocation of endowments could help to roll back that trend while also funding more teaching and research. As Fleischer writes in the Times, “Only fund managers would be worse off.”

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This Chart Will Make You Even More Pissed Off About Your Ballooning Student Debt

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The Obama Administration Will Force Companies To Show How Out of Touch CEO Pay Really Is

by ITAVinceyt Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Soon, you will be able to see just how bad income inequality is within major US companies.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission finalized a long delayed rule that will force all publicly traded companies to publish a ratio between the amount it pays its CEO and the median salary at the company. The rule was finalized by a 3-2 vote. Companies will need to start revealing this information starting in 2017. “After too much delay, the Securities and Exchange Commission did the right thing today,” Jim Lardner, a spokesperson for the liberal Americans for Financial Reform, said in a statement Wednesday.

The rule comes from the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a law signed by President Obama in 2010 to address the Wall Street crash. Democrats slipped in this provision as a means to try to publicly shame companies that reward CEOs with overly lavish compensation, but liberals and consumer advocates had grown increasingly frustrated with the delays in getting this rule in place. Democratic senators had urged the SEC to hurry up, and earlier this summer Elizabeth Warren attacked SEC Chair Mary Jo White for being unclear about the timing on the rule (she also had other complaints against the SEC). “You have now been SEC Chair for over two years, and to date, your leadership of the Commission has been extremely disappointing,” Warren wrote in a letter to White.

Hillary Clinton joined the cause right before the SEC finally acted. In a speech two weeks ago, the Democratic front-runner specifically called out the agency for dragging its feet on this proposal. “There is no excuse for taking five years to get this done,” she said during one of her first economic speeches of the 2016 campaign. “Workers have a right to know whether executive pay at their company has gotten out of balance—and so does the public.”

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The Obama Administration Will Force Companies To Show How Out of Touch CEO Pay Really Is

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The Rent Is Too Damn High in San Francisco, and It’s Putting People on the Street

by BridgetteKesteve Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new report shows that San Francisco is still struggling to house its homeless. According to the 2015 Point in Time Count—an in-person tally conducted in cities around the country every two years—the city’s homeless population has remained roughly constant over the past decade, even as the numbers of chronically homeless people continue to decline. This shift, homeless advocates say, points to a disturbing link between homelessness and the skyrocketing cost of housing in the city.

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From 2013 to 2015, San Francisco’s homeless population increased by around 200 people to a total of 6,686. The number of chronically homeless has, however, decreased by 12 percent since 2013 and has fallen close to 60 percent in the past six years. (Chronically homeless refers to those who have spent more than a year on the streets, often with a disabling condition like mental illness or substance abuse.) Close to half of the homeless people surveyed by the city said they lost their housing because they could not afford rent; an additional 17 percent said they could not find housing.

“Housing instability is a trend we have been hearing a lot about nationwide, particularly in high-cost areas like San Francisco,” says Elina Bravve, a Senior Research Analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an advocacy and research organization. After the recession, she explains, more people began renting. Now higher-income renters are driving up demand and price. “That puts a lot of pressure on the low-income market,” she says. “It is definitely a problem that will continue over the next few decades.”

According to a NLIHC report released earlier this year, a person needs to make more than to $31 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city and around $40 an hour for a two-bedroom. At $12.21 an hour, the local minimum wage is higher than average but it doesn’t even come close. The problem isn’t limited to expensive cities. The same NLIHC report finds that the 2015 national “Housing Wage” for a two-bedroom apartment is $19.35—more than double the federal minimum wage and far out of reach for renters earning the average wage of $15.16.

The Obama administration has set a goal of eradicating chronic homelessness by 2017. But Bravve says fixes for the non-chronic homeless population are subject to the ebbs and flows of political will, especially when budgets are tight and most federal and local programs don’t target this population. In Los Angeles County, for example, rental prices have risen more four times faster than wages since 2000. The LA Times reported in January that city funding for affordable homes had fallen by $82 million between 2008 and 2014. In May, the county’s count found a 12 percent increase in its homeless population. It also found an 86 percent spike in numbers of tents, makeshift shelters, or people sleeping in vehicles, which it attributed in part to housing affordability.

Chronic homelessness is declining largely because of the effectiveness of “Housing First” programs that provide permanent housing to individuals who need the most (and most expensive) services. The strategy, which enabled Utah to house nearly all of its chronically homeless people can also provides a huge boon to local budget, saving around $43,000 a year per person.

However, this strategy isn’t designed to help low-income people who are not chronically homeless. Housing First’s savings start to dry up when it comes to housing people who don’t require the same level of services. This is one reason why analysts like Bravve emphasize the need for cities to invest in affordable housing. In San Francisco, she says, that doesn’t just mean increasing the supply of housing but “preserving what already exists and making sure that it doesn’t end up turning into condos.” The Housing Balance Report, released last week, showed that even though the city built thousands of new affordable housing units between 2004 and 2014, it only had a net gain of more than 1,100 new affordable units.

Just south of San Francisco, Santa Clara County has made housing affordability a priority—and it has paid off. Like San Francisco, the home of Silicon Valley has one of the most expensive rental markets in the nation. The wages necessary to rent a typical one-bedroom are close to three times as much as the local minimum wage. San Jose, like San Francisco, ranks among the top ten cities with the highest numbers of homeless people.

But this year, San Jose saw a 15 percent drop in its homeless population. “San Jose has been a leader in building affordable housing over the past 15 years,” says Ray Bramson, the homeless response manager for the San Jose Department of Housing. “We have 17,000 units in our portfolio and we have great low-income housing for working families and folks who need support in the community.” With more than 6,500 people still on the streets, he says the city remains committed to creating more affordable housing.

This year the county has issued 1,000 project-based vouchers that provide funds for contractors to produce affordable housing units, is working to convert more hotels and motels into low-income housing, and is looking into models like temporary tiny homes to house people coming off the streets, while more units are being built. It also invested $91.5 million in on housing and homeless services, and an earmarked an additional $6.7 million specifically for permanent supportive housing.

They still have a long way to go—more than 6,500 people are still without homes. But Bramson says the numbers show that the strategies are working. “I think if we can show that we can create affordability in a community like San Jose and areas of Silicon Valley,” he says, “we have great potential to house people anywhere in this country.”

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The Rent Is Too Damn High in San Francisco, and It’s Putting People on the Street

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Jesse Jackson Is Taking on Silicon Valley’s Epic Diversity Problem

by MikaylaU07 Posted on June 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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In May 2014, the Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled from his home in Chicago to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, to address the search giant’s annual shareholder meeting. Technology isn’t what you would call a core area for the 73-year-old civil rights leader, who carries an old-school flip phone and oversees a website, Rainbowpush.org, that looks like a relic from the GeoCities era. But Jackson had a bone to pick. Despite Google’s mission to make the world’s data “universally accessible and useful,” it had been fighting for years to stop the release of federal data on diversity in its workforce. “There should be nothing to hide, and much to be proud of and promote,” Jackson told the company’s executives after politely requesting its diversity stats. “I ask you, in the name of all you represent, to pursue this mission.”

Ask him anything! On Wednesday, July 1, Jesse Jackson will be on Reddit, answering your questions on this and other topics from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. ET (8:30-9:45 a.m. PT). Photo by John H. White, via Wikipedia Commons.

David Drummond, the company’s only black high-level executive, sized up Jackson, who stood out amid the mostly white crowd. “Many of the companies in the Valley have been reluctant to divulge that data, including Google,” he responded. “And quite frankly, I think we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re wrong about that.”

The exchange was the public culmination of some behind-the-scenes arm wrestling that was vintage Jesse Jackson. Drummond, 52, was an old friend of the reverend who had volunteered for his 1988 presidential campaign and helped launch Jackson’s first tech initiative, the Silicon Valley Project, 11 years later. The two men had met quietly a month or so earlier at Google HQ, and again around the time of the shareholder meeting. Drummond knew Jackson would ask for the stats, and Jackson knew Drummond would agree to release them. Two weeks later, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock, did just that. “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” he said, upon revealing that the company’s overall workforce was only 30 percent female, 3 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black.

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Jesse Jackson Is Taking on Silicon Valley’s Epic Diversity Problem

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