Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced on Tuesday that the company has set up a $300 million fund to improve its workforce diversity within five years.
The computer chipmaker hopes to attract more female professionals, blacks and other minorities within the established timeframe. The company is dominated by white and Asian men, and is similar to other tech companies in that sense, but Intel stands out for having the highest percentage of men.
Intel released its diversity report in 2013 which showed that only 24 percent of its overall workforce is composed of women, and ethnicity figures revealed that four percent of the workers are black and eight percent are Hispanic or Latino. Even its leadership department needs to improve and get more women to take on roles as leaders; only 10 percent of the higher ranked positions are occupied by women. Intel currently has nearly 100,000 workers worldwide with more than half based in the United States.
The $300-million fund will be used to provide scholarships to women and the minorities from various colleges and universities to give them an equal chance to work for a company like Intel.
"This is the right time to make a bold statement," Krzanich said in a phone interview with the New York Times. "It's kind of Intel's culture. We march by Moore's Law. We say we're going to reinvent Silicon every two years even though we don't really know how we're going to pull that off."
Krzanich made the announcement during the International CES 2015 held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Aside from the dedicated fund, he said that the company will "lead by example" and will change its hiring choices to accommodate more diversity. He also promised transparency on the progress of the new initiative, Techcrunch reported.
"We've made progress, but not the amount of progress we need," he said last night during a dinner after the event.
"CES is the best place to set out goals like this."
