Intel focuses on increasing diversity in workplace

The $56-billion chipmaker Intel Corporation is focused on creating a diverse and inclusive workplace to deliver strong business results and has committed to spend $300 million to make it happen by 2020.

The company, which is working toward its goal of being the industry’s diversity leader, had 24 per cent women on its total workforce of approximately one lakh in 2014 and in the US alone, which has over 50,000 employees the percentage of women, was 26 per cent.

“We are working toward increasing the percentage of women in the US to 31-32 per cent by 2020. Our diversity goals also include hiring and retaining underrepresented minorities (male and female) such as African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans, in the US,” Rosalind Hudnell, Vice-President and Chief Diversity Officer, Intel Corporation, told BusinessLine .

“A decade ago, Intel had just 23 female vice-presidents and zero African American VPs. Now, we have 66 female VPs and 1 female President and of the 66 VPs, 4 are African American females and 5 are Hispanic females, which is a lot of improvement,” said Hudnell. “We want a fully diverse and inclusive workforce, so that we have diversity in thought, diversity in experiences and skill-sets coming to bear in how we design for the new world. Therefore, we are focussing everywhere not just at the college levels but also from my organisation right to the bottom,” added Hudnell.

Asked how the $300 million would be spent, Hudnell said it will be spent on education and scholarships for women and underrepresented minorities, toward developing a diverse team at Intel, funding women in small businesses who are a part of Intel’s supply chain and helping them start businesses.

Intel wants to ensure that they have different thinking in their teams that comes from different life experiences.

“Different life experiences come from gender, faith, race, education, socio-economic status etc. Therefore, we are building our teams by not just restricting our hiring to Tier-1 schools but to Tier-2 schools where students come from a different socio-economic status” she said.

Rising attrition rates

While Intel faces high attrition rates among women in their early 30s in the US and Europe, in India women quit much earlier from 25-30 years.

“Since 2010, women make over 30 per cent of our fresh graduate hiring, however we lose them very fast due to the trailing-spouse phenomenon, first child, second child life stages and this hurts the company,” said Kumud Srinivasan, President, Intel India.

Intel India has initiated a women protégé sponsorship programme through which it plans to double the number of senior technical women by the end of 2016. Another initiative called ‘Home to Office’ has been launched, which facilitates women to resume their careers after a break. Currently, 90 per cent of its 5,000 employees are technical, of which 20 per cent are women.

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