INTC Intel Corporation

By Yoree Koh 

Intel Corp. on Monday announced an internal milestone in its push for a more diverse workforce: It has achieved "full representation."

But that doesn't mean it has reached gender or racial equality.

Instead, the company says, its workforce now reflects the available talent pool -- roughly 27% female, 9.2% Hispanic and a little under 5% African American. Those numbers lag well behind the overall population as well as the workforce at large, but Intel says hitting this goal is a first step toward achieving broader diversity.

Though no other companies are known to use "full representation" as a metric, Intel is one of a growing number that are setting concrete diversity goals -- but choosing benchmarks they think are attainable in the near term.

AOL Inc. set a goal to have women in 50% of leadership positions by 2020, while the German chemicals firm BASF SE said it wanted women in 22% to 24% of leadership positions -- up from 19% -- by 2021 to match the percentage in its global workforce.

Twitter Inc. said earlier this year it would set diversity goals every two years instead of on an annual basis. It also said it would narrow its goals to focus exclusively on increasing representation of women and African American and Hispanic workers. In the past, it had set goals for the percentage of women and underrepresented minorities generally in technical and nontechnical roles.

Other large companies have committed to achieving equal pay for men and women. Still, while nearly all companies say they want to build diverse workforces, most decline to disclose their goals publicly.

Some companies are hesitant to join Paradigm for Parity, a coalition of over 80 companies that have pledged to reach gender parity in executive ranks by 2030. "They don't want to sign something that they are fearful that they can't achieve," said Jewelle Bickford, co-chair of Paradigm for Parity.

Ms. Bickford, a partner at Evercore Wealth Management, said she and her co-chairs spend considerable time talking to prospective participants about "what you can do to get started and so on and assuring them that nobody is going to blame them if they're not quite there."

Intel coined the phrase in 2015 when then Chief Executive Brian Krzanich announced the push for "full representation" by 2020 and earmarked $300 million to spend towards strategic initiatives to get there.

The company said it bases "full representation" on market availability, which it calculates by pulling from different sources, including university graduation data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau and internal company data.

The target is "not particularly aspirational," said Joelle Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a diversity-and-inclusion strategy firm based in San Francisco. It "means we are as representative as basically other organizations in our industry."

Ms. Emerson said she commends Intel for setting a goal at all.

In many ways, Intel's numbers are similar to those disclosed by other tech companies struggling to diversify their ranks beyond white and Asian men, particularly in leadership and technical positions. The skilled labor force remains shallow in those areas. For example, at Intel, African Americans make up just 1.8% of their technical executives and just over 2% of technical managers.

Hitting the internal target is "like one inch on the 12-inch ruler," said Barbara Whye, Intel's chief diversity and inclusion officer, who says the company's next likely goal is to be more reflective of the U.S. population.

Ms. Whye said Intel has baked diversity and inclusion goals into the business, with 7% of all employee bonuses tied to hiring and retention goals. About 45% of hiring must be considered "diverse hiring," and the exit rate of "diverse" employees 0.5% less than majority counterparts.

Women and under-represented groups like Hispanic and African-American workers are now leaving at a slower rate. Ms. Whye attributes the improvement to initiatives like the company's WarmLine, which catches workers who may be thinking about leaving because they do not feel challenged or included.

The efforts have run into headwinds. For instance, Ms. Whye said Intel changed the hiring process to make sure diverse candidates are considered for new jobs and people of different backgrounds are on interview panels. But she discovered that "diverse" employees were still being overlooked for promotions because they tended to go through the formal application process, whereas other employees made use of informal networks to land new jobs within the company. Now, all employees must apply for jobs through official channels.

Intel's diversity work may also have been challenged by its corporate woes. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating the company for allegedly targeting older workers in its massive layoffs in recent years.

Mr. Krzanich, who captained the 2015 diversity initiative, resigned in June for violating company policy by having a relationship with a co-worker. Ms. Whye said the circumstances around Mr. Krzanich's departure didn't affect recruiting.

--Kelsey Gee contributed to this article.

Write to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 29, 2018 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

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