Wells Fargo employees conducted “fake interviews” with diverse job candidates, The NY Times reports, with one former executive claiming he was fired after complaining about the practice, which Wells denied. Seven current and former employees, including one former executive, told The Times that they were instructed to interview women and people of color for roles that had already been filled. These efforts, they said, appeared to be a way to show a record of diversity efforts rather than actually hire diverse candidates. The current Wells Fargo employees also told The Times
Failing to credit Black creators will cost platforms and TikTok is one firm that’s not trying to be a part of that mess – again. The Bytedance-owned app is introducing the first iteration of creator-crediting tools that will enable — and encourage — users to link back to the videos of TikTok creators and trend originators. The new TikTok tools, rolling out over the next few weeks, will let creators directly tag and credit others through a new button in the app. Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s U.S. director of the creator
In 2017, Iris Nevins decided to leave her job as a teacher in Florida to attend a bootcamp in the Bay Area – but it was not without its struggles. On a Go-fund Me page – where she asked for support – she said: “I began learning how to code through online tutorials, and 7 months later, I quit my job as an 8th-grade history teacher, left my organization, and moved to the Bay Area to attend a coding BootCamp. “Making such a transition is very costly as I had
In February, Prestige magazine published a list of the top-selling pieces of crypto-art to date, with all entries sharing some common traits – they were all men and all white. And when you look into the news reports of those who’re supposedly ‘killing it’ in the NFT or crypto space most of them look the same. But here at POCIT – we’re all about shining a light on the communities that are sometimes cast to the side and forgotten even when they’re making a considerable impact. Before we begin – for
Timnit Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for co-authoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Gebru, who recently founded her own firm, an independent artificial intelligence research institute, was awarded $3.7 million in funding after she was fired by Google. And now she’s been cited as a case study by Harvard Business School’s research team in a new paper that details her experiences being ‘silenced’ by
Nzambi Matee, a 30-year-old who quit her job in oil and gas to work on her passion full-time, has created a lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material. Every day her enterprise, Gjenge Makers, churns out 1,500 bricks made from industrial and household plastic that otherwise would be dumped in the city’s overflowing garbage heaps. In 2021, the team recycled 50 tonnes of plastic but Matee has ambitions to double that amount this year as
CarePoint, a Black-owned technology-driven healthcare startup that seeks to make healthcare accessible, has just raised a $10 million bridge round to accelerate its growth across Africa. How does it work? Patients are able to access care virtually through CarePoint’s MyCareMobile app, which links them to diverse services through teleconferencing, including consultations with their doctors, test results, and 24-hour emergency response. The funding round was led by TRB Advisors and brings the total funding raised by CarePoint to $30 million. It follows an $18 million Series A round announced in November last year.
Colourintech, working with Meta, found that Black students and professionals face many barriers when advancing in the tech industry. To try to understand the scope of the matter, the research team looked at 2,000 individuals in tech – asking questions about finding a job, getting hired, advancing, and being supported in their careers. More than 60% of Black professionals encounter barriers to entering the tech profession, the new figures unveiled as it shone a light on the hurdles still being faced in the industry. Saloni Shah, a student at Imperial
Black-owned tech firm Better Life Technologies Group, Inc. has been awarded a patent for its wristband smartwatch used for non-invasive detection of glucose and pathogens, including COVID-19. It may have applications for non-invasive cancer detection, according to Black News but POCIT cannot yet confirm this. The glucose diagnostic system will reportedly be able to be worn like a watch and help detect early stages of cancer, and symptoms of diabetes, electrolytes, and much more. “A lot of times, the venture capitalists and angel investors look the direction that everyone is going.
Michael Broughton and Ayush Jain came up with the idea of helping people build credit through recurring payment forms such as digital subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu. It was in December 2019, that they started Altro and began brainstorming how to build out a platform that finds a person’s recurring transactions and connects them to a trade line that reports to all three credit bureaus. A trade line is a line of data that goes directly into a bureau’s system that affects a person’s FICO score, which is used for underwriting.
