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🗞️Diversity and inclusion news🗞️
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🤔Microsoft's Diversity report🤔
Yep, we're paid to read it! So thank us that you don't have to because it's not the most riveting bit of prose. Nonetheless it gives us a bit of insight🤔
The first bit was their slogan which is often the business case for DEI which is seen to be "To empower everyone, we must include everyone"
More broadly we learned
Women make up 31.6% of Microsoft’s core workforce, Up 0.4% from last year
Women in technical roles are 27.2% up by 0.5% from last year.
Racial and ethnic minority groups are now 54.6% of employees, down 0.2%
Black and African American employees at the Partner and Executive levels grew to 4.3% up 0.5%
You can read more here if you're curious
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🤔4 day work week🤔
Don't believe everything you're told! Yep skepticism about the 4 day work week may need to be rebuffed as we take a look at one of the most equal countries in the world, Iceland🇮🇸
In Iceland, between 2020 and 2022, 51% of workers in the country had accepted the offer of shorter working hours, including a four-day week.
Well it turns out last year, Iceland logged faster economic growth than most European countries and its unemployment rate is one of the lowest in Europe.
When public sector workers were put in a trial where folks worked 35-36 hours per week, with no reduction in pay compared to their usual 40 hours a week.
Researchers found that productivity stayed the same or improved in most workplaces, while workers’ well being increased “dramatically” on a range of measures, from perceived stress and burnout to health and work-life balance.
You can read more here but given what Amazon have said about culture it'll be interesting to see the work week's impact on that
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🧠Things that make you go hmmm🧠
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💻Tech politics👮🏽
Love him or loathe him, the reality is as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson says "It doesn't matter what you think" because Donald Trump is back!😅
Rather than go into too much about his impact on DEI (that will wait for future editions) we'll cover some of the immediate impact on tech🤔
Firstly a lot of the big tech founders came out and congratulated him (Well they would wouldn't they💁🏾♀️) and that's not really any surprise as having the president elect of the USA not liking you is clearly bad for business🧐
Just ask Elon Musk who at the latest look has made over $16bn in share price increases as a consequence of his backing of Donald Trump. Why? How? Well apart from doing the closest thing to paying people to vote for him clearly trump and his friendship is good for Elon's businesses👀
Take tesla, A tariff on foreign produced Electric Vehicles, will benefit Tesla (Hence their stock is up ~20%) and the valuation went above $1tn again making it more valuable than almost all the other car companies put together. Also Trump plays a big role in Nasa contracts and Elon runs Space X which looks to benefit🚀
Obviously some of Hillary's deplorables, also rejoiced with the news with Far right commentator Nick Fuentes saying
“It’s your body, my choice,” to his 430,000 followers on X a whilst wearing donning an America First hat🤮
Outside of that Tech stocks are broadly up as trumps musings about being more lasse-fare on AI regulation, hawkish on breaking up big tech and lower corporate taxes got those investors optimistic about the tech companies share price📈
Crypto fans were also happy with Bitcoin breaching the $82k (Its now closer to $88k Dollar mark up something like 100% up on the year to date, and Dogecoin out doing it, because, well who doesn't like a meme. And this isnt any old meme, its a meme at that which may be an acronym for a new government department (D)epartment (O)f (G)overnment (E)fficency. Even we
have to smile at the Shiba Inu dog. Elon, the self anointed DOGEfather, dropped a photoshopped meme of him with the kitchen sink (a thing he threw out to symbolise his move "sinking in" as well as the cost cutting he made as he bought Twitter X)🥲
There are so many images to adorn this story (like the Miguel song) so with love we'll add a gallery to the bottom of this round up for you to see our fave images😅
So what?
As another trump fan and wrestling Icon said "What you gonna do"? It turned out the USA voted for Trump in answer, and a lot of tech investors, put their money there too. PS we reckon the hype will get bitcoin to $100k before or around his inauguration. Would you bet against it👀
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🙏🏾Really, Really...😅
Lots of people have heard of Chat GPT (Infact its monthly Active users rival Google Chrome). Secondly Google's Gemini, si well known too but the other big one (the one Amazon is backing) is Claude, by the AI company Anthropic👨🏿💻
Well this week Anthropic announced Claude is being sold into Defence contracts. Why do we care. Well AI is racist!!! Every week we point things to substantiate that and the way we last saw to get around this was to ask it to be nice. Yes really..!🥲
In a self-published paper, Anthropic researchers found to prevent it discriminating against protected categories like race and gender in situations like job and loan applications they saw a plea appended to the prompt that tells it not to be biased prefaced with "“really really” actually helped to reduce the levels of Bias it showed.🤦🏽♀️
They noted "“The appropriate use of models for high-stakes decisions is a question that governments and societies as a whole should influence—and indeed are already subject to existing anti-discrimination laws—rather than those decisions being made solely by individual firms or actors,” they write. “While model providers and governments may choose to limit the use of language models for such decisions, it remains important to proactively anticipate and mitigate such potential risks as early as possible.” which translates to, "It's over to you but we wouldn't recommend using it for high stakes decisions"🤔
Well in the defence sector we don't have a lot of transparency so we certainly have suspicions, the "really really dont be biased" won't be asked a lot and therefore we do questions what happens next💣
So what?
We've told you!
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🤔Backdoor layoffs🤔
Last week we told you to take a look Amazon's workers reaction to their return to the office mandate🏢
Well turns out Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy has told employees at an all-hands meeting that the recent 5-day in-office mandate is not meant to be “a backdoor layoff"👋🏾
We're not sure if anyone is convinced given what we've read and head from Amazonians except for the senior leaders who have claimed "This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.”👀
So what?
We'll let you decide what you believe but we shared data suggesting that there wasn't much benefit to being in 5 day a week for Trip.com
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📈 The tools behind the tech📉
📦Product📦
📏Design📏
👩🏿💻Code👩🏿💻
🏢The business behind the tech🏢
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🌐Partner Events & Opportunties 🌐
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🙌🏾The latest from the Colorintech team🙌🏾
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