IT'S IN YOUR COMPANY'S BEST INTEREST TO HIRE DIVERSE CODERS: To be competitive and successful, tech companies need to invest in diverse talent.

• Author: Bentz, Ana

It maycome as no surprise that Silicon Valley continues to be the most sought-after job market--they are still a hotbed for innovation and genius. But with this power comes the continuous struggle to create a diverse and inclusive workplace. A culture war over a lack of diversity in hiring and unconscious bias is happening and if left ignored, the need for diversity may just be Silicon Valley's Achilles' heel.

Whether unconscious or not, hiring bias continues to impact tech organizations' salaries and hiring processes, hurting various ethnicities coming into the workforce. Hired.com, a tech startup out of California dedicated to matching top talent with the world's most innovative tech companies, recently put together a study they call "2017 State of Global Tech Salaries."

Their data analyzed more than 280,000 interview requests and job offers that went through Hired's online service in 2016. They also drew from 5,000 participating companies and 45,000 job seekers across the world. According to their research, the average black software engineer is 49 percent more likely to get the job than a white software engineer. However, that same black candidate reported making around $10,000 less in salary than their white colleagues.

The study goes on to say that it's "unclear if Black American candidates are receiving more offers because they are more qualified, their preferred salaries are lower, because of diversity initiatives, or a combination of those and other factors." Black Americans are frequent users of technology and have helped build many of the technology users interact with on a daily basis, helping turn startups into the giants they are today. But they aren't reaping the same economic benefits of the tech industry that white Americans are.

Another example from that same study highlighted the fact that Latino and Asian candidates are more likely to receive salaries that are more equivalent to their white counterparts, but they are also less likely to get hired. "When we look at our two largest markets on Hired's platform, San Francisco and New York," the study says, "Latino candidates are 26 percent less likely to get hired than white people, while Asians are a whopping 45 percent less likely. They do, however, receive salaries that are on par with other white software engineers."

Hired's 2017 report confirms that when it comes to hiring software engineers and coders, the tech industry has quite a few biases based on ethnicity...