Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is on a tour of America to “get out of my little bubble in San Francisco.”
As part of that tour, he stopped at the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church as well as North Carolina A&T State University, where he spoke to about 200 students on issues including diversity in technology.
“I don’t think it’s a secret that the tech community and industry has an issue with diversity,” Zuckerberg said.
He added that the industry must “do a better job” but that “it’s going to take a little while.”
“You can’t just expect that you’re going to have a normal recruiting team go out and try to get folks and you’re magically going to solve a diversity problem that we have,” he explained. “We need to make sure we train our hiring managers. If they have the choice between can I get the first person who’s good who could be on my team and I need to ship this product or would I rather put in an extra amount of time to get diversity, a lot of them have different pressures.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook in particular has its managers enroll in a course on unconscious bias because “a lot of people who think they care about diversity actually still have a lot of these biases” and “it’s often people who think they’re doing the best who are doing the worst.”
“If you focus on doing the best work that you can, then there’s a lot of opportunity out there.”
Zuckerberg also drew applause for his take on whether or not Facebook Live cameras could be used as a check on police, saying, “If we’re not going to give them body cameras, then we’ll give everyone a Live camera.”
