On Thursday, Facebook released its diversity report and it turns out that there wasn’t much improvement over the previous year.Analyzing the figures, Wired called Facebook’s diversity numbers “pathetic”: “Last year, 31 percent of staffers were women. This year, it’s 32. Last year, 2 percent of its employees were black. This year, it’s exactly the same. The number of women filling tech jobs at the company slid slightly, from the already paltry 16 percent to 15 percent.”That Facebook has released its report publicly is itself a rather remarkable, given America’s problems in acknowledging institutional racism as opposed to individual racist acts.American law requires even the private sector (that meet certain criteria) to disclose the social composition of its employees to the government, but they are not obligated to make this information public.While Hewlett-Packard and Intel had been releasing this data publicly for several years, in 2014, a number of companies including Facebook joined their ranks. Companies have different parametres for reporting this data, but it is a definite a step forward in making societies more inclusive by at least making data available.While American tech companies were doing this in 2014, in India, you could not even be perceived to be supporting reservation in the private sector. Two business dailies misquoted Nilekani as saying that he supported reservations, and later withdrew the reports.Nilekani was inundated with criticism. His former colleague at Infosys TV Mohandas Pai accused him of “selling his soul for power; made his money in the company wedded to meritocracy”.A day later, Nilekani wrote a blog post, elaborating his views: “When it comes to the private sector however, we should encourage private companies to themselves be more proactive about inclusion, and not over-regulate them. The focus should be on job creation - on creating more opportunity, rather than just dividing up existing opportunity.”Clearly, we are long way from even discussing social diversity in the private sector, let alone following the lead of the American companies.Social diversity in the private sectorWhen Facebook and other companies first revealed their data, the numbers simply confirmed what had already been known: tech companies are a largely white male bastion.Data on social composition in the private sector may not be available in India, except perhaps for some limited studies on newsroom diversity, including academic Robin Jeffrey’s study wherein he found less than a handful of Dalit journalists in mainstream Indian newspapers.Read: The death of a Dalit journalist and the question of casteism in the Indian mediaA 2006 survey of the Indian media undertaken by the Centre of Study of Developing Societies, found that not a single decision-maker out of of 317 people in media houses surveyed, belonged to either the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. The American Society of Newspaper Editors has been making this data public since the 1970s.While America is loudly discussing race and social diversity in the private sector and even public spaces, India remains closed to nuanced debate about caste in the private sector.But even beginning a discussion on social inclusiveness in the Indian private sector requires an acknowledgment of the problem.In America, this was brought out by the Civil Rights Movement which resulted in legislation – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which requires the private sector to report the social composition of its work force through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. These mechanisms also provide protection against discrimination.India’s anti-discrimination laws, however, are limited. They include the Equal Remuneration Act which mandates equal pay for equal work for women, and the three laws that protect the rights of workers with disabilities, the Civil Rights Act of 1955 which makes untouchability a punishable offence, and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989.The Constitution of India prohibits the state from discrimination on grounds of race, religion, caste, birth and so on, but it does not extend to the private sector.Read: How do private firms get away with religious discrimination? It's the lawsA 2013 research paper by Deepti Shenoy notes: “Reservations, which constitute the primary means by which the government addresses employment discrimination, do not extend to the private or agricultural sectors. This is highly problematic, given the fact that these sectors together encompass nearly eighty percent of the workforce.”Affirmative action – in jobs and in elections – ensure better representation of the social composition in the country’s public institutions. While the private sector is the self-proclaimed driver of India’s economy, it is not obligated to contribute similarly, and sees no need for it either.The bulk of the debate on affirmative action is focused on the economic aspect, and any attempt to draw attention to the social aspect of belonging to a disadvantaged community (caste, tribe, minorities - linguistic, sexual, religious) is brushed aside in the name of “meritocracy” as Infosys co-founder TV Mohandas Pai did in response to Nilekani’s remarks.The government of India did make an attempt to address this in a limited way by drafting the Equal Opportunities Commission Bill. It was last heard of in June 2013, when Minority Affairs Minister K Rahman Khan and a delegation of ministers met with British government officials to discuss the idea.It is unclear what the nature of this bill is, as very little information is available in the public domain. However, one hopes that like the American laws which while penalizing discrimination, mandate that companies publicly disclose their social composition institutional prejudice. Affirmative action in the private sphere is a long, long, way off. If we are to achieve true social inclusion, the present debate needs to be about “social inclusion” and not just “economic inclusion”, because to use B R Ambedkar’s words, caste is not just a division of labour, but a division of labourers. The same situation applies to some of India’s minorities as well, as evidenced by the denial of a job to Zeeshan Mohammed because he is a Muslim.(Note: This story orginally said that Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani had said that he supported reservations in the private sector. The error was corrected on June 29, when it was discovered that the two business dailies that originally reported this, later removed these reports from their websites. However, other media reports which took from the original reports are still available online, creating the impression that Nilekani had said that he supported reservation.)
