A GROUP of ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) Jews arriving at a meeting recently at Facebook’s Israeli headquarters were initially barred from entering by the security guard. “He couldn’t believe we actually had a business reason for being there,” said one participant. “He thought we wanted to hold a demonstration”.
The altercation was a sign of how rare it is to see black-garbed Haredi Israelis in the shining development centres of the startup nation. Some 300,000 people, or about 8% of the Israeli workforce, are employed in the country’s burgeoning high-tech industry. The industry has sucked in talent so quickly that it is now constrained by a shortage of qualified engineers and programmers and is looking abroad. Yet a large and almost untapped pool of talent lies close to home. Only 2% of Israel’s tech employees are ultra-Orthodox Jews, although the community makes up nearly 10% of the population (similarly just 3% of tech employees are Arab, despite making up about 20% of the total). And of those ultra-Orthodox Jews who are employed by tech companies, about two-thirds are women who work mainly in call centres for low...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/29MXFCL
EmoticonEmoticon