California Assemblymember Chris Holden has authored a bill that would require the University of California to conduct a study of the racial and ethnic diversity of the board of directors and employees of California high technology companies.  The bill, AB 2819, would define a "California high technology company” as a publicly traded company whose primary trade or business is either software development or computational hardware that has a business location in this state and has more than 1,000 employees in California.

The bill is curiously inconsistent in what the study should cover.  For example, it would information on the number of people employed in the high technology industry by "race or ethnicity" and gender but would require information only as to the race and gender of The of people employed by the high technology industry as executives, senior officials, or managers categorized by race and gender but not ethnicity.  The bill doesn't define what constitutes a "senior official" or "manager".  It also provides not clue as to how these classifications will be made.

The bill requires a "biannual" report, a term that generally refers to twice a year.  However, I suspect that the author intends a "biennial" report (i.e., every two years).