:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/64015607/1056086262.jpg.0.jpg)
An image of a tech event in which two women CEOs were poorly Photoshopped into a group of 15 men reignited a discussion last week about tech companies’ ongoing failures to meaningfully diversify their workforces.
Companies like Google and Facebook have overturned industries, changed the way we live, and are shaping the future. Yet somehow they haven’t been able to hire a workforce that even remotely represents their customers. Across the tech industry, the share of black and Latinx people in tech and leadership roles is often well below 5 percent, while women typically make up about a fifth to a quarter of those positions.
Around 2014, under heavy pressure from activists, many tech companies for the first time began releasing reports about their employee diversity. Back then, it seemed like a good-faith effort to acknowledge their lack of diversity and be more transparent about the problem and how they intended to fix it. They hired heads of diversity and inclusion, launched diversity initiatives, and updated their hiring practices.
But five years later, these companies have only become incrementally more diverse. While they’ve made strides in raising their companies’ overall diversity percentages, they’ve largely done so with lower-level positions. Women and people of color are still vastly underrepresented in leadership and technology roles: the high-paying, high-prestige jobs for which tech companies are known.
Facebook’s latest diversity report shows the company still has the same share of black and Latinx employees in technical roles — 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively — as it had in 2014. The number of women in these roles has jumped more substantially in that time, from 15 percent to 22 percent, though that’s still a far cry from the half of the population women represent. Facebook did not comment on the record about its diversity stats.
The story is similar at Google, though its share of Latinx employees did grow about a percentage point from 2014 to 2019. Google referred Recode to its annual diversity report to learn about the “challenges we see and strategies we are employing to make progress.”
Tech, of course, isn’t alone in its gender imbalances; many industries lack significant representation of women and minorities in important roles. Indeed, just 26 of the CEOs in the S&P 500 are women.
Tech companies, however, aspire to be progressive. You wouldn’t know that from their diversity numbers.
Diversity as optics
Many people working in tech have suggested that rather than hiring a truly diverse workforce, tech companies have resolved to deal with their diversity issues with lip service, pandering, and downright dishonesty.
In 2018, Twitter put out misleading diversity data that made it look like it was becoming more diverse, when in reality the share of underrepresented minorities at the company had declined. In May, a Google employee accused the search giant in a lawsuit of using bait-and-switch tactics to hire minorities in lesser positions than what they applied for, as a way to juice its diversity stats. And BuzzFeed News found last week that a photo of a tech CEO event published in GQ showed 15 mostly white male executives and two women — but the women, CEOs Lynn Jurich and Ruzwana Bashir, had been Photoshopped in.
The design house hosting the event said its doctored photo was a well-meaning attempt to get everyone into the picture. This prompts questions about why the two women weren’t in the photo, and why there were only two women present at the event in the first place. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who were also in attendance but who were not pictured, did not get digitally added, according to BuzzFeed News.
Thanks to everyone that came along for the ride. Story is out now: https://t.co/eFbfPZxzbH
— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) June 13, 2019
Major thanks to @benjymous and and @z3dster for helping crack the case. If you have any tips on any weird shit, feel free to DM me. They're open.
“No wonder activists are skeptical about real progress in Silicon Valley,” said Deborah Singer, chief marketing officer at Girls Who Code, a nonprofit trying to alleviate the gender gap in tech.
“This is a culture problem that’s keeping women out of tech — it’s sexism, racism, harassment, discrimination, bias. And this Photoshop story is the perfect illustration.”
She added, “What’s so deeply ironic about this Photoshop scandal is that in the time it took them to Photoshop Lynn and Ruzwana into the photo, we could have recommended 100 women for them to actually invite and include.” Representatives for Brunello Cucinelli, the luxury designer the tech summit was visiting, did not reply when asked if more than two women had been invited to the event.
The doctored photo incident struck a nerve because it literally illustrated the ongoing criticism that tech companies consider diversity to be a vague optics problem rather than a real issue they must solve.
“Photoshopping women in, diverse employees taking a picture together — that’s branding,” said Bärí Williams, vice president of legal, business, and policy affairs at All Turtles, a company that uses AI to help startups.
“How are those employees treated? How often are they in rooms where decisions are being made?”
These types of tactics are at play across the tech industry.
“One of my greatest frustrations when it comes to diversity is seeing tech companies putting people of color and women on their websites and promo materials, but if you walk on campus the makeup of employees is extremely homogenous,” Mark Luckie, a digital media strategist and former manager at Twitter and Facebook, told Recode.
Why hasn’t tech even come close to fixing its diversity problem?
Tech companies will give you lots of reasons why they’re not more diverse yet — many of which I’ve included in my crowdsourced “diversity-pandering Bingo board.”
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16344217/Screen_Shot_2019_06_14_at_7.57.02_AM.png)
Chief among the excuses made by tech companies is that there are not enough women or people of color with appropriate education and experience.
“We keep hearing that it’s a pipeline problem, and it’s clear to anyone paying attention that’s just not true,” according to Singer. “Girls Who Code has 30,000 college-aged alumni. Stanford’s computer science grads are at least 30 percent female,” she said. “But try to find a tech company with 30 percent women in their technical roles.”
According to a McKinsey research report completed on behalf of Girls Who Code, the US could reach gender parity in entry-level computer science jobs within 10 years. The report estimates there will be 11,000 women graduating with computer science degrees in 2027 — just enough to fill half of the new entry-level computer science jobs expected that year.
As for minorities, many more black and Latinx people major in computer science and engineering than work in tech jobs. There are certainly still gaps between the number of women and minorities with tech degrees and those working in tech jobs, but that gap is not nearly enough to account for tech companies’ current lack of employee diversity. That suggests other forces are at play beyond the “pipeline.”
“I’m not understanding why we’re not seeing actual progress in five years,” Williams, who previously worked as an attorney at StubHub and Facebook, said. “They talk about building everything to scale. Well, scale this.”
For her, it’s a matter of effort.
“These are incredibly smart people, but they’re not willing to do the due diligence to learn where to go” to find and hire diverse employees, Williams said.
Diversity advocates say bias is a factor in why tech companies are dawdling on diversity.
“Many tech companies are content with incremental increases in the diversity of their staff. Going up a percentage point or two allows them to say they have made improvements,” Luckie said. “Outside of the public eye, tech companies are wary of ‘lowering the bar,’ a blanket statement that assumes that people of color, specifically Latinx and black applicants, are less skilled than their white or Asian counterparts,” he said.
Luckie is the author of a widely circulated internal Facebook memo, “Facebook is failing its black employees and its black users,” which he wrote upon departing the company. In it, he discussed how the company’s lack of diversity was leading to products that alienated some of its most active customers.
“Tech companies retain some of the brightest minds in the world that are solving life’s most complex problems, and yet they still haven’t been able to figure out how to make their companies more diverse,” he said. “The percentage of diverse employees would be much higher if they weren’t leaving companies in droves because of the unwelcoming environments they face.”
Facebook doesn’t provide attrition rates. What we do know is that in two years the company said it has “more than doubled the number of engineers from historically underrepresented backgrounds that we’ve hired.” In the same time, the company’s overall employment doubled to about 38,000 while it has maintained the same share of black and Latinx employees. Facebook did not comment on the record about its diversity stats.
At Google, black employees had the highest attrition rates of any employee group at the company in 2018. Black men in tech roles were 36 percent more likely to leave their roles than the average Google employee (though that number was down from 60 percent more likely in 2017).
One of the reasons these employees leave companies is that people of color in tech aren’t promoted at the same levels as their white counterparts.
What needs to happen for tech companies to become truly diverse
First off, tech companies have to believe that a lack of diversity is a problem worth fixing.
“Tech companies have to want to change. Many focus exclusively on efforts they see as contributing to the bottom line and don’t see diversity as doing so, despite the many studies to the contrary,” Luckie said.
As Singer put it, “We need real allies — men in power — who see the gender gap for what it is: their problem to help solve, too.”
Fixing these problems requires real money and giving the people heading diversity efforts real power.
“Look at org charts to see where the diversity head sits. If it’s six layers down from the CEO, there are no resources truly allocated to helping the person do their work,” Williams said. “You can tell what people value by what they spend their time and money on.”
Tech companies also need to recruit more heavily at schools that graduate black and Latinx computer science and software engineers.
“Tech companies have traditionally hired from the same few elite schools that are themselves not very diverse at all,” Luckie said. “Some have created HBCU [historically black colleges and university] programs or outreach, but the resources poured into them often pale in comparison to their general recruiting practices.”
Williams said that tech companies should meaningfully expand recruiting efforts beyond prestigious schools, which — with their preference for legacy students and those who in various ways can buy their way into school — don’t necessarily have the best students.
“They don’t want to go outside comfort zones like Harvard and MIT,” Williams said. “If those are the only places you’re going to go, that’s all you’re going to get.”
Tech companies could also move their campuses to areas that have more black and Latinx talent, Williams said.
“They have to understand that not everyone wants to live in the Valley,” she said. “In the past, the idea was if we build, they will come. They don’t come. You need to go to them.”
Finally, tech companies need to change enough internally so they’ll be able to retain the minority and women candidates they do hire.
“The most diverse companies are making diverse employees feel as if they belong,” Luckie said. “They are empowering their employee resource groups to interact with the community through continued partnerships with nonprofits, bringing in high-profile speakers or supporting employee-led events — all of which lead to increased employee retention.”
Pictures of women or people of color aren’t going to do it.
Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.
