Fact or Fiction? Examining Three Reasons for the Lack of Diversity in Tech

In 2014, the country’s largest tech companies voluntarily released the sector’s first diversity reports. The numbers back then were woeful. Now, seven years later, very little has changed.

Why is diversity important?

Before I dive any deeper into the subject of inclusion, I first want to answer the big question: why does any of this even matter? In a society where we’ve been trained to value (or at least pretend to) wider representation, many have glossed over the very material benefits that increased diversity provides a company and society at large.

1. Increasing employee engagement: Inclusive workplaces report higher levels of employee engagement than less inclusive workplaces. Employee engagement in turn has a strong causal effect on lowering attrition rates and increasing Net Promoter Score (the percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a company, a product, or a service to a friend or colleague). In fact, a study from Bain & Co. found that inspired, engaged employees are up to 3x more productive than uninspired employees. Low attrition rates cut recruiting costs and NPS scores are widely used by individual and institutional investors to predict a businesses’s growth curve.
2. Reducing Groupthink: Every culture needs to be shaken up. A recent study showed that more diverse teams reported 37.9% better assessment of consumer interest and demand. In 2018, Victoria Secret’s CMO, Ed Razek, proclaimed that the company’s annual fashion show would never include any trans or plus-sized models because they did not exemplify the “fantasy” that the show aims to create…… Well 2 years later VS has lost significant market share to Rihanna’s significantly more inclusive Fenty line, Razek has stepped down, the iconic Victoria Secret fashion show has been permanently cancelled, and the company has hired its first trans model. Whoops. Who would’ve thought a 72 year old man could be out of touch with his under 30, mostly female, target audience?
3. Reducing unintended consequences: As evidenced above, people with different life experiences view things from different angles. Having a diverse group of employees can help companies avoid unintended consequences if companies empower employees to speak up and bring their experiences with them to the workplace. For example: Computer scientists like Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, and Margaret Mitchell (all women) have been drawing increasing attention to the racial bias in facial recognition technologies and other AI. They’ve urged tech companies to broaden their datasets and limit the use of the of these facial recognition technologies (ex: not selling to police departments) to mitigate the risk of disadvantaging people of color. Consequently Gebru, Mitchell and their allies within Google (mostly women) are being flung unceremoniously out of the company.

We’ve gone over a few reasons why increasing diversity is important, now let’s dive into why it’s proving so hard to achieve. In this article, a diverse workplace is a workplace with a high percentage of employees from traditionally underrepresented groups (specifically women, members of the Black, Latinx, Native American and many other communities, and people from low-income households). This percentage would ideally come close to reflecting the racial, gender, and income demographics of the U.S. Our country’s largest tech companies are nowhere near the ballpark.

The Pipeline Problem

The pipeline problem is the long-held belief that there simply aren’t enough qualified women, people of color, and low-income individuals for hire. This belief is fiction. Girls make up about half of high-school science and math classes and are scoring identically to their male counterparts in standardized tests. Despite this, women only make up about 29 percent of the STEM workforce in the U.S. In fact, all across the board there is far more supply than supposed demand. So what gives?

The main problem is that companies aren’t looking in the right pipes. Sourcing from the same top-30 universities (who in some case have low diversity) will yield the same kind of candidates. Companies should be expanding their horizons to include candidates from organizations like the Society of Woman Engineers, coding bootcamps, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

The tech industry, which prides itself on being comprised of a bunch of self-taught upstarts, needs to live up to its reputation.

Lack of Connections

This is a big fact. “It’s not about the grades you make, it’s about the hands you shake”. Everyone’s heard some variation of this phrase. Simply put, in business, your network is more important than your actual aptitude. People tend to gravitate towards people that think, talk, and act like them. If tech management is comprised mostly of white men, it would stand to reason that their networks are also predominately white men. It’s a network effect that keeps minorities out of the industry. This goes against the odious myth of tech as a purely “meritocratic industry”, but it is nonetheless true.

Companies can seek to remedy this problem by making a concerted effort to recruit candidates from outside of the company (with no connection to a current employee) and leveraging the networks of associations like the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE).

Attrition Rates

This is another big fact. Attrition rates for underrepresented groups (specifically black and latinx community members) is significantly higher than for other groups. And a lot of this is because ….

Diversity is not inclusion.

Diversity is not inclusion!

Diversity is not inclusion!

Loosely defined, inclusion refers to a cultural and environmental feeling of belonging. Far too many companies hire for the optics without actually taking the effort to make employees feel like they belong.

For example, if your office team-building and networking events hinge entirely on alcohol, you risk alienating Muslim or other teetotal employees. If you hire a bunch of black employees but aren’t enrolling managers in implicit bias training, these employees have a higher chance of being discriminated against in the workplace and feeling isolated.

Simply put, diversity without inclusion is tokenism. Companies want to have diverse talent, but do not always want to engage with the lived realities of this talent. Instituting inclusive practices takes time, effort, and investment. As Dana Brownlee puts it “If diversity is a sprint, inclusion is a marathon. Each requires different training, conditioning and commitment.”

All this being said, the tech sector is making some progress. In 2019 Apple reported that 53% of its new hires in the U.S. were from historically underrepresented groups. Many other companies have partnered with and pledged millions to organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative and Black Girls Code to. Somehow though I can’t shake the feeling that if the topic at hand was increasing profitability or cutting costs, companies would be making much larger commitments and way quicker progress.