A Look Back on a Decade of Diversity in Tech
In October of 2013, I wrote a piece on Medium titled “Where are the numbers?”, decrying Silicon Valley’s lack of transparency around diversity data, and it went unexpectedly viral. The tech industry released its workforce demographic data and came to a moment of reckoning for its sins of white male homogeneity; I became an accidental spokesperson for the diversity in tech movement.
For years and years, I hit the talking points: Yes, diversity is important. We build better products with diverse teams. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also the smart thing to do. Diversity is more than gender diversity. True inclusion must be intersectional. The data matters so we can understand our baseline, set targets, and track progress.
But then I got tired. I stopped repeating myself, moved onto the startup founder life, ran headlong into new frustrations around sexism and discrimination, and wondered if all my diversity work had been a waste.
Ten years on, we’ve achieved a lot less than I hoped for at my most naive, but also a lot more than I despaired at my gloomiest. When I pull myself out of the thickets of the day-to-day to take perspective on the past decade, I am heartened that the comparison of now vs. then is quite a favorable one:
- General awareness of diversity issues today is much, much greater. We went from general apathy about a topic niche even within tech to the Obama White House hosting its first ever Demo Day in 2015 and announcing initiatives to bring more women and minorities into the industry. To this day there are journalists whose entire beat is diversity.
- The level of sophistication in the discourse around diversity has increased dramatically, too. People used to conflate “diversity” with “gender diversity”. Post-Ferguson, post-George Floyd, race has become impossible to ignore. It is also now assumed that you can reference intersectionality in a conversation without having to stop and define it.
- An entire industry of diversity consulting came into its own. Doing work that used to be regarded at best as a side project and more often as an irrelevant distraction, people are now paid, and paid well, for their time and expertise.
- Diversity and inclusion efforts now extend beyond recruiting and HR at tech companies into product work. My favorite examples of this come from the team at Pinterest: search on the platform allows users to filter by skin tone and hair type, and and recent AI improvements promote body type diversity in recommendation feeds and search.
- The blue chip VC firms all hired their first token women partners, and then some. Back in the day, no one even blinked at a team page that was entirely Chads at a ball game. Even if we do still see the occasional fund launch announcement with an all male crew, these days it is roundly criticized and apologies arrive in short order.
- Female founders now exist in enough numbers that there are entire funds that only invest in women. Likewise for underrepresented minorities. I am thrilled that more people representing much more diverse lived experiences get to participate in the tech innovation ecosystem in a way that we never did before. It has a real impact on the types of problems that we try to solve, and how we go about it.
I know that every one of these notes of progress can be followed up with sour caveats. Increased attention on diversity comes with alarming pushback; resourcing for diversity teams and initiatives gets cut dramatically when the economy turns; female founders still only get 2% of all VC funding; and yet — sometimes you have to celebrate the small wins.
Happy ten years to the little blog post that changed my life and put me on a course of diversity activism. It’s been an honor to be a part of a movement much greater than myself and I’m glad to be able to look back and see the progress we’ve made.
