Why do we talk about blockchain more than we talk about diversity in tech?
When we decided to make diversity and inclusion a focus of our 2018 State of European Tech report, we knew that we wanted a way to visualise the debate beyond funding numbers. So we reached out to Quid, a member of the Atomico family. Quid’s software analyses the text in millions of news articles, company information and other documents, and presents insights visually.
Quid’s analysis showed issues such as diversity, the gender pay gap, harassment, and discrimination unfortunately aren’t being talked about as much as other aspects of tech, and when they are, it’s all negative news and it’s dominated by US voices.
We couldn’t include all the Quid analysis in the final report, so we’re presenting some heretofore unpublished graphs to show how data visualization helped us understand a big, hairy topic. A big thank you again to the whole Quid team, especially Julie Kim.
There were three takeaways from our deep dive with Quid…
- The press talk about blockchain more than they talk about diversity
First, we wanted to know how big the conversation about diversity and inclusion was in the context of the broader conversation about tech, so Quid helped us analyse which topics in tech the media covered on a one year period.
In the year through September 2018, the media in Europe talked about diversity, discrimination, harassment, pay equity and women in tech only 10.6% of the time. Yet they discussed fundraising in 44% of articles, AI in 19.89% of articles, and blockchain in 11.9% of articles.
That was actually a little bit better than for non-European sources (mainly in the US), where diversity, discrimination, harassment, pay equity and women in tech was only 7.4% of the conversation.
2. Social engagement on stories about issues of diversity and discrimination is driven by negative stories
We’ve all heard the phrase “bad news travels fast.” That’s exactly how things work on the internet. In both European and non-European sources, social engagement around stories about diversity and discrimination were driven by negative stories.
In the year from September 2017, only 18% of the total social engagement was positive among European source news articles. Articles that captured a lot of negative engagement included this news about diversity at Apple, as well as the news in January 2018 that James Damore, a former engineer at Google, was suing the company after penning a controversial memo on gender.
This lawsuit and lawsuits against Uber and Google received some of the highest social engagement and media coverage in and out of Europe. Stories like Apple creating emojis representing people with disabilities got a lot of social engagement but very little media coverage.
Great that people are talking about these issues, but disproportionate sharing of negative news reinforces the perception of the tech industry is not a friendly place for women and minorities. That puts off young female and minority talent, and perpetuates a lack of diversity. It also means people who are doing good things need to work even harder to get those stories to stand out.
3. There’s a huge opportunity in Europe to own the conversation around diversity and inclusion
Finally, Quid analysed the top companies mentioned in conversations about diversity and tech were big U.S. tech giants. In both European and non-European sources the top 2 were the same: Google, followed by Facebook.
The only two European companies that made the European list and non the non-European list were the BBC and SAP, Europe’s largest software company.
All that is to say that there is a huge opportunity for European tech companies to own the narrative around diversity and inclusion. As we stated above, the majority of the news about those U.S. tech giants wasn’t positive either. It could be a gamechanger if European tech companies can push hard to establish and spread a positive narrative around these issues.
Simply put, it’s up to us in the tech community to start a conversation. Atomico contributed to that conversation last year by publishing stats on diversity and inclusion in our State of European Tech report (including this Quid analysis!) We also published Diversity and Inclusion guidebook for founders in partnership with Diversity VC. It’s a free, practical guide to creating organisations with diversity and inclusion at their core, with case studies from tech companies at all stages.
Some great organisations furthering the conversation in the UK are the Femstreet newsletter, YSYS, Backstage Capital, Muslamic Makers, Code First: Girls, and Dot Everyone (a longer list is available here).
