Is Silicon Valley Actively Biased Against Certain Viewpoints?

Sam Altman and Tim Ferris made waves over the past few weeks, calling out Silicon Valley for what Ferris termed creeping “McCarthyism.” Altman claimed that ignoring people with “dangerous” ideas could cause tech firms to miss out on the non-consensus ideas that drive the Valley’s success.

These anecdotes are important, but more data is needed to understand whether viewpoint bias exists and what the implications may be.

As an initial step to address this shortfall, Lincoln Network built a survey to better understand viewpoint diversity in tech’s epicenter.

You can find and take the survey here.

In the past two weeks, over 400 tech professionals have completed the survey. The current distribution of respondents reflects a wide range of religious and political viewpoints [charts 1 & 2]. Among the long list of represented companies, we’ve had participants from Facebook, Google, Apple, and many early stage startups describe their experiences.

In addition to this quantitative analysis, we are currently completing interviews with over 40 survey participants who are immersed in the tech culture and have volunteered to share relevant experiences.

We’ve also received nearly 100 comments describing the challenges and opportunities in the Valley related to viewpoint diversity and cultural norms. They encompass the full spectrum of experiences:

• A self-identified moderate commented how they were pleased with how interested executives were in being open to all viewpoints.
• A self-identified conservative stated, “The severe examples of this problem appear to be limited to the larger, public firms, unlike my own, as they employ greater numbers of very young, recent grads who are exhibiting this extreme political-correctness policing and desire to invoke policing forces against others.”
• A self-identified liberal mentioned they experienced “repeated calls, from managers and non-managers alike, for people to be fired for the political views they expressed” and “several managers admitting or encouraging the use of the company’s performance review process to punish employees for their expressed views, on the pretext that exposing their coworkers to those views represented a job performance issue.”
• A self-identified very liberal person shared, “My main hesitation on sharing views at work is because I’m gay and while company values are okay with that, we have many people from different backgrounds and I can’t trust that there won’t be individuals who will have a problem with it.”
• A self-identified very liberal woman noted, “Once I was leading a meeting and a guy stood up, took the marker out of my hand, and took the meeting over. In talking to him later, he didn’t even realize he’d done it; displacing and silencing a woman was that natural and unremarkable to him.”
• A self-identified libertarian wrote, “I have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in the face of an increasingly extreme, narrow minded, and regressive environment here at Google…When I started in 2004 I felt completely safe to bring my whole self to work, to express my (reasonable) thoughts and ideas to my coworkers, and to be generally unguarded and honest. Those days are loooong gone now.”
• A young man commented, “I checked ‘conservative’ on the alignment form even though I’d have described myself as liberal five years ago. My views haven’t changed. The change has come from the left, which has started what I can only describe as a reign of terror. Scientific is hate. Silence is a microaggression. Dissent is violence.”
• A self-identified conservative noted, “There is overwhelming internal support for leftist political candidates, policies, and ideas and they are frequently expressed at corporate Q&As, internal groups and discussions. There is oversized internal outrage and support if a leftist agenda item is ‘wronged’ by our product, but zero to very little is done about the mistakes and biases we’re responsible for on more conservative issues. There are zero to very few senior people who dare to speak up or represent an alternative (more conservative) point of view in company debates or policy decisions.”

We invite tech professionals of all backgrounds in Silicon Valley to participate in our ongoing survey, which will run through January 6th.

For more information please contact viewpoints@joinlincoln.org.