Starting from five years ago, the largest companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft began to release diversity reports annually to uncover the workforce diversities of their companies. It turns out employees of these companies are predominantly white or Asian men.
That’s when these companies acknowledged that they need to do some work to change this status quo. Tim Cook even wrote a promising letter to the employees that the company as innovative as Apple has to be at the forefront of advancing diversity.
Since then, many things have changed, but not the diversity in the workforce. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, Facebook gained over a billion active users, and Apple released Apple Watch, Airpods and a series of new iPhones. In spite of many of these large successes these companies achieved, none of them progressed much in diversifying their workforces.
Lack of racial diversity.
Data shows that among tech workers such as coders, engineers and data scientists, diversification of the workforce hasn’t advanced much. Technical employees who are Black or Latino increased less than one percent since 2014.
Lack of gender diversity.
Also, Silicon Valley and the tech industry is famous for its ‘bro-culture’ and lack of gender diversity. Most of the studies show that not much is being done to address these issues. Women make up 59% of the total workforce, and they account only 30% at the major tech companies. The numbers get uglier when you combine tech and non-tech work at tech jobs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter where women make up only 20% of the workforce.
What is the solution to the diversity problem?
The main problem behind this is that despite spending tons of money and resources, companies haven’t addressed the biases in their cultures. These biases often result in unfair hiring processes. that is the reason why our workforces are generally homogenous. If tech companies don’t work on changing their cultures, then advancements in diversities won’t likely improve in the coming years.
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