T E C H N O L O G Y
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Edited by
David Rocks● Tech companies’ mostly
White workforce reflects years
of broken promises on diversitySilicon Valley Failed
To Think Different
Quora Inc., which runs the eponymous questions
and answers website, couldn’t figure this one out:
Why were so many Black and Latinx college stu-
dents rejecting its job offers or withdrawing from
interviews? Last year, a recruiter suggested that
the Silicon Valley company might seem more
welcoming if it had dedicated groups of under-
represented employees for the candidates to con-
sult. Higher-ups were initially skeptical, she says,
whether the company even had enough diverse
employees to do so. Quora says it’s in the process
of creating such groups.
Silicon Valley’s predominantly White, male work-
force didn’t have to be this way. The wave of national
unrest around ingrained racism has called atten-
tion to the dearth of people of color across corpo-
rate America. Yet if there’s one industry that should
have been able to avoid these problems, it’s technol-
ogy. Many of today’s biggest tech companies, which
frequently use their corporate mission statements to
espouse utopian harmony, didn’t exist a few decades
ago. They didn’t inherit the same racial disparities
entrenched at banks and other centuries-old institu-
tions. Yet they’ve replicated the same rot.
“Tech had started to take over our world, but
as the industry added tens of thousands of jobs, it
was ushering in the same systemic racism we’ve
faced for 100 years,” says Joseph Bryant, who leads
PushTech2020, an initiative of the Reverend Jesse
Jackson. “It’s not just, ‘Don’t put your knee on
my neck.’ It’s also, ‘Help me get a job and build
wealth, because I’m qualified and you’re not even
looking in my direction.’ ”
According to the Kapor Center for Social Impact,
about 21% of computer science graduates are Black
or Latinx, yet they represent only 10% of technical
roles at the 20 top-grossing tech companies. More
than 97% of tech startup founders and their ven-
ture capital backers are White or Asian.Renewed vows in June by tech companies to
diversify their workforces recall years of failure at
Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. At those com-
panies, Black employees make up 3.3%, 1.7%,
and 2.4% of technical roles, respectively. Proxy
statements show there was only one Black exec-
utive among the leadership teams at Microsoft,
Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon.com last
year. He was at Google, and he left in January.
To truly make good on all these years of prom-
ises, tech companies must start by puncturing two
pervasive Silicon Valley myths: that they’re meri-
tocracies where everyone gets a fair shot, and that
diversity is a pipeline problem. The reality is that
Black employees are leaving faster than they’re
being hired because, for people of color, many tech
companies can be painful places to work. Getting
through the door is one thing; staying and progress-
ing up the ranks to a position of influence is another.
Often, Black employees are the only minori-
ties on their teams. They receive salary offers that
average $10,000 less than offers to White peers,
according to recruitment marketplace Hired Inc.,
and take longer to get promoted. Many also incur
what’s referred to as a “Black tax”—additional work
such as representing the company at career fairs or
conducting new-hire interviews, implicitly distort-
ing how diverse the company is. That takes them
away from their day job for no extra pay. Small
wonder, then, that many tech companies lose
more Black employees through attrition in a given
year than they manage to hire. To have any mean-
ingful change, tech companies will have to spend
as much time—or more—retaining and promoting
Black employees as getting them in the door.
And if they want smart people to speak up, they
can’t penalize outspoken Black workers. “One of
my managers used to call all the things I was doing
around diversity ‘extracurriculars,’ ” says Bari
Williams, a former Facebook Inc. lawyer who now
heads legal at Human Interest Inc., a fintech com-
pany. “Leadership can talk about diversity all day
long, but if the managers and people who imple-
ment it don’t buy in, it’s not going to happen.”
Google came under fire in June after claims
that its campus security policy, which encouragesBloomberg Businessweek August 10, 2020