◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek August 10, 202016
engineerTracy Chouthatwomen madeup
just12%ofthecompany’sengineeringstaff.Her
declaration prompted women at other companies
to speak out. “There’s no way we’d get systemic
change if we weren’t even willing to release the
basic numbers,” says Chou, who now runs Block
Party, the maker of an anti-harassment app.
The next year, Reverend Jackson established
PushTech2020 in San Francisco. He showed up
at the annual shareholder meetings of Google,
Microsoft, and Amazon and demanded they dis-
close their race and gender data. In 2015 mem-
bers of the Congressional Black Caucus weighed
in, meeting with Facebook Chief Operating Officer
Sheryl Sandberg and Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook.
PushTech2020 aimed for 20% of people of
color in Silicon Valley by 2020. “We won’t say they
totally failed because this story hasn’t reached its
endpoint,” says Bryant. “But they haven’t come
close.” Top tech companies did begin to disclose
their diversity stats and hire chief diversity officers,
but five years on, not one such company has any-
thing close to a 13% Black workforce, which would
match the Black proportion of the U.S. population.
Some companies have even tried to fudge figures
by including temporary contractors and cafeteria
workers, Bryant says, declining to name names.
Gwen Houston, Microsoft Corp.’s former head
of diversity, says Black employees there would
quickly become disillusioned by the “only-ness
factor” that comes when few minorities are on a
team. Promotion and hiring discussions regularly
excluded Black employees under the banner of
amorphous criteria, such as whether a candidate
was considered a good “fit,” she says. When the
employees leave, she says, Microsoft’s reputation
among other Black job candidates naturally suf-
fers. By the time Houston left Microsoft in late 2017,
there had been some progress on increasing the
number of women in leadership, but not much
onthenumberofBlackpeople.Twice-yearlytal-
entreviewswhileshewasatthecompanyfailedto
elevate many Black executives because there were
too few of them at a high enough level, she says.
A company the size of Microsoft would need
to hire 9,000 Black workers in the U.S. alone to
achieve population parity, so losing Black staff
stung. “I always used to say we need to be just as
invested on the retention as we are on the recruit-
ing because we have to manage this hemorrhaging
effect,” Houston says. “Microsoft wasn’t keen on
talking about turnover costs.”
Pledges to double the number of Black employ-
ees in senior and leadership positions by 2025 will
“hold us accountable for progress,” a Microsoft