REPORT ON DIVERSITY OFF COURSE
Firms like Uber leave out key data that reveals more about workforce
After weeks of scandal, Uber released its first report this week detailing the gender breakdown and racial makeup of its employees. Though welcomed by diversity advocates, the revelations weren’t that surprising: Within engineering, only 15 per cent are women and six per cent are black, Latino or multiracial, which makes Uber not that different from other tech companies, where those groups make up a tiny fraction of the technical workforce.
In fact, the more illuminating piece of data about diversity at Uber isn’t in its report at all. Retention — the percentage of each demographic group that stays at the company each year — reveals more about the hospitality of the workplace culture than the percentage of white and Asian men there overall. Most companies, including Uber and its peers in Silicon Valley, track it. They just don’t make it public.
Retention data is a proxy for job satisfaction, and tech companies won’t be able to build the diverse workforces they claim to be working toward unless they can hold onto the small fraction of female and minority employees they successfully recruit. Since 2014, demographics at Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google, Twitter Inc. and others have stayed roughly the same: Women make up about 17 per cent of technical workers; only about six per cent are black or Latino.
Across industries, few companies release employee retention data, but tech firms have consis- tently held themselves up as meritocracies, based on data-focused decision-making. At the same time, they’ve assembled homogeneous employee bases, and come under fire for tolerating behaviour and attitudes that make minorities feel unwelcome. As far as data and transparency, they have mostly stuck to releasing annual demographic breakdowns and the occasional tidbit about the race and gender of new hires.
“People are looking for ways to tell a good story around their diversity and inclusion efforts,” said Ellen Pao, co-founder of Project Include, which advocates for more diversity in Silicon Valley. “The fact that tech companies aren’t sharing their retention numbers indicates those numbers likely aren’t good.”
A handful of industry-wide studies support Pao’s suspicion, at least as far as women are concerned. A 2008 survey of women in tech found that female workers in the industry leave their jobs at twice the rate of men. A 2013 study found that after about 12 years, 50 per cent of women in STEM fields — mostly in computing and engineering — changed their professions, compared with 20 per cent of professional women in non- STEM fields. The studies didn’t ask the same questions of other under-represented groups, though a new study expected in April from the Kapor Center for Social Impact will.
Meanwhile, retention numbers are trickling out of the Valley’s biggest companies. In a recent essay, former Uber Technologies Inc. software engineer Susan Fowler described how her request to transfer to another team was denied, and she couldn’t figure out why. Later, she learned, her manager was more concerned with maintaining the retention rate on his team.
“It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good,” Fowler wrote. “I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team.”
Fowler took it upon herself to estimate the retention rate for her department, which had gone from about 25 per cent female to six per cent in a year, according to her post. “Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit,” she wrote. “There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization.” Fowler left Uber in December. Uber declined to comment on its retention rates.
Uber is now investigating Fowler’s claims, and the company promised to release findings from that investigation next month. But it had long been tight-lipped about any diversity-related data. Even recruiters tasked with hiring more people from under-represented groups were denied access to information about the company’s makeup, Bloomberg reported last week.
Tech companies all collect data on retention, said Joelle Emerson, CEO of Paradigm, which consults with Silicon Valley firms about diversity. “So it’s just about analyzing and reviewing this information regularly.”
So far, only Intel Corp. has released this data. The company had long tracked its retention rate internally, and it wasn’t good: Underrepresented races and women were more likely to leave the company than white or Asian men.
But after Intel started to release retention data in 2015, it set a goal for the next year to keep exit rates even for all groups and reached it in 2016. Next year’s goal is to retain under-represented groups at a higher rate than their counterparts.