Diversity in tech: Lots of attention, little progress

Top companies’ workers don’t reflect their users

NEW YORK • The tech industry has brought us self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, disappearing photos and 3-D printers. But when it comes to racial and gender diversity, its companies are no trailblazers.

Despite loudly touted efforts to hire more black, Latino and female workers, especially in technical and leadership positions, diversity numbers at the largest tech companies are barely budging.

In 2014, two per cent of Googlers were black and three per cent were Hispanic, numbers that haven’t changed since. The picture is similar at and

is slightly more racially diverse (though not when it comes to gender) and even more so, though still not reflective of the U.S. population. is more racially diverse still, although it counts its large, lower-wage warehouse workforce in its totals.

Women, meanwhile, make up less than a third of the workforce at many companies — even less in engineering and other technical jobs.

Tech companies themselves tend to blame a “pipeline problem,” meaning a shortage of woman and minorities with technical qualifications. But a number of academic experts, tech-industry employees and diversity advocates say there’s a bigger problem. Silicon Valley, they argue, has failed to challenge its own unstated assumptions of what makes for great tech employees — and that actively hampers diversity.

“The people who are doing the hiring are not changing their thinking around what they view as qualified,” says Leslie Miley, engineering director at the messageservice startup Slack. Hiring managers, he says, spend too much time worrying that applicants who don’t fit techie stereotypes aren’t “Google-y enough or Facebook-y enough or Apple-y enough or Twitter-y enough.”

Miley, who is African-American, has previously worked as an engineer at Twitter, Apple, and

Companies are spending a lot of time and money on improving diversity. Two years ago, Intel splashily set itself the goal of achieving full representation in its workforce by 2020. Despite committing US$300 million to the effort and some early progress, acknowledges there is “a great deal of work to be done.”

Similar programs are everywhere throughout the tech industry, from outreach at high schools and historically black colleges to internship and mentoring programs to sponsorships for coding boot camps to bias training and support groups.

Why? Interviews with more than 30 tech workers, executives and diversity advocates suggest the blame lies with subtle biases in hiring, unwelcoming work environments and a paucity of diverse role models in top positions.

Aniyia Williams, founder and CEO of the startup Tinsel, says companies should focus on their own culture rather than blaming external factors they can’t control, such as limited computer-science education in U.S. schools. It’s not enough to release diversity reports and say, “Oh, not a lot has changed, but it’s the world, not us that’s the problem,” she says.

Williams, who is African-American, says she has made sure to hire women as well as underrepresented minorities. Tinsel makes tech jewelry targeted at women.

Diversity isn’t just about fairness. It’s about having designers who reflect the diversity of the people they are designing for. For tech companies hoping to reach millions or billions of users, a lack of diversity could mean their products “will not appeal to a large population,” says Lillian Cassel, chairwoman of computer sciences at Villanova University.

Diverse perspectives can also help prevent grievous errors — such as a problem at Google in 2015, when a photo-recognition feature misidentified black faces as gorillas. Some related tech missteps: Snapchat’s release of two photo

Some 11 per cent of computer science graduates were black and nine per cent were Hispanic in the 201314 school year, the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Education. Yet only four per cent of Google’s 2015 hires were black, and three per cent were Hispanic. At Intel, fewer than five per cent of hires were black and eight per cent were Hispanic. Numbers at other tech companies are comparable.

Major tech companies have a tradition of hiring applicants from top-tier universities — and those universities also have a problem with diversity, even if they’re doing slightly better than the companies. Some minority applicants, meanwhile, earn computer science chops through community colleges or coding boot camps instead — places often overlooked by recruiters.

The few minorities hired into big tech companies can often feel alienated in overwhelmingly white (and sometimes Asian) environments. Unsurprisingly, they are sometimes reluctant to recommend their employer to friends, classmates and former colleagues, furthering the cycle of underrepresentation, Williams and others say.