ADRIAN WECKLER

Tech firms follow the herd in terms of employee diversity

HOW important is diversity at tech companies? By some metrics, it’s not very important at all. Facebook, which last week reported record revenue and user numbers, recently admitted that it remains largely a white male firm. The number of women working at Facebook is stuck at 33pc, while black employees make up just 2pc of the social networking giant’s staff.

The figures are for Facebook’s US operations. But it’s a common story across the world and here in Ireland: tech companies largely hire white men for the vast bulk of senior technical, engineering and management roles.

These companies blame ‘the pipeline’ from schools and colleges, claiming that not enough women and men of ethnic minorities are coming through the required educational and training channels.

“It has become clear that, at the most fundamental level, appropriate representation in technology or any other industry will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system,” said Maxine Williams, head of diversity at Facebook.

But others say this excuse sidesteps a critical factor: that companies founded by rich young men who went to elite colleges are overlyfocused on recruiting similar people from similar backgrounds in similar colleges. Tech companies sometimes call this “culture”. In trying to guess who will be a success and who will be a failure if hired, recruiters go with what they know — rich young white men who largely took the same classes as them and use the same vernacular.

Even in Dublin, which is a satellite base for lots of Silicon Valley tech firms, big firms’ recruitment processes can involve four or five interviews and ‘vocation’ tests to check whether the candidate’s personality ‘matches’ what they’re looking for. This is over and above any qualifications you actually have.

Deviating from this is seen as a risky move that might “lower the bar”.

Aside from the problematic societal implications of this culture, there is actually evidence that it may not work to advance tech companies’ progress.

“Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” said Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google in a 2013 interview with the New York Times.

“We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school.”

This message doesn’t seem to be getting through to recruiters for some of the biggest tech companies. Web giants, especially, seem to be the most white, male and conservative.

For example, black employees make up just 2pc of Google’s staff, 2pc of Facebook’s staff and 2pc of Twitter’s staff. And that’s for all roles: it’s just 1pc for technical positions.

Older, non-web tech firms are a little better, though not by much. 3.5pc of Microsoft’s staff are black while 8pc of Apple’s staff are black.

“The lie is that there is some sort of pipeline problem preventing tech companies from hiring more black people,” wrote Microsoft engineer Dare Obasanjo in a blogpost on the issue earlier this month. “The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic makeup of their employees based on what schools and cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices.”

Obasanjo is strongly critical of what he regards as self-congratulatory lip service from seemingly-liberal white tech company founders who talk the talk but rarely the walk the walk on straying from hiring rich young men.

“One of the things I noticed is how these tech companies feel they are extremely open minded and tolerant,” he wrote. “But when the rubber meets the road about hiring more diverse candidates it turns into a discussion of ‘lowering the bar’.”

In Ireland, assessing whether there is a problem in hiring ethnic minorities in tech companies is harder to gauge as there are less technical design roles here than in tech companies based in the US. However, there is no lack of evidence about how scant the numbers are of female participation at top levels in local tech companies.

Research I undertook this year found that under 3pc of tech-related venture capital, a central sources of funding for tech firms in Ireland, goes to firms led by women.

What’s more, the average individual investment (€591,000) in a female-led Irish tech company was nine times less than in the malerun firms (€5.46m).

And while almost one-in-eight VC-funded tech firms here has a female co-founder, only one in 20 has a female chief executive.

The problem isn’t limited to men choosing men over women. According to my research, two-thirds of the tech companies founded or co-founded by women last year also chose a male chief executive to run the business. (Of the four firms run by a female chief executive, all were founded by women.) Where women are involved at a senior level, it is still typically in the roles of marketing, HR or project management roles. How much does all of this matter? To society, it matters a lot. Tech companies are now the biggest, most important companies in the world. Other industries now look up to their working practices.

So if they say that hiring more women or ethnic minorities is an act of philanthropy that risks “lowering” the performance “bar”, others will feel empowered to do the same.

“One of the things I noticed is how these tech companies feel they are extremely open minded and tolerant. But when the rubber meets the road about hiring more diverse candidates, it turns into a discussion of ‘lowering the bar’...”