Narrative: Tech is Not Diverse
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Google accused of ‘extreme’ gender pay discrimination by US labor department – The Guardian (Apr 7, 2017)
The Department of Labor is suing Google over an alleged failure to adequately disclose its compliance with equal opportunity laws as a federal contractor. During the course of the court case, the DoL has accused Google of having a significant gender pay disparity, something Google strongly denies. Were the allegations to be true, it would be extremely damaging for Google’s reputation as an employer, but given that Google hasn’t given the DoL all the documents it’s asking for, you have to ask whether the Department has a full picture of Google’s pay practices. Google, in turn, has argued that the DoL has gone too far in its request for documents and that it has already adequately complied with the applicable regulations. Recent surveys have shown significant gender and race pay disparities within the industry, so it wouldn’t be surprising if those patterns held at Google too, but it claims its own data shows no such disparity. The court case will presumably eventually come down one way or another both on this question and whether Google has adequately complied with regulations, so it’s worth keeping an eye on how this develops.
via The Guardian
In tech, the wage gender gap worsens for women over time, and it’s worst for black women – TechCrunch (Apr 5, 2017)
I covered a similar story a while back, but this one has more detail, and focuses more on gender in addition to racial disparities in tech salaries. It turns out that being a member both of an underrepresented gender and race increases your odds of being underpaid significantly, such that black and Latina women earn 79 cents for every dollar equivalently qualified men do. In part, as with that earlier study, this is because women often ask for lower salaries than men, though apparently only after their first few years in a career (in their first four years, they actually tend to ask for more). That, in turn, may reflect both conditioning in terms of what to expect and lower previous salaries. Regardless of the reasons, this is yet another sign of systemic problems in the tech industry when it comes to hiring women and racial minorities and paying them at the same rates as white men.
via TechCrunch
Uber’s first diversity report is not the worst thing ever – TechCrunch (Mar 28, 2017)
TechCrunch wasn’t the only publication to go with a headline like this, and it makes sense: Uber’s diversity report in many ways mirrors those from other big companies in the tech industry, and doesn’t appear noticeably worse on several of the big metrics. Indeed, if you were reading the report itself including the commentary about the various efforts Uber is engaged in, you’d get the impression that Uber was a forward-looking, tolerant, diverse, and vibrant place for people of all backgrounds to work. And that’s the problem with these reports – they say nothing about what it’s actually like to work at the company if you’re in one of the underrepresented groups, and we know from recent news that Uber can actually be pretty awful if you’re a woman, especially in a technical role. So even though Uber comes off not much worse than other big tech companies from the report alone, that shouldn’t be all that reassuring. Since this is the first of these reports, we also have zero data about how things have changed in the past year, and whether they’ve got better or even worse, something some past female employees have suggested. But numbers alone don’t tell the story, and that’s why the investigation – flawed though it is – is critical for evaluating and hopefully changing the other aspects of Uber’s culture as regards diversity which this report says nothing about.
via TechCrunch
Google opens Howard University West to train black coders – USA Today (Mar 23, 2017)
This seems like a great program from Google aimed at bringing in a more diverse workforce. For all that tech companies like to say they try to be diverse in their hiring, part of the problem is that people from underrepresented groups never apply in the first place, and companies therefore have to proactively reach out to those groups, as Google is doing here. Google is bringing students from Howard University, a historically black college, onto campus in Mountain View to help train black coders. This is on top of existing programs where Google employees spend time at Howard and other historically black universities helping students prep for interviews at Google and so on. Good for Google for doing this.
via USA Today
Survey Suggests Tech Workers Feel Workplaces Are Diverse Enough – USA Today (Mar 22, 2017)
This survey is a great illustration of one of the biggest challenges in increasing diversity in the US tech industry: most employees feel there’s already enough diversity. Reading through the various bits of insights in the article here, it appears that it’s a combination of most employees by definition not being in the minority or underrepresented groups and therefore not being personally affected by it, and a sense that the problems are systemic in the industry and their particular employer is doing its best. But it’s obviously very hard to change workplace cultures in favor of diversity when most of the current employees don’t even see a problem. Moreover, I suspect many individual employees are so focused on doing their day jobs that they rarely give a second thought to cultural issues in general, whether diversity specifically or something else.
via USA Today
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick just told staff he’s hiring a COO to help him – Recode (Mar 7, 2017)
Small follow-up on yesterday’s Information piece about Uber trying to hire a number two for Travis Kalanick. That news is now official, though Kara Swisher here also reports that Uber is looking to put another woman on its board, and that the board would prefer the COO to be a woman as well. That echoes both what I said here yesterday and what I implied last week in my Techpinions piece on CEOs and corporate culture: fixing Uber’s problems will be a lot easier with a woman in a senior executive role.
via Recode
Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret: The way it treats women – USA Today (Mar 3, 2017)
There has been a slew of these stories lately, the main tenor of which is that Uber is unfortunately not as much of an exception as we might like to think in Silicon Valley and the tech world more broadly. This piece has both some trend data and some specifics about other individuals beyond Susan Fowler, who wrote the story about her time at Uber recently. All of this, of course, is in large part an outgrowth of the lack of diversity in tech companies and the prevailing culture among engineers more broadly. Lots to digest here and lots of work to do, well beyond Uber and its current troubles.
via USA Today
How Uber got into this human resources mess – Recode (Feb 21, 2017)
Some great reporting here from Johanna Bhuiyan, with lots of digging behind the scenes into not just the corporate culture at Uber but more specifically the HR department and its lack of resources over the last several years, which likely contributed to the events Susan Fowler wrote about this week. It’s fairly clear that Uber underinvested in some of the aspects of HR not related to hiring and firing, but also that CEO Travis Kalanick continues to drive the company culture very much from the top down, including in a number of negative ways.
via Recode
Uber is not the only tech company that mishandles sexual harassment claims – TechCrunch (Feb 21, 2017)
Though I focused in yesterday’s bit on the Uber harassment claims on that company’s toxic corporate culture, it’s far from the only tech company with a culture that’s often unfriendly to women at best and which tolerates harassment and misogyny at worst. This TechCrunch article does a good job highlighting some other cases which were reported anonymously after the Uber news broke. If the tech industry is to become more diverse, this kind of thing has to go away, although of course until it does become more diverse, that’s a lot less likely – there’s definitely something of a catch-22 here.
via TechCrunch
A former Uber employee’s disturbing claims of workplace sexism reignite calls to #deleteUber – Recode (Feb 20, 2017)
On the one hand, this is an awful set of accusations regarding Uber and a culture of misogyny and damaging internal politics, and on the other I suspect most people who follow Uber won’t be surprised. The company has long been known for a bro culture which starts at the top with Travis Kalanick, and it seems to have done very little to change that culture. Corporate cultures are very powerful things, and very hard to change once established. Uber early on created a culture of intense competition both internally and externally – a culture where winning at all costs is what matters – and no matter what executives have said in formal settings since, their early actions have spoken much louder, and it appears that the culture at Uber is deeply toxic, especially for women. Travis Kalanick has predictably responded with feigned outrage, despite the fact that at the very least his direct reports were aware of the specifics here, and of course he’s directly responsible for the company culture that allows these things to happen. I’m glad an investigation will be led by Arianna Huffington, who is outside the hierarchy at Uber but on its board, and I’m very curious to see what it shows. A whitewash will go down terribly, but anything short of a serious shakeup is likely to be seen as insufficient.
via Recode (Susan Fowler’s full post here, and Kalanick’s Twitter response thread is here, while Arianna Huffington’s short tweet thread is here)