Silicon Valley’s ‘bro culture’: faulty pipeline, or old fashioned misogyny?
It’s well known that the tech industry has a diversity problem. For many, the words ‘Silicon Valley’ conjure up an image of the quintessential ‘tech bro’. The term, alongside Silicon Valley’s ‘bro culture’, has become a byword for the tech industry’s sexism.
The industry knows this as well. The past decade has seen an increased focus from industry leaders on changing the narrative around diversity and equality in Silicon Valley. One step, adopted by several big companies, has been to start publishing diversity and inclusion reports.
Each company has its own stated aims for publishing these reports, but in general, we can assume they’re intended to communicate to the public an awareness of the problem, demonstrate greater transparency, and highlight companies’ efforts to make a difference.
"The lower numbers of women studying STEM undoubtedly impacts the number of women who are recruited to tech companies."
Has heightened awareness of the problem led to tangible progress? The best place to start is to look at what the numbers in tech companies’ own reports tell us. According to Google’s 2019 diversity and inclusion report, published last April, the company’s global workforce is made up of 68.4% men and 31.6% women.
In terms of racial diversity, Google’s US staff comprises predominantly two ethnic groups—White (54.5%) and ‘Asian+’ (39.7%). Just 3.3% of Google’s US staff are ‘Black+’. The document doesn’t specify exactly which groups are included under the term Black+, but according to the US Census Bureau’s (USCB) estimates, Black or African-American people make up 13.4% of the total population in the US.
The report also records ‘Latinx+’ (this term is not universally accepted, but is used by Google) as being the ethnicity of 5.7% of the company’s US staff. The USCB estimates Latino and Hispanic people, the closest comparable category, to be 18.3% of the total US population.
Google’s lack of racial diversity is skewed primarily against two groups: Latino and Black people. This is particularly glaring when compared to the US population as a total. You could perhaps get a truer picture by looking at the geographic spread of Google’s employees.
Google’s national headquarters is located in Mountain View, California, where it employs more than 20,000 people (a significant chunk of parent company Alphabet’s global 100,000+ workforce). The demographics of California could possibly go some way towards explaining the proportion of Black+ employees at Google—the 3.3% figure compares slightly more favourably to the 6.5% of California residents who are Black or African-American, than to the total US figure of 13.4%.
But this still doesn’t explain how underrepresented ‘Latinx+’ people are—the USCB says that Latino and Hispanic people make up 39.3% of California’s population. It would be unfair to focus exclusively on Google (which could not provide a spokesperson for comment), especially as these figures are only intended to demonstrate a trend that is common across the tech sector. Look at similar players in the industry, and you will find the same dynamics.
Facebook’s latest diversity report, published last July, indicates that 36.9% of its global workforce are women. When looking at technical jobs, that drops to just 23%. Its US staff consists of 5.2% Hispanic people, and 3.8% Black people. In technical roles, this is 3.5% and 1.5%, respectively.
