In 2014, some of the biggest tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Apple, released their initial diversity reports. For the first time, these companies opened up about quite how woefully homogenous their teams were, including from a gender perspective. All reported that women made up around 30 per cent of their overall staff, with that figure dropping to 15 to 20 per cent for specifically tech roles.
At the time, many journalists covering the tech industry hailed the release of these diversity reports as a positive step. I remember, because I was one of them. Of course, the figures were as terrible as we expected – but surely this transparency was an important step forward; the necessary groundwork to improve the massive gender imbalance in tech. After all, you can’t fix a problem without admitting it exists.
Five years later, and things don’t look much better than they did back then. In its latest diversity report, from 2018, Google reports that 30.9 per cent of its global staff are women – up from 30.6 per cent in 2014. Apple’s latest figures, from 2017, put the company’s global staff at 32 per cent women, while Facebook has done slightly better, with an increase from 31 percent women in 2014 to 36 per cent in 2018. The numbers for women in technical roles are all still significantly lower.
Clearly more can – and should – be done. It’s not enough to just report figures, donate a paltry sum (by tech giants’ standards) to a girls in STEM scheme and make some vague hand-waving references to “the pipeline”. On International Women’s Day, here are some solid actions we’d like to see tech companies – and, indeed, all companies – take to help address gender bias in the workplace.
Reduce bias in hiring
Don’t look for applicants who fit your stereotype of what a tech worker should look like. Check your unconscious (and conscious) biases, both when hiring and promoting. Do not look for a “culture fit”. Beware of language that may put you off hiring a woman; studies have found that people tend to use more tempered language when writing recommendation letters for women than they do for men, and that some descriptions that read as positive for men can be interpreted negatively when applied to women.
Describing a man as a “team player”, for example, is seen as a positive leadership trait, but when applied to a woman, this can be interpreted as someone who follows rather than leads. Caroline Criado-Perez’s new book Invisible Women, on the “gender data gap”, has a whole chapter on the myth of meritocracy and the bias woman face both in getting hired and climbing the career ladder.
Beware, also, of automated systems. Often designed with the idea of promoting “blind” recruitment, automated tools can soon perpetuate and even enhance gender bias if they are working off biased data – and they probably will be. In 2018, Reuters reported that Amazon had scrapped a machine-learning-based recruitment tool because it was downgrading women's CVs unfairly. Even though it wasn’t supposed to be judging based on gender, the system learned not to like references to a “women’s chess club” or to an all-women’s college, as these did not appear in the examples of good CVs it was trained on – most of which came from men.
Look beyond gender
It’s not enough just to consider gender if you’re trying to create a genuinely inclusive environment and attract and keep a diverse workforce. Facebook, Google and Apple’s most recent diversity reports all report an overall staff around 50 per cent white, with black employees making up only 3.5, 2.5 and nine per cent respectively.
But looking at gender and race separately doesn’t give the full picture. It’s important to look at how different characteristics intersect. The experience of a woman of colour may be very different from that of a white woman, for example, but also from that of a black man. Understanding the different challenges faced by different groups means looking at these intersectional identities. For too long, “diversity” has been interpreted as just “more women”.
Prioritize parental leave
Given the burden of pregnancy and childbirth, and then childcare, falls disproportionately on women, insufficient paid maternity leave can force women to leave work. Most of the big tech companies actually offer better leave than many companies (especially in the US), but women can still find themselves forced to make a choice between keeping their job and raising a family. Netflix is a positive outlier here, offering a full year of paid parental leave.
And it’s not just women. Offering paternity leave not only lets fathers spend time with their families but can also help combat expectations that women should take on the predominant childcare role. It’s not enough just to include it in a contract, however – if company culture frowns upon men taking leave, they won’t. Don’t just offer it; encourage it.
Improve childcare options
While tech companies love to make a big song and dance about the perks and amenities they offer – Huge gyms! Healthy snacks! Doggy daycare! – they rarely include on-site childcare. Many, such as Facebook, subsidise the costs of childcare, but making it easier for employees to balance work and family life would prevent women from having to choose between the two. This also includes offering flexible working hours or part-time roles, and allowing people to work from home.
Insist on pay equity
It goes without saying that women and men should be paid equally for equal work – although that’s not always how it plays out. The US Department for Labor is currently investigating claims that Google underpays its female employees (though the company denies this). It’s also not just about offering the same salary for the same role; it’s important to check whether people are being given the correct position in the first place, or if they may be overqualified for the title they find themselves with and therefore undervalued and underpaid.
There remains a notable pay disparity at many companies between women’s and men’s median salaries, largely because men tend to hold more higher-ranking positions. This shows the importance of hiring women into higher-level roles, as well as promoting women internally. At board level, men still vastly outnumber women at tech companies.
Address company culture
One survey by AnitaB.org, a social enterprise that supports women in tech, found that women leaving tech roles cited working conditions – including long hours, no advancement and low pay – as their reason for quitting 30 per cent of the time, and organizational climate – including not getting on with their boss or coworkers – 17 per cent of the time.
In 2017, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler went viral with her account of discrimination and harassment in a male-dominated team, which she wrote dropped from 25 per cent women to six percent women during the year she was there. Her blog post described a workplace culture that was hostile to women, with Fowler’s experiences including incidents of sexual harassment as well as more absurd “everyday” sexism, such as the company buying leather jackets for all the men on the team but not the women.
Even common aspects of company culture that do not appear to be overtly sexist can end up having a disproportionate effect on women. Workplace cultures that fetishize long hours, for instance, can exclude women, who take on a disproportionate amount of care work and therefore may not be able to stay late. The same goes for holding work social events in the evening; consider a more inclusive alternative.
Have clear processes for reporting harassment
If you think your company has zero issues with harassment or discrimination, you’re probably not listening to the right people – or not giving them chance to speak. Make sure you have clear processes for how people can report, and what should happen when they do. Have mechanisms in place for people to report – anonymously, if they wish – and train staff to handle these situations.
Oh, and stop silencing victims by using non-disclosure agreements and forced arbitration.
Actually measure progress
In 2013, software engineer Tracy Chou, who worked at Pinterest at the time, decried the lack of transparency around the number of women in technical roles at tech companies and released the stats for women in engineering at Pinterest. She then set up a GitHub repository to allow people at other companies to do the same, ramping up the pressure on tech giants to come clean. A year later, many released their first diversity reports.
Chou recognised the need to track and measure in order to see the true scale of the problem, and this mentality needs to be carried through in any efforts to address diversity and inclusion. If you start a new project to hire more women, set metrics of what you aim to achieve, and track whether you actually reach them.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
