REUTERS/Brian Snyder
- Many technology companies have shared statements of support as protesters across the country advocate for an end to systemic racism and police brutality.
- But many of these same companies struggle to hire and retain people of color and women from all backgrounds.
- Business Insider tracked what enterprise tech companies have said publicly about the ongoing protests, along with their diversity statistics for leadership and their overall workforce, and asked how they plan to promote more diverse and equitable workplaces.
Across the US, people are marching to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black people who have been killed by police.
In response, tech companies have jumped on board, crafting blog posts and tweets to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But while their messages say they stand against racism, employees within those companies have often told a different story.
Silicon Valley has long been a mostly-white boys club: Underrepresented minorities like Black and Latinx people still only make up single-digit percentages of the workforce at many major tech companies. When you look at the leadership statistics, the numbers are even bleaker.
Making a corporate statement opposing racism should just be an initial step, says Aparna Rae, the cofounder of Moving Beyond, which helps companies make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of their business operations.
Companies should immediately "acknowledge the pain, suffering, and secondary trauma experienced by people of color employees, especially Black employees," she said, while equipping managers to offer time off, mental health resources, and no-meeting days. They can also support Black employees by providing white employees with resources to become better-informed allies, she said.
Beyond the systemic racism they may deal with in their everyday lives, underrepresented minorities face barriers to breaking into tech that their white counterparts are less likely to face.
Word choice in job postings can deter underrepresented minorities and women from applying in the first place, and if they do apply, tech interviewers may have unconscious biases that lead them to gravitate towards candidates like themselves (which can mean white males only hiring white males).
Once women and people of color are hired, they may face pay gaps and harassment. According to a Glassdoor survey, 43% of US employees have seen or experienced racism at work. While it's become common for major tech companies to hire diversity and inclusion executives, many startups don't make it a top priority early on, which can affect the way the company grows.
And when the culture of a company is unwelcoming to underrepresented minorities, it affects their retention rate. In the past year, the tech industry has seen memos circulate from employees at Google and Facebook describing the racism and discrimination they have faced at work. In one memo, a former Black Google employee wrote that they "never stopped feeling the burden of being black at Google," and current Black engineering director Leslie Miley also shared shared how he was accosted at least once a week while wearing his badge because he doesn't look like the employee his coworkers expect.
Women and people of color have also been disproportionately impacted by layoffs during the coronavirus, says Evelyn Carter, director of Paradigm, which works with companies to improve their diversity and inclusion efforts. She says it's partly because layoff decisions are often based on tenure, and, for the aforementioned reasons, women and people of color are more likely to be in junior positions instead of leadership.
"That influx of diversity is going away if folks aren't intentional about all their decisions in the employee life-cycle," Carter told Business Insider.
In recent years, companies have published their diversity statistics and pledged to increase hiring of people of color and women. In many cases, progress for these companies has been slow.
Moving Beyond's Rae also said that companies should be publicly and explicitly detailing their plans to diversify company leadership and boards of directors, and focus on approaches grounded in data.
"We are reading, 'We support Black Lives Matter," and, 'We don't condone racism,' but ultimately, when this dies down, is it going to be business as usual?" Rae said.
The value of making plans public is that it invites feedback and suggestions, and helps employees and outsiders hold the company accountable.
In that spirit, Business Insider put together a list detailing what 17 enterprise tech companies have said publicly about the ongoing protests, along with the diversity statistics at each one. We included statistics both for the company overall and in leadership. In addition, we asked each company what it plans to do in order to improve diversity and inclusion within the company: