Diversity in the Tech Workforce

A blog post I wrote about diversity in the Google workforce led to an invitation from Wired Magazine to expand on the idea for a special issue on Race, Gender, and Equality in the Digital Age. I gathered data regarding both ethnicity and gender in the tech workforce pipeline. I also broadened the scope of tech companies included in the data, and took a look at the transition within companies from professional/technician to leadership roles.

The article was published in November as part of their infographic feature well. It featured my research and writing, and a graphic that was generated by Wired's in-house team. You can read details about the methodology and sources I used in this post - where there is also a photo of the original print article (Wired hasn't posted the article online, as of this writing).

Here's another way of looking at the data with more of a pipeline perspective:

And another look with gender as the primary focus:

As you might have expected, there are a lot of white males in the tech industry. No surprise there. What's interesting (and potentially useful) is seeing the bottlenecks for those who are underrepresented. Understanding where different groups drop off the path to tech employment may give clues to where educators and employers can focus their efforts to have a real impact on diversity in tech.

Many thanks to Sarah Nahm of Lever, Jane Margolis (author of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing), Caroline Simard of Stanford, and Christopher Palmer of UC Berkeley for their valuable insights throughout the research process.