While women and people of color are employed at tech companies in larger numbers than they used to be, their upward mobility at those companies has stagnated.
People of color — especially women — aren’t being promoted in tech as fast as they should be
White men consistently comprise a higher share of executive roles than professional roles at tech companies.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
A study by the Ascend Foundation, an organization for Asian professionals in North America, examined tech professionals over a period of eight years using government data, and found that white men were consistently promoted at a higher rate relative to their non-white, non-male peers.
From 2007 to 2015, white men consistently composed a higher share of executive roles than professional roles at tech companies, the study found. It’s the reverse for Asians, Hispanics and blacks, especially if they’re women.
The study looked at Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data from 2007-2015 for manufacturing and information companies with more than 100 employees based in San Francisco and San Jose areas. This is used as a proxy for major tech hardware and software companies, which tend to be based there.
More than 1,000 Bay Area tech companies were included in this review, providing a wider lens than the data released by individual tech companies.
Some key findings:
- Though Asian men and women were more common in entry-level professional jobs, white men and women were twice as likely as Asians to become executives.
- Asian women were the least likely among any cohort to become executives.
- Black and Hispanic professionals are much less likely than their white peers to become executives.
- The number of black executives had increased by 43 percent in the time period examined
.At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of black managers and black female professionals (which could spell trouble for the future executive pipeline). - Hispanics remained only 3.5 percent of all executives but declined from 5.2 percent to 4.8 percent of all professionals (also not promising for future promotions).
- White women are now more likely to be executives than professionals, but they are still underrepresented generally — an issue with recruiting rather than promotion.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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