An internal memo written by a male Google engineer has reignited a heated debate about representation in Silicon Valley. Google’s new diversity VP has since come out against the memo’s central claims — which include statements about women being biologically unsuited to engineering jobs — but the debate still rages on.
It’s not just Google — many major tech companies are struggling with diversity
Here’s a look at their comparative diversity.
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.
Here’s a look at major tech companies’ comparative diversity, according to their most recent reports. Women make up at most 30 percent of leadership roles and less than 27 percent of technical roles at these companies.
Twitter, the smallest company by number of employees, has the highest rate of female leadership at 30 percent. It also has the lowest rate of women in technical positions, such as engineers at 15 percent.
Racial demographics aren’t much brighter.
Blacks and Latinx are represented at a much lower rate than their U.S. population. Facebook, which most recently reported new diversity numbers, had the highest share of people of color, particularly Asians, in technology jobs. Asian Americans tend to be overrepresented in technical roles but underrepresented in leadership positions.
Amazon, Apple and Google all had 31 percent of their leadership consisting of Asian, Latinx and blacks. These companies also report “other” and people who are two or more races, but those are usually under two percent.
Inequality exists at all levels of the job pipeline, but so do solutions. Look, for example, at the record number of women and minorities taking college-level computer science in high school this year.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
