Hidden figures: How Silicon Valley keeps diversity data secret
Hidden figures: How Silicon Valley keeps diversity data secret
By Will Evans and Sinduja Rangarajan / October 19, 2017
When the popular messaging platform Slack won a fastest-rising startup award last year, the company sent four black female engineers to accept it.
Onstage at the TechCrunch awards show, one of the women praised Slack’s diversity,citing a statistic from the company’s 2016 diversity report: 9 percent of Slack’s engineering team were black, Latina or Native American women.
“THIS Is What Diversity In Tech Should Look Like,” said one HuffPost headline.
At the 2016 TechCrunch awards in San Francisco, four black female engineers at Slack – from left to right, Megan Anctil, Erica Joy Baker, Kiné Camara (at microphone) and Duretti Hirpa – accept the award for fastest-rising startup. In her speech, Camara cited a number from a Slack employee diversity survey that the company later acknowledged was flawed. Credit: TechCrunch
It turns out that number came from an anonymous employee survey that Slack later acknowledged was flawed. While the company had said 6.9 percent of its technical team was black, for example, this year’s diversity report admitted the number should have been 4.3 percent. No mention was made of women of color this year.
How many women of color do work at Slack? The answer is on a one-page form Slack and all companies with 100 or more employees send to the federal government each year. The forms – called EEO-1 reports – show hard numbers of employees broken down by race, gender and job categories such as professionals, managers and executives. But Slack won’t make it public.
Even as California’s Silicon Valley struggles with diversity and discrimination, most of the area’s tech companies won’t share that basic data with the public. Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting sought the government-mandated EEO-1 reports from 211 of the biggest San Francisco Bay Area-based tech companies as part of an ongoing project examining diversity data in Silicon Valley.
The requests included the top 150 publicly traded tech companies, as compiled by The Mercury News in San Jose, and dozens of Bay Area “unicorns,” or private companies worth at least $1 billion, as estimated by research firms Crunchbase and CB Insights. Of the 211 companies surveyed by Reveal, only 23 released their most recent reports. One of those 23, Clover Health, now says its report might be inaccurate.
Still, the 23 reports represent the largest public collection of EEO-1 figures that name Silicon Valley tech companies. A few private companies – Pinterest, 23andMe, Viewand Clover Health – released their raw numbers for the first time. So did public companies Square, a payment processing platform, and MobileIron, which specializes in mobile security. Chipmaker Nvidia also released its latest report exclusively to Reveal.
Companies are under no legal obligation to release the reports, and the government keeps them confidential. But a recent push for transparency led some tech giants, including Google and Facebook, to share their raw numbers.
Since 2004, Alex Karp has led Palantir Technologies, a data analysis company that paid nearly $1.7 million earlier this year to settle government claims that it discriminated against Asian applicants. Palantir is one of many tech companies that have not made their EEO-1 forms public. Credit: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Most others – including name brands such as Dropbox, Instacart, Netflix, PayPal, Pandora Media, Reddit and Tesla – still resist or put out basic pie charts that can be misleading, difficult to verify and impossible to compare. Three companies the federal government has accused of discriminatory hiring – Oracle, Palantir Technologies andSplunk – also failed to disclose their demographics.
For tech firms that did disclose, the numbers were particularly stark for executives. Twitter, Square and 23andMe did not report a single black, Latino or multiracial executive in 2016. Female executives who were black, Latina or multiracial were nonexistent at eight of the 23 companies, including Adobe Systems, Google and Lyft.
The EEO-1 reports often are criticized for using clunky, outmoded categories. The multiracial option, for example, doesn’t specify races. And the “professional” job category includes both tech workers such as software engineers and non-tech employees such as lawyers, accountants and human resources specialists. Still, the raw numbers are the only standardized way to compare companies.
Among professionals, Google and Apple had some of the lowest proportions of women, with 25 percent or less. Nvidia sat at the bottom, with 16 percent. Googlefired an engineer in August over a memo arguing that biological differences make women less suited to tech or management. For all of the firms, the vast majority of female professionals – 80 percent or more – were white and Asian.
For black professionals, Hewlett Packard Enterprise had the highest proportion at 6.4 percent, compared with 1.7 percent at Apple and less than 1 percent at eBay. The online auction company also had the lowest proportion of Latino professionals. Underrepresented minorities — including black, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander and multiracial employees — made up 8.7 percent of Uber’s professional workforce, compared to 14.2 percent for Lyft.
Asian employees generally were much better represented among professionals than managers or executives, where the ranks were usually whiter.
A tight hold on data
The battle over disclosing demographics is old news to veteran diversity advocates such as Erica Joy Baker. She argues that tech firms should share much more: promotions, departures, salaries and company ownership – all broken down by race and gender.
“We’re still having a fight about step one, we’re still having a fight about the bare minimum,” she said.
Baker was onstage as a senior engineer at Slack when the company won the startup award last year. But she couldn’t move up the ladder, she said.
“I started getting really demoralized and thinking maybe I shouldn’t be a manager,” she said.
Baker got several outside offers and ended up as a senior engineering manager at the startup Patreon.
“So, OK, it wasn’t me,” Baker said of hitting a ceiling at Slack. “Who else is involved in that equation?”
Slack declined to say how many of its employees or managers are women of color. Its EEO-1 report would answer that question.
“As we continue to understand and pursue best practices for advancing inclusive environments and reporting diversity data, we may consider publishing our EEO-1 reports in the future, but we are not planning to do so at this point,” a Slack spokeswoman wrote in an email to Reveal.
Fast-growing startups rarely have good processes for fairly evaluating and promoting engineers, which can hit people of color hardest, said Leslie Miley, a former engineering director at Slack and former engineering manager at Twitter. It’s important, though, for companies to share their raw numbers, he said.
“How can you get better unless you are truthful about what the situation is?” he said. “I don’t understand why companies don’t share those publicly.”
Diversity numbers rarely generate positive headlines, but they can make companies confront reality.
“Internally, it’s that, ‘Oh man, our numbers are coming out again, how do we look?’ ” said Judith Williams, who was head of diversity at Dropbox and a diversity manager at Google. “It forces a conversation both externally and internally.”
