Technology & its diversity problem – Is your workplace diverse?

Technology & its diversity problem – Is your workplace diverse?

Diversity within is a huge problem – for example the amount of women in Technology is vastly smaller than the number of men in technology. The Tech Power houses have shed some light on their diversity figures, which paints a shocking picture.

Last year, in response to critics who accused them of being comprised almost entirely of white men, a number of the biggest players in tech published their employee demographic data for the first time. The numbers confirmed the doubters’ worst suspicions: Minorities accounted for just a tiny fraction of most of the companies’ workforces and no company could say that women made up 50% of its employees.

The table above shows how many people work in technology related roles.

The table above shows people in non-tech roles. e.g. marketing.

“Tech companies must reflect the communities they serve. If not, they risk alienating the users most responsible for their success” – Mark S. Luckie Author of The Digital Journalist’s Handbook and the new novel, DO U. Former Manager of Journalism & News @Twitter

Getting a workplace to be more diverse isn’t just about appearances, it’s about better serving their users. Twitter, according to a recent Pew research, has a user base that’s 27 percent black, 25 percent Hispanic and 21 percent women. Indeed, Twitter is a key factor in important social movements in black America, resulting in hashtags like #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter, which are actually adorned on Twitter’s walls.

Recently, there was a bug where black people were mistakenly tagged as “gorillas” in Google’s image search, which might not have happened if black people were involved in the development and quality assurance process. Miley also posits that Twitter’s recent struggles in gaining new users could also be attributed to the lack of diversity in opinions and backgrounds.

Twitter has a commitment to becoming more diverse:

Here are the representations goals we’ve set for 2016:

  • Increase women overall to 35%
  • Increase women in tech roles to 16%
  • Increase women in leadership roles to 25%
  • Increase underrepresented minorities overall to 11%*
  • Increase underrepresented minorities in tech roles to 9%*
  • Increase underrepresented minorities in leadership roles to 6%*

*US only

https://blog.twitter.com/2015/we-re-committing-to-a-more-diverse-twitter

Is your workplace diverse or are you more stereotypical? Is your work place planning a shakeup in 2016 to become more diverse? I would love to hear!

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