Our ranking weighs gender and race-based diversity across all types of roles, as well as a score calculated from the Simpson’s Diversity Index. With Simpson's, diversity goes up as a result of an increase in demographic richness and evenness, commonly used in university admissions. It's one of several variables used in the ranking, and probably speaks a little more directly to the way in which you're interpreting diversity.
I'm excited to share this project on behalf of the creators. If you're interested in learning more, you can contact them at deartechpeople(at)gmail.com.
Something about that really creeps me out. I don’t want someone looking at my photo to determine if I’m Asian or Latino, or male or female or whatever else, then shaming my employer based on the data.
What’s next, auto scanning of resumes to make sure the name sounds like a girl’s name? Requiring photos when applying to jobs to ensure you are “black enough?”
The goal of Dear Tech People is to provide a degree of transparency into diversity data--a topic that frankly a lot of companies feel is taboo and too hard to talk about. Outside the very few companies that have released diversity reports, most companies have poor, incomplete, or no diversity data available internally, and diversity advocates we spoke with found it difficult to make an internal case for inclusion initiatives without data to back up efforts.
Dear Tech People is by no means perfect, but what we've found is that some amount of data, even imperfect data, can give people an idea of where they are and what their goals are. Even some amount of data helps kick off a discussion of leadership or helps people make a case for an internship program that works with HBCUs. Furthermore, the long term vision is to raise the standard of self-reporting, and get companies to fill in incomplete data with complete data that they gather via their own diversity reports. If a company (or even an employee at a company) doesn't think the data looks right, we want to work with them to figure out how to survey their company and get their self-reported data up to standard.
But for now, we work with what we have, and that is public profiles on the internet. You can read more about how we put the methodology together here: http://www.deartechpeople.com/methodology
And your stance is that people aren't allowed to judge characteristics about you from your public photo that you put online?
Are you also going to be outraged over people shame conference presenters over a lack of diversity in panels, which requires the same sort of determination?
What's next, requiring filters installed on peoples' eyes to prevent them from seeing race/gender in photos?
1) Only two companies in the entire ranking have outperformed the American population in terms of diversity. We all know that tech can do better, but this is pretty surprising given that most companies on the list are based out of SF and NYC, two areas are quite diversity relative to the rest of America.
2) Because this is the first time we can compare this amount of standardized diversity data across companies, it's the first time we're really able to see who is doing better than who. It's interesting to see some companies that are often lauded and branded as diversity thought leaders, doing less well than we'd all expect.
3) Some patterns have emerged: NYC based companies tend to do better than SF based companies. Ecommerce companies tend to outperform security companies (though we saw that one coming). More importantly, this data shows how company structure and sector can make it easier or harder to be inclusive in certain ways. That's why we've included sector averages. We hope those numbers help people make more informed analyses about how well a company is performing given their role make up.
We've had a lot of feedback from underrepresented groups that will inform product improvements moving forward--from accessibility to which companies people want to see on the list next. Most of all, we've had affirming feedback that these numbers really do help people make the case for diversity initiatives and kickstart conversations at their companies. We're excited about the prospect of seeing real initiatives come into existence because of DTP data, and that's what we really hope to support and see more of!
I know that hiring for increased diversity in certain professions is very difficult. In particular this is difficult in professions where the education-to-profession pipeline for qualified individuals is "bottlenecked" from earlier points in peoples' lives. Company initiatives may not be nipping the problem in the bud, but rather are counteracting a problem that has already started earlier.
That is, not only are certain groups underrepresented in some profession, but they are also underrepresented in the population of students and self-learners that are interested in that profession. It is indeed a complex problem which may require "uprooting" of trends that penetrate deep in family traditions, ethnic economic niches, or improving social networks from people that have an educational or an income disadvantage.
