Surprise, surprise. In a report published by Dear Tech People, we can now say for certain: Diversity in tech blows. Granted, things are better than they were five, even two, years ago. But it’s still a bit bleak. Of course, companies like Apple and Intel run in-house diversity reports, however, very few tech giants have followed suit. Dear Tech People tackled the rankings, analyzing race and gender inclusion at the top 100 tech companies.
“After talking to 50 HR leaders and hundreds of employers, we found diversity data to be incredibly sparse,” the study says. “We analyzed thousands of profiles across LinkedIn and AngelList and now have the data to hold companies accountable.”
According to the methodology behind the report, Dear Tech People chose 100 tech companies that were “darlings” of the industry – the companies that show up most in our daily lives. They then analyzed thousands of profiles pulled from online sources, such as LinkedIn, and consolidated diversity numbers at a company level. From there they looked gender and race representation by employing a combination of name analyzers, facial recognition technology, and manual identification through Mechanical Turk to determine an individual employee’s race and gender.
The final piece they analyzed was leadership roles within the top companies.
“There’s very little standardization regarding what constitutes “leadership,” the study says. “Some companies (like Github) indicate that leadership is anyone who is a manager, while others (Slack) define it as Directors and above. We’ve chosen to classify leadership as anyone who is a VP and above.”
That said, the study is by no means holistic. Missing from the metrics are LGBTQ representation, those who identify beyond the binary, and those who are Native American.
The report presents three different rankings. First, they have the overall ranking, which evaluates companies on a composite score. There are two separate categories for leadership and technical rankings, both of which take underrepresented demographics and a Simpson’s diversity index calculation into account.
Leading the pack in the top 10 are:
1. Clover Health
2. Blue Apron
3. Patreon
4. Rent the Runway
5. StitchFix
6. Glossier
7. Chariot
8. Pinterest
9. BuzzFeed
10. Collective Health
