Diversity & Inclusion in the Tech Industry

That Time When Women Stopped Coding

• What occurred during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer scene?
  • The decline in women in computer science coincided with the increase number of personal computers entering homes.
• Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up?
  • Men who reached college were already far more familiar with the basics of using computers. This often placed women at a disadvantageous starting point compared to their male counterparts in computer science education.

Employee breakdown of key technology companies

• What three take-a-ways do you have looking at this data?
  • Major tech company employees appear to be majority white males.
  • In 2017, most tech companies appear to have made a push toward diversifying the racial composition of their employees.
  • Despite a push for racial diversification, gender diversity didn’t appear to change much in 2017. Some companies made a 5% change, but that was the larges swing and was only seen in 3 companies who provided their data.

Why diversity matters to your tech company

• When are diversity efforts most successful?
  • When they’re driven by a commitment from company leaders. This requires leaders to understand the importance of diversity in the workplace.
• Why do diverse companies perform better?
  • Diverse groups bring more and different ways of seeing and approaching a problem. Members of a diverse group have a wider range of life experiences that they can draw from for problem solving.
• Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa.
  • A great example is from the reading, which cites a case where Youtube’s iOS app was originally built by mostly right-handed people. As a result, no consideration was given to how left handed people would use the app and 5-10% of user videos were uploaded upside down by mistake.

Things I want to know more about

I’d like to know what methods work most effectively to build and promote a diverse workplace. The military had frequent diversity and Equal Opportunity training, but I’ve always wondered what other methods could be more effective.