White men still hold the most leadership positions in tech

It’s still pretty difficult to be a woman or person of color in Silicon Valley. A report from The Center for Investigative Reporting of 177 of the largest San Francisco Bay Area tech firms shows that despite at least 30 top tech companies taking the White House’s Inclusion Pledge a couple of years ago, most have made little progress in changing the makeup of their companies. 

The report, which is based on the one-page, federally mandated forms, known as EEO-1 reports that these companies are required to furnish to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), created an anonymized dataset that shows how far behind they are on creating diverse workforces. Among the top-level unsurprising findings:

-Nearly a third of the firms (including Lyft and Square that have made their statistics public) had no female executives of color.

-The Asian-American glass ceiling is real. Among engineers, designers, and analysts, 12% were Asian women in 2016, but only 8%  of managers and 4.5% of executives were Asian women.

-White women professionals made up 13.8% of the workforce, and that number only inched up to 14.6% at the exec level.

-Black workers make up less than 2% of professionals and less than 1% of executive roles while Latinx workers make up less than 4% of those roles. For example, more than half of Apple’s Latino and black employees worked in retail or administrative support.

It’s not a pipeline problem. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, 8% of professionals (including tech roles) at companies such as banks, universities, and hospitals were black, but only 4% of all professionals in leading tech companies were black.