Why women in tech are being Photoshopped in instead of hired
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Why women in tech are being Photoshopped in instead of hired:
An image of a tech event in which two women CEOs were poorly Photoshopped into a group of 15 men reignited a discussion last week about tech companies’ ongoing failures to meaningfully diversify their workforces.
Companies like Google and Facebook have overturned industries, changed the way we live, and are shaping the future. Yet somehow they haven’t been able to hire a workforce that even remotely represents their customers. Across the tech industry, the share of black and Latinx people in tech and leadership roles is often well below 5 percent, while women typically make up about a fifth to a quarter of those positions.
Around 2014, under heavy pressure from activists, many tech companies for the first time began releasing reports about their employee diversity. Back then, it seemed like a good-faith effort to acknowledge their lack of diversity and be more transparent about the problem and how they intended to fix it. They hired heads of diversity and inclusion, launched diversity initiatives, and updated their hiring practices.
But five years later, these companies have only become incrementally more diverse. While they’ve made strides in raising their companies’ overall diversity percentages, they’ve largely done so with lower-level positions. Women and people of color are still vastly underrepresented in leadership and technology roles: the high-paying, high-prestige jobs for which tech companies are known.
Facebook’s latest diversity report shows the company still has the same share of black and Latinx employees in technical roles — 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively — as it had in 2014. The number of women in these roles has jumped more substantially in that time, from 15 percent to 22 percent, though that’s still a far cry from the half of the population women represent. Facebook did not comment on the record about its diversity stats.
The story is similar at Google, though its share of Latinx employees did grow about a percentage point from 2014 to 2019. Google referred Recode to its annual diversity report to learn about the “challenges we see and strategies we are employing to make progress.”
Tech, of course, isn’t alone in its gender imbalances; many industries lack significant representation of women and minorities in important roles. Indeed, just 26 of the CEOs in the S&P 500 are women.
Tech companies, however, aspire to be progressive. You wouldn’t know that from their diversity numbers.
Diversity as optics
Many people working in tech have suggested that rather than hiring a truly diverse workforce, tech companies have resolved to deal with their diversity issues with lip service, pandering, and downright dishonesty.
In 2018, Twitter put out misleading diversity data that made it look like it was becoming more diverse, when in reality the share of underrepresented minorities at the company had declined. In May, a Google employee accused the search giant in a lawsuit of using bait-and-switch tactics to hire minorities in lesser positions than what they applied for, as a way to juice its diversity stats. And BuzzFeed News found last week that a photo of a tech CEO event published in GQ showed 15 mostly white male executives and two women — but the women, CEOs Lynn Jurich and Ruzwana Bashir, had been Photoshopped in.
The design house hosting the event said its doctored photo was a well-meaning attempt to get everyone into the picture. This prompts questions about why the two women weren’t in the photo, and why there were only two women present at the event in the first place. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who were also in attendance but who were not pictured, did not get digitally added, according to BuzzFeed News.
“No wonder activists are skeptical about real progress in Silicon Valley,” said Deborah Singer, chief marketing officer at Girls Who Code, a nonprofit trying to alleviate the gender gap in tech.
“This is a culture problem that’s keeping women out of tech — it’s sexism, racism, harassment, discrimination, bias. And this Photoshop story is the perfect illustration.”
She added, “What’s so deeply ironic about this Photoshop scandal is that in the time it took them to Photoshop Lynn and Ruzwana into the photo, we could have recommended 100 women for them to actually invite and include.” Representatives for Brunello Cucinelli, the luxury designer the tech summit was visiting, did not reply when asked if more than two women had been invited to the event.
The doctored photo incident struck a nerve because it literally illustrated the ongoing criticism that tech companies consider diversity to be a vague optics problem rather than a real issue they must solve.
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