Tallying Female Workers Isn't Enough to Make Tech More Diverse; Atlantic, 8/11/14

Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic; Tallying Female Workers Isn't Enough to Make Tech More Diverse:

"This drumbeat of diversity data has been anticlimactic, not least because it shows what most people already expected: that leaders in technology are overwhelmingly hiring white men. Often, when companies offered more granular detail, the gender divide was even more pronounced. Company-wide representation of women might be 30 percent, but the percentage of women in tech and engineering roles at Google and Yahoo, for instance, was about half that.

All the companies say they need to do more. Few are willing to talk about the issue beyond what they've released in charts and blog posts. Plenty of people say, or whisper to themselves, that individual companies can't fix the industry-wide "pipeline problem."...

If the industry cannot agree that there are obstacles to women entering the industry in the first place, it's no wonder the scope of the conversation is limited. Even those who fixate on diversity in tech often focus too narrowly on gender. "We'll talk about the fact that there's sexism in tech, but we won't talk about the fact that there's racism," said Tiffani Ashley Bell, CEO of scheduling app Pencil You In. "I feel like that's the safe conversation. And mostly white women are highlighted, and mostly white women are talking about the issue—and they're going to see it from that perspective."

Bell says that without a more open and inclusive conversation about diversity in tech, a few high-profile blog posts about workforce numbers isn't going to make a difference. "You can be well intentioned, but if you don't act on it—if you're not actually doing anything—change is not going to come about just from you wanting to be inclusive," Bell said. "It has to be something you're actively doing. If you want to be more inclusive there are ways to do it."

Sharing data is part of the solution, but it has to be linked with meaningful initiatives to change corporate practices. Companies should release annual reports detailing their progress and publicly assessing the workforce diversification strategies that have and haven't worked. That's the next step."