Certain areas of technology companies outside of engineering, such as business development, customer success, communications and marketing, are also often more filled with women and historically underrepresented ethnic minorities. Brown says these types of roles have been gaining more and more respect and notoriety in recent years. But Mimi Fox Melton, program director at Code 2040, a nonprofit that helps early-career Black and Latinx technologists advance in the industry, says individuals in these roles are still more likely to be fired because they’re less likely to work. essential to the company than those who develop or maintain the product.
“You usually see BIPOC candidates being hired in the HR and recruiting space,” says Fox Melton. “But with a hiring freeze, you don’t need that many people to recruit candidates, so those people will be fired.”
Kaplan also told WIRED that managers often fail to consider how processes used to identify employees or roles to be eliminated can be biased against certain demographics. “Even systems designed to be neutral end up penalizing women and people of color,” she says. Research has shown that in performance reviews, women and especially people of color are often rated lower for comparable performance than their peers, making them appear to contribute less than they actually do. The choice to fire newer employees and protect those who have shown loyalty by staying with the company for a number of years may sound reasonable in theory, but in practice, Kaplan says this method will help people hired as part of more recent efforts to put diversity on the chopping block.
“In their early growth phase, most companies hire people through referral,” says Fox Melton. “We know that 75 percent of white people have all-white networks, which means companies are more likely to hire more and more white people.”
Efforts by tech companies to return employees to their luxury offices could also lead to a reduction in workforce diversity. The remote work revolution caused by the pandemic has helped companies looking to bring in workers from underrepresented backgrounds, said Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Meta’s most recent diversity report recognized remote work as a key factor in bringing in a more diverse pool of talent.
“If companies hire more diverse people from places like Atlanta, or Texas, or the South, they can keep them because they allow them to work close to their social networks, their homes and their communities,” Chakravorti says. “And that helps workers of color because they feel like they don’t have to move to a city like Boston, which is quite alienating for a lot of workers of color because it’s not the friendliest environment.”
With many tech companies, including Google, now forcing employees to return to the office, Chakravorti says some women and BIPOC employees are choosing to leave of their own accord. Women still do most of the housework and childcare, and while remote working doesn’t guarantee equality, a survey conducted by FlexJobs last year found that 68 percent of women would prefer to continue working remotely, with many work-life balance. Compulsory return to the office threatens to upset that balance. “It makes it harder for women,” Chakravorti says.
