Diversity in Silicon Valley
We hear lots of anecdotes about the difficulties that minorities face in the tech industry, but hard numbers on the issue are scarce.
We spent more than two months trying to get data, and we posted a piece about the results this morning.
Back in August, we filed a Freedom of Information request seeking workforce data from 20 companies: the tech industry’s 10 biggest firms by annual sales and 10 influential startups.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission denied the request in full, saying it is legally prohibited from releasing that information. We later filed the same request with the Department of Labor, and we’re awaiting a response.
We also asked all 20 companies to voluntarily release parts of their most recent report. Three companies agreed to do so: Dell, Ingram Micro and Intel. (Click here for a look at the data from each of those three.) The other 17 declined or ignored multiple requests.
The chart above compiles the workforce data from the three who shared their data, and compares those numbers with the overall U.S. workforce ages 25-64.
Read more about what we found here — and I hope that our FOIA requests will lead to another story with more data soon. -Julianne