Tech companies first largely began releasing diversity reports in 2014. Since then, they've made some progress, but have also backtracked in certain areas. The hard part is that you often can't tell who has succeeded and who has fallen short unless you're taking into account the whole measure of that company's progress. That's why we've built the Protocol Diversity Tracker.
This is the place where anyone can access both historical and current diversity data for the most powerful tech companies, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Uber and others. While it's hard to get full apples-to-apples comparisons, we want to make it easy for folks to quickly analyze how, for example, Facebook's diversity numbers compare to Google's, and how Apple's diversity numbers have changed over the years.
We're starting by looking at the diversity data of 20 tech companies, looking at the racial and gender diversity of their overall workforce and at the leadership level. Here's an example of the type of insights you'll be able to glean from the database:
- Microsoft's representation of women in 2014 was 29%. In 2021 women still only represent 29.7% of the company's global workforce.
- Square's representation of Black people saw a 104.5% increase between 2017 and 2021. In 2017, Square was 6.4% Black. In 2021, Square reported a 13.1% Black population.
- As of this year, Facebook has a stronger representation of women in leadership positions than Google. At Facebook, 35.5% of leaders are women, compared to 28.1% of women in leadership positions at Google.
Down the road, our plan is to look at diversity in technical roles and at the board level. Additionally, we plan to integrate available intersectional data into this database.
You can expect updates every time a company on our list comes out with a new report, and we'll be adding more companies every quarter. Have a data point you want us to track or a company you think should be added? Email Biz Carson.
Note: This story was updated on October 29, 2021 with new data from Microsoft.
