Earlier this week, Meta/Facebook released its 2022 diversity report, and its 2021 EEO-1 report. This simple act reminded us how long we’ve come since the early 2010s, when Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants were under pressure from shareholders, plaintiffs, investigative journalists who sought their diversity data.
After guarding their workforce data like Fort Knox, every one of these companies bowed to pressure in the middle part of the 2010s, following the first Black Lives Matter protests. Since then, all have continually published their EEO-1 reports, except for Amazon, which is not from Silicon Valley, and went dark for a two-year period (2017-18).
Today, big tech’s diversity data is not quite an open book, but it is significantly more transparent than it was eight years ago. With that in mind, this week we looked back into our archives to compare Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple’s workforces today, versus 2014.
What’s changed in the past eight years? We’ll let the charts speak for themselves:
At the same time, slight progress has been made on other fronts.
- For example, Google did not have a single Hispanic/Latino executive, senior official or manager in 2014. Today, Hispanics/Latinos hold 2.4% of these positions.
- Similarly, in 2014, less then 1% of Amazon’s executives, senior officials and managers were Black. Today, Black Americans hold 5.6% of these positions.
And in one interesting data point, Apple has gone backwards:
- In 2014, only 2.4% of its executives, senior officials or managers were Black. Today, that share has shrunk to 1.6%.