Filling out job applications, I’m not sure what’s more dreadful — listing the right qualifications or inputting my race. Having a mixed background, I guess I could tweak my ethnicity the same way I could adjust my prior work experience to appear more suitable for the company. By the looks of some of these big-time tech companies listed below, it may be safer just to check “white.” After all, people who identify as two or more races — or “other” — sometimes make up as little as 1 percent of these companies.
Compared to their presence in the overall labor force, Black people, Hispanic, and Native Americans are underrepresented in tech by 16 to 18 percentage points, Free Press reported. This disparity is even more evident for Black women. Women hold 25 percent of all computing jobs, yet Black women hold only 3 percent and Latinas 1 percent. You can read more at this Open MIC report.
Even though we have been clicking on our race and gender for years on job applications, some of the biggest tech companies in the world only started going public with the information in 2014. The demographics seem disproportionate.
This is the racial breakdown of the overall U.S. population as of July 1, 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau:
Take a look at the workplace demographics of some of the world’s biggest tech companies to see for yourself.
