Washington - The average Silicon Valley
engineer is compensated roughly $200 000 a year, and gets to work in offices
with perks like daily catered lunch, on-site yoga, and life coaching.
Still, for many people, particularly if you are a woman or
underrepresented minority, these aren't fun places to work. Take hard-charging
Uber, which has seen a slew of executives flee the company after a female
employee detailed a horrific saga of harassment and discrimination in February.
Or Ellen Pao, who sued her former employer, the
male-dominated venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, after alleging that she
was denied promotion because of her gender and cut out of business dinners
because male colleagues felt that having women there would "kill the
buzz."
Or tech giants Oracle and Google, which were recently, sued
by the Department of Labour for systematically underpaying female and minority
workers.
A new study of turnover in the tech sector goes beyond these
isolated incidents and lawsuits and takes a stab at a persistent question: How
widespread are these problems?
The study, by the Oakland, California-based non-profit Kapor
Centre for Social Impact and Harris Poll, asked a nationally-representative
sample of 2 000 adults who had voluntarily left a tech job in the last three years
why they chose to abandon their cushy workplaces. Were they enticed by a better
opportunity? Did they decide to take time off to care for children? Did they
desire a shorter commute?
The answers the "tech leavers" gave were
eyebrow-raising in that they suggest the extent to which feelings of
mistreatment drive people to leave even the most elite jobs. They also show the
way the same workplace can be a vastly different experience depending on a
person's background.
Overwhelmingly, workers of all backgrounds cited
"unfairness or mistreatment" within the work environment as the most
common reason for leaving. Thirty-seven percent said it was as "major
factor" in their decision to quit. Unfair treatment was cited twice as
often as being recruited elsewhere.
The study also compared workers in tech to other industries,
and found that people cite unfairness as a reason to leave a job in tech more
frequently than people in other industries [42 percent compared to 32 percent].
Not surprisingly, the study found that workplace experiences
differ dramatically by race, gender, and sexual orientation.
The Kapor Centre found that men of colour were the most
likely to quit because of unfairness. Forty percent of black and Latino men both
groups are underrepresented in the tech industry left their jobs for that
reason.
Nearly a quarter of underrepresented men and women of colour
said they had experienced racial stereotyping, twice the rate of white and
Asian men and women. Black and Latino women were more likely than any other
group to say they were passed over for a promotion.
To be sure, turnover in Silicon Valley is very low overall,
and people who leave companies are more likely to have an axe to grind than
those who stay. That is to say, the results of a study of people who leave may
not reflect how most women and underrepresented minorities who work in tech
feel.
Read also: More men to do 'women's jobs
But if people from certain groups are quitting in higher
numbers than people from other groups, it's worth understanding why, the
authors said. They added that further study may be needed on why blacks and
Latinos have more negative experiences at work than whites and Asians in the
tech industry.
The study's authors said they examined retention because
efforts to increase diversity through hiring have gotten a lot of attention in
recent years. Technology companies are now spending hundreds of millions of
dollars a year to increase their dismal diversity numbers; so far they've had
limited results.
Women represent 25 percent of tech employees though they
comprise half the population; blacks and Latinos make up 30 percent of the
population but roughly 15 percent of tech employees. Among the top Silicon Valley companies, black and Latino employees are
only 3 to 5 percent of the workforce.
Hiring is only one half of the equation, the authors argued.
If technology companies don't make substantial efforts to understand how people
feel once they are in the workplace, their hiring efforts will be cancelled out
by turnover.
"Put simply, the diversity numbers may not be changing
at least in part because tech companies have become a revolving door for
underrepresented groups," the authors wrote.