Layoffs are making tech less diverse
If you're a woman or from an ethnic minority you're more likely to be let go
The tech sector is getting leaner. In 2022, according to the website Layoffs FYI over 1,000 companies globally laid off more than 164,000 employees. Contrary to popular perception, it isn't just the tech giants reducing their payrolls. Networking, communications, software, cybersecurity and hundreds of start-ups across multiple industries all shed staff last year. The wave has continued into 2023, with more than 167,000 people globally being let go. IBM and Apple have recently announced redundancies.
Given that women and people of colour remain underrepresented across the majority of tech employers, it seems reasonable to assume that women and minority ethnicities would be equally underrepresented in those which have been let go. That is not the case. Approximately 45% redundancies globally are women, which doesn't sound too terrible until you realise that women actually only made up around 27% of tech industry jobs in the first place.
Why is this happening? The biggest contributor to the disproportionate amount of women and people of colour now job searching is the fact that they were much more likely to hold the kind of role which is presently considered more expendable.
These roles tend to be the less technical ones - support, HR, communications and marketing. Almost all tech employers will communicate the message that diversity matters to them, but most of their boards are still comprised of men holding all the C-level roles apart from those of Chief People Officer and Chief Marketing or Communications Officer.
Aileen Allkins, presently Chief Revenue Officer of global digital skilling company Elev8, but also a former Corporate Vice President at Microsoft commented on this pattern in early January 2023.
"I'm going to be very interested to see if statistics are ever produced on the ratios of redundancies of men and women relative to their ratios of employment. Here's what will happen. They will try to eliminate roles in HR, talent acquisition and marketing, which are predominantly more female oriented. There will be fewer in sales, fewer in product engineering which are predominantly male."
Allkins couldn't have predicted more accurately, and the statistics are there to prove it.
However, the over representation of women in areas most likely to be cut, isn't the only reason they're more likely to end up unemployed. Another reason is that the huge increase in remote working driven by the pandemic broke down some of the barriers to entry into the tech workforce. Childcare was still necessary but maybe not needed for as many hours so it made working viable for more women, and employees no longer had to live within commuting distance of the places that tech companies tend to congregate - which are usually more expensive to live near. New hires were more therefore more likely to be diverse. However, they were also more likely to be legally easier and cheaper to lay off, and last in often means first out. Barriers to entry for a more diverse tech workforce have been reconstructed.
Women working in technical roles also more likely to be made redundant
However, the fact that underrepresented groups were more likely to be found in more recently created and less technical roles doesn't wholly explain why former tech workers are more likely to be female and from an ethnic minority. In some cases women working in the type of technical roles considered less expendable were still more likely to be let go than their male colleagues.
A lawsuit brought is the US by two female ex Twitter employees claims that Twitter violated state and federal sex discrimination laws. The lawsuit claims that 63% of women in engineering roles lost them, as opposed to 48% of men. When Elon Musk told workers at the end of 2022 that they had to accept a "hardcore" working culture or leave, those who picked up the majority of childcare or had other caring responsibilities were always going to find that edict harder to comply with. It seems obvious that those people were also more likely to be female.
It remains to be seen how much of this phenomenon is transitory and how much will be sustained as tech adjusts to post pandemic economic reality. If tech employers are as committed to diversity and inclusion as they almost all claim to be, we can look forward to seeing greater numbers of women, and those from diverse ethnic backgrounds employed in greater proportions than usual over the next few years to take us back to the heady days of 2020 when only 72% of the tech workforce was male, and 8% were Black.
Tech keeps telling us, via ESG reports and other channels of communication, that "we must do better," when it comes to building workforces which reflect the general population that use that tech. The next few years will be an acid test of that commitment.
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