Tech companies have made big promises, and small gains, for diversity and inclusion

“And these are the jobs that can lift entire families up into the middle class,” Barrett said.

Diversity in the tech industry is crucial for technical progress. CNBC’s Jon Fortt described it like this: “Women, people of color, often have different experiences. And with that can come diversity of thought, and it’s shown that diversity of thought can really aid organizations.” According to a report from the Boston Consulting Group, companies with more diverse leadership teams report higher innovation revenues.

But tech companies are still lagging when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

In 2014, a year after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, some Big Tech companies started reporting their workplace demographics and promised to increase diversity.

According to the available data from 10 major U.S. tech companies gathered between 2014 and 2019, the percentage of women in these workforces increased less than 2%. The reports that specified gender and race said most of these women were White. The gender data doesn’t consider transgender or gender nonconforming employees, and only one of the 10 companies reported nonbinary employee demographics.