Lessons From Tech’s Diversity Disclosures

Transparency can be a powerful tool, but it can also be a double-edged sword. When companies disclose information too quickly without building the necessary capacity to follow through, it can lead to resistance and backlash from various groups, even those who share the same progressive ideals. This is especially true when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Some skeptics view these disclosures as ideological and political agendas disguised as data, while others see them as hollow gestures rather than genuine efforts for change. Moreover, when external pressures change, companies may revert to silence, refusing to disclose any data at all. Before 2014, Silicon Valley kept its workforce data under wraps.

It was Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader known for his 1980s presidential campaigns, who managed to convince Silicon Valley to publish its demographic data, sparking a transparency wave that transformed corporate behavior for a decade. By the count of Jackson's aide, 24 out of the 25 companies he targeted complied with his request to publish the data (Oracle being the notable exception).

A dozen years later, these reports have largely stopped. Jackson's approach demonstrated that while transparency can drive change, it requires a calculated strategy to maintain momentum and avoid reversals. Jackson's work in the civil rights movement was centered on economic progress, viewing the first three phases of the Black freedom struggle as battles against slavery, Jim Crow, and disenfranchisement.

His corporate work, termed "the battle for access to capital," aimed to create opportunities for ethnic and racial minorities in the finance industry. In 1999, he launched the Silicon Valley Project to "bridge the digital divide," recognizing that if underrepresented groups were excluded from the fast-growing tech sector, they would be marginalized from future economic growth.

Jackson understood that broad moral appeals were ineffective in persuading the tech industry. Instead, he needed a concrete demand that businesses could not ignore. In 2013, Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou sparked the movement by publishing her team's gender demographics in an online essay and creating a public spreadsheet for others to fill in.

This crowdsourced approach set the standard for measuring gender diversity in tech. The numbers quickly caught the attention of investors, causing significant fluctuations in stock prices based on the diversity metrics of individual companies. Despite the government's requirement for employers with 100 or more workers to file EEO-1 reports, these data remained inaccessible to the public unless voluntarily disclosed by the companies themselves.

Jackson's strategy involved leveraging his relationships within Silicon Valley. One key connection was with David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer and the company's only senior Black executive at the time. Drummond played a crucial role in convincing Google to publish its workforce diversity data during the 2014 annual shareholder meeting.

Google's initial report revealed a stark disparity in its workforce: 60% White, 2% Black, and 3% Hispanic, with the engineering workforce even more skewed at 1% Black, 2% Hispanic, and just 17% women of all races. Drummond conceded to releasing the data, but Laszlo Bock, Google's head of people operations, provided the proof by acknowledging that Google was not meeting its diversity goals.

This report marked a turning point, establishing a new norm where disclosure was seen as leadership rather than capitulation. The success of this strategy hinged on which company moved first, with Google's disclosure acting as a catalyst for others to follow suit.