When tech companies send out messages of support for International Women’s Day today, there will be far fewer among their ranks to whom the messages will pertain.
The wave of layoffs sweeping the tech industry is more of a tsunami for women. According to Roger Lee, creator of Layoffs.fyi, 44.8% of those laid off by tech companies from October 2022 to January 2023 are women. Prior to 2022, women made up just 28% of employees in the industry. This is especially distressing when considering how many women have been pushed out of the workforce completely during the pandemic.
To put faces to that data, or rather, to note the lack of female faces, there’s this photo of Twitter after the first rounds of the Elon Musk-led layoffs.
Shortly after, a lawsuit was filed against Twitter by women who said the company engaged in discriminatory behavior regarding those layoffs.
Twitter is not the only tech company facing such allegations. The Washington Post recently detailed how Meta’s layoffs have unfairly targeted women and other underrepresented groups.
A wave of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts crested during the pandemic, but tech companies have since drastically cut those departments, resulting in an end to efforts to hire more women—and often firing women in the process, since many were employed in that area.
There are many barriers to women entering the tech industry, one result of which is that the majority of women who are employed in the field hold non-technical roles. These are among some of the first jobs to be cut during layoffs. Additionally, tech companies went on remote hiring sprees during the pandemic. The flexibility of these jobs appealed to women who inordinately struggle with caring for children and older parents and handle the bulk of household tasks. But now, the remote jobs that benefited women are the first to be cut.
Though these inequities stem from indirect causes, tech companies' lack of action to counter them is a direct endorsement of bias. We don't need a relitigation of the advantages a diverse workforce brings to companies of all kinds, particularly tech businesses facing the new challenge of an AI that reflects the prejudices of people. And the ethics of not engaging in gender injustice is clear. What are not clear are companies' efforts to match their forward-thinking products to equally progressive corporate visions.