I've worked in tech for years – Facebook and similar companies really do have a 'black people problem'

Among other issues, I’ve had conversations with well-educated, influential tech leaders who say things like: ‘I want to hire more black people, but I don’t want to lower the bar’

Tech companies pride themselves on their abilities to solve complex problems yet can’t seem to wrap their head around the most urgent one: diversity and inclusion

Last month in central London I addressed a room of 80 professionals at the monthly Creative Mornings meetup. I asked the audience to close their eyes and think of someone techie. I asked them to raise their hands if the person they had pictured looked like me. Only a couple did.

When we think of the tech world those faces most often in the press will come to mind. Founders like Mark Zuckerberg whose companies boast multibillion pound valuations, or investors like Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com.

Over 50 per cent of employees at Google and Facebook are white, while 1 per cent are black. That’s not representative of their customers. Facebook-owned Instagram alone has over a billion monthly active users – 1 out of 7 people across the world. So it’s far from a shock that former partnerships manager at Facebook, Mark S Luckie, a black man himself, recently spoke out against the social media company’s “black people problem”.

While tech affects everyone, tech teams still do not represent the societies they serve. In a world where women represent half the population, we represent less than 20 per cent of the tech workforce, less than 10 per cent of founding teams and less than 2 per cent of venture capital recipients.

Black people are an even smaller proportion of the tech population. Despite black communities contributing to the growth and engagement of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, walking around their corporate offices you’re unlikely to see any black faces. Luckie himself pointed this out in his post about Facebook’s issues with inclusivity, writing: “In some buildings, there are more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people.”

I’ve worked in tech for eight years at giants like Amazon and Groupon and quickly grew accustomed to being a minority among mostly white, male faces. I was not surprised to see that in Google and Facebook’s latest diversity reports, the number of black people in their organisations has decreased over time.

Tech companies pride themselves on their abilities to solve complex problems yet can’t seem to wrap their head around the most urgent one: diversity and inclusion. When the first Apple watch launched in 2015 black customers were soon disappointed to find it did not work on their skin (data).

How could a product get to market with such an obvious flaw? In the absence of black people on the team, every person that tested the watch would have had a positive experience. No one thought to think about how it work on black skin, no one noticed that black people were missing from the equation because that is the status quo.

I’ve been running Hustle Crew for two years, working with tech companies and ambitious techies to make tech more diverse and inclusive through talks, training and mentorship. What I’ve noticed in this time is that tech is failing black people and other minority groups so consistently because the tech world has little understanding of the concept of privilege. As American sociologist professor Mike Kimmel says, “privilege is invisible to those who have it”.

Most tech leaders believe they have built teams based on merit. They believe they have hired the best people for the job based on their understanding of where the best hires come from. They define “the best” based on things like what university a person graduated from, or what degree they studied. Based on this rigid set of requirements, they then add the idea: I would also like to hire more black people that fit the bill.

What their privilege has blinded them to is the fact that while talent may be evenly distributed across a population, opportunity is not. Due to structural oppression, black people are less likely to be students at the universities tech firms favour. The experiences we have growing up could even make us less likely to align with the elusive measure of “culture fit”.

The challenge is not only around diverse recruitment, but also creating inclusive cultures. Tech companies have been criticised for their toxic environments. Many startups are modelled on cultural norms you would expect from a fraternity house, not an office – customs which anyone falling outside the norm must endure painfully.

I’ve had my hair touched without my permission, participated in drinking games out of peer pressure and have been the victim of double standards countless times. I’ve been labelled emotional for speaking out against a mid-quarter increase of my sales targets (which my compensation was tied to) while a male colleague who threw a keyboard across the office, smashing it into a wall, was never even questioned, let alone reprimanded.

In my work at Hustle Crew, I’ve had conversations with well-educated, highly accomplished, influential tech leaders who say in the same breath: “I want to hire more black people, but I don’t want to lower the bar.” If in their view hiring more black people lowers the bar, they must believe black candidates to be inferior to white candidates. Or is it something else?

Despite the data telling us that diverse teams lead to greater productivity and profit, for many people in tech’s status quo, diversity and inclusion feels like a threat. Something to fear. To see the world as a zero sum game means that if those different to you start to benefit then you will lose out, even if research says otherwise. Tech may be progressive on external frontiers but it still struggles to confront its own inner bias and weakness.

Until tech gains a better understanding of privilege, and uses that understanding to create more equitable recruitment practices and foster cultures founded on empathy and understanding of different backgrounds, the state of representation is unlikely to change.