Hacking Diversity in Tech

Christina Dunbar-Hester

Author of the book Hacking Diversity. Associate Professor of Communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Diversity in tech remains elusive. Though the tech industry has long presented itself as a meritocracy, it is entirely too easy to find patterned differences in how workers are treated. For instance, here in the U.S., Black Google employees are more likely to be short-term contractors with less job security than full-time employees. Part of the problem here is how “diversity” is being asked to do heavy lifting, arguably beyond what it is capable of doing. “Diversity in tech” usually means that “diverse” individuals ought to, or are entitled to claim higher-status (and better paid) positions, leading to economic gain and better representation of a broader range of groups. But “diversity” is conceptualized as belonging to individuals, or the individual as a representative of a group. This conception subtly draws attention away from institutions and structures that maintain inequalities.

This becomes most apparent if we zoom out of the Global North context. Taking into account subcontractors and global supply chains, the tech industry employs a diverse workforce, but who holds which jobs underscores the industry’s diversity problem. Much work is performed offshore by racialized workers, such as shops of coders in Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India (or their migrant cousins working in Germany or the U.S. on temporary visas, with second-class status compared to native-born workers); lithium miners in Bolivia; cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and post-use e-waste processers in Ghana. And much global tech work is “pink collar,” feminized and casualized: think of the stereotypical “nimble fingers” of young women electronics assembly workers in China, producing Apple products for Foxconn.

So what “diversity in tech” calls in the Global North really mean is more high-status, high-paying jobs in the industry for members of underrepresented groups. And yet the tech industry as a whole is invested in a system of racial capitalism, which implicates both tech builders and consumers. It is reliant on extractive practices at every stage in the chain, and its ability to profit handsomely depends on a system that sorts people into categories that place some workers in relatively good positions and others in relatively worse positions. The global supply chain illustrates this well—but so does the racial hierarchy within a Facebook campus in North America, which will reveal relatively more white and Asian workers in the engineering department and relatively more Latinx and Black workers in the custodial department. (Even the category of “tech worker” is worth interrogating—to our ear it sounds like high-status, glamorous work, but inarguably a tech company cannot do its work without the miners, electronics assemblers, and janitors—which underlines how a boundary is being drawn around who gets to be included in a high-status designation. A process of sorting bodies precedes and accompanies those bodies being sorted into jobs. There is no inherent or biological reason a young person that grows up to be a kitchen worker could not have grown up to be a software engineer or vice versa, but there are social and economic reasons for this.)

Conversations around “diversity in tech” generally engage only the tip of the iceberg; tech is not handling pay or status equity well, let alone structural racism. So even taken at face value, we have good reason to be suspicious of the tech industry’s sincerity in addressing diversity issues. In addition to pay, status, and employment security, a host of matters pertaining to structural racism that have received renewed attention since last summer in the wake of Black Lives Matters protests. Critics have zeroed in on how tech is implicated in policing—especially surveillance, facial recognition, and predictive policing. Companies like Amazon were quickly accused of hypocrisy, claiming to stand with Black lives while exploiting disproportionately Black and Latinx warehouse workers in the COVID19 pandemic, and maintaining a pipeline between law enforcement and surveillance tech like Ring and Rekognition. Predictably, the topic of “diversity in tech” percolated through many of these conversations, and offering members of underrepresented groups “seats at the table” in engineering divisions at tech companies is often touted as a solution.

I am certainly not claiming that calls for “diversity in tech” are bad, of course. It is rather that they are incomplete. If what people mean is a fairer shake, and better-paying, more dignified work to go around, especially for people who have historically been prevented from holding high-status and well-paid jobs, that points towards a need to consider structures, more than individuals. A system that relies on sorting people into differential positions based on what kinds of bodies they have cannot really be reformed by moving some more of one kind of body into a higher position. Do we really expect that enrolling “diverse” people into building large-scale surveillance tech, for example, can produce meaningful change?

As noted above, “diversity” is only the visible tip of the iceberg. Surfacing the submerged mass will elicit more challenging and potent debates. Feminist hackers have been imagining otherwise tech cultures and artifacts; they have built women*- and people-of-color-led spaces where they code and hack projects that don’t feed directly into industry demands. Minoritized people may not find their desires represented in market offerings—and markets do not always cultivate demand for the public goods we need the most anyway. Others in tech communities have raised questions about the ties between IT work and militarism: Microsoft workers mounted opposition to that company building databases that would be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And solidarity across categories of workers is not unheard of either, and is possibly growing; last spring during the COVID19 pandemic, striking Amazon warehouse workers were joined by Amazon engineers who called in sick. As the pandemic has laid bare, our world rests on pernicious inequities, and tech is cast in a leading role. Many tech workers and hacking enthusiasts are poised to take part in much richer conversations—but “diversity” is a timid framing. What would change if the conversation was directed towards justice instead? Much is at stake here and “diversity” offers too little.