By Sarah Danielzadeh
Since 2015, there has been no meaningful increase in the number of Black and Latinx technically skilled workers in Silicon Valley technology companies — especially in the case of women, says France Winddance Twine, a sociology and feminist studies professor at UC Santa Barbara.
Twine joined UCSB’s Film and Media Studies department to present her 2019 research at a Global Media Technologies and Culture Lab lecture called “Silicon Valley’s Caste System: Race, Class and All Women Coding Boot Camps.”
Twine said Black women make up only 1.2% of technical workers in Silicon Valley. She sought to examine the ‘inequality regimes’ that exist within tech company hiring practices. And she wanted to understand why diversity initiatives in the technology industry have failed to increase the numbers of Black, Latinx, and other non-Asian minorities in the ranks.
UCSB sociologist France Winddance Twine in a recent virtual lecture for Film and Media Studies on hiring practices in Silicon Valley.
“I was really interested in bringing the literature and sociology on discrimination into dialogue with gender, technology studies and critical race literature,” Twine said.
She found that certain hiring practices, such as social referrals, greatly contribute to the absence of Black women in Silicon Valley tech firms. Even with the rise of coding bootcamps that give women competitive skills, women are still unable to find technology jobs without social connections.
The women who participated in her study were between the ages of 20 and 58. Twine collected survey data and interviews from men and women in Silicon Valley high tech organizations including Facebook, Twitter and Google. Other data sources included lawsuits filed against technology firms for gender and racial discrimination and conferences about diversity in technology that Twine attended in San Francisco.
She introduced the term “glass walls,” which are social and cultural barriers that qualified applicants from underrepresented groups face even when they possess the educational credentials and technical abilities to perform a job.
“We’re all familiar with the term ‘glass ceiling,’ but ‘glass walls’ are different,” said Twine. “For example, in Silicon Valley you often have to be interviewed by several teams over several months and some of the qualities that they look for don’t have anything to do with whether you’re qualified in terms of technical skills, but if you are ‘culture fit.’”
Both white and Black women in Twine’s study confirmed technology firms would look for people who seemed to fit the culture of the company. Twine said this “culture fitness” often meant shared ethnicity, shared class background and shared hobbies. “The glass walls are produced by corporate recruiting practices that include an over dependence on social referrals,” she said.
Roughly 90% of firms or startups interviewed for Twine’s study said they use social referrals and often give employees bonuses for referring someone who gets hired. “The problem with social referrals is that you can end up reproducing the same ethnic and racial structure and you end up not diversifying,” Twine said. “Especially if people are socially segregated or only have friendship networks that are similar to their ethnic background.”
Indian-born women in the research sample said they tend to refer people from their own background, but none of them could name a single Black, Latinx, or in some cases not even a white woman, on their team. The Indian-born women said they worked with people who were not only from their same caste or class background, but also from the same region of India.
Twine said a critical difference between Black and non-Black female technical workers was that Black women constituted the only subgroup that described having nobody on their team who was from a similar background. “When they faced either overt racism or gender discrimination or micro-aggressions, they didn’t have anyone who they felt understood their experience,” she said.
UCSB sociologist France Winddance Twine presented the demographic breakdown of employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter in 2016. White and Asian employees vastly outnumbered those who are Black and Latinx.
When Twine asked CEOs and managers of technology firms to explain their diversity problem, they tended to blame the educational system.
“I argued that the educational pipeline motto is a mythology that does not explain the dismal numbers of Black, Latinx and other underrepresented groups in either technical or nontechnical jobs in Silicon Valley,” Twine said.
“This pipeline motto argues that women in underrepresented minorities are responsible for their own exclusion because they have not earned degrees in science, engineering, mathematics or other related fields.”
But Twine said that those Black and Latinx professionals who do have computer science and engineering degrees are still not getting hired in Silicon Valley. “If we compare Silicon Valley to Atlanta, Austin, New York and Chicago, they have the worst record in terms of the exclusion of Black and Latinx people,” she said.
Twine also found that all of the Black women she interviewed were the first generation in their families to be technology workers, so they did not have “built-in mentors,” whereas 95% of Indian women in the study – whether born here or abroad – were the daughters, sisters, wives or cousins of engineers.
By 2018, one of the growing pathways for women to enter the technology workforce was coding boot camps, Twine said. Coding boot camps are short-term training programs that teach programming skills such as web and mobile development.
Twine’s research revealed that graduates of coding boot camps in California earned the highest salaries – more than $100,000 – while the national average salary of coding boot camp graduates was $64,528. “This market took off, and it provided a gender segregated learning community for women which enabled them to safely learn and reset their skills,” she said.
Even with these coding boot camps, Twine said it still takes the addition of social connections to be able to secure interviews and successfully enter the tech industry.
“Accelerated coding boot camps are fulfilling a need and they have created a market for a skills-based accelerated curriculum,” she said. “But not all women were able to make that [career] transition.” She said none of the Black women in her study had attended a coding boot camp. “And the majority of the white women who had attended already had connections to the tech industry, either through their partners or their siblings.”
Sarah Danielzadeh is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor. She is a Web and Social Media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.