photo by Lex Photography
A post on Instagram and Twitter providing a graph of racial inequality at the executive level at major tech companies has been getting shared across the internet recently as more and more discussions around racial inequality pervade our nation.
The post, by user @bri_xu, shows simply the shocking lack of diversity of the c-suite at multiple companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
The chart also stipulates that in the two data points representing black executives at Facebook and Alphabet, they are both in a “diversity officer” position, suggesting that executive branches at these companies are less likely to hire a POC to a job based on merit alone.
This resonates well with a conversation had around race, specifically within the black lives matter movement that many systems are unwilling to make meaningful change while they are willing to make substantial symbolic change.
This idea suggests that metaphorical victories, like the toppling of white supremacist statues, the painting of murals, and the renaming of streets, may not go further than the cultural shift they represent.
@bri_xu went on further to create data pools for the racial breakdown of CEOs at all 100 companies part of the Fortune 100 distinction. These findings show that CEOs are predominately white men. There are only 8 CEOs that identify as female at these 100 countries, and only 11 CEOs at these 100 companies that aren’t white.
One commenter mentioned that they had worked with Microsoft a lot in the past, and that they had worked with executives of color in these occasions. User @bri_xu then further explained that his findings were only C-level executives, meaning chief officers, and expressed interest in doing further research to quantify the racial breakdown of employees at the executive level.
@bri_xu’s real name is Brian Xu. He says he works at LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, but his time spent working on this data collection is unaffiliated and of his own volition.
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