The right language to solve tech’s diversity problem
It took me five years of working in London’s tech scene to realise it wasn’t representative of the wider society it served. On a spring day in 2015, I was sitting at my desk in Amazon’s London office. My colleague Sarah and I were key account managers in the payments department, and together we were huddled by my screen looking at the company’s organisation chart.
We wanted to see how many women were in Amazon’s leadership team. We started at the top of the chart, where CEO Jeff Bezos held a solitary top spot. Beneath him, the next layer of executives were all white men. The layer beneath them showcased a homogeneous group of white men, too. We were disheartened to discover how few women occupied leading roles within the company. What hope did we have of breaking into this gentleman’s club?
A Tech Nation report in 2018 found that women represent just 18% of the UK’s tech workforce, despite representing 49% of the total UK workforce and 51% of the overall UK population. And representation doesn’t improve at senior levels: women hold fewer than a quarter of all the director-level
