How the Tech Industry Broke the Promises It Made to Women

So when tech companies are realizing they need to hit their diversity goals, they're going to hire women in positions, in parts of the company like HR or customer service, which in the minds of hiring managers play into the stereotypes of what they think women might be better at.

What's important to bear in mind when you think about that number is that women only represented about 39 percent of the workforce overall. They might have been about 45 percent of the layoffs, but they were only 39 percent of the workforce. So the question is, why were women overrepresented in these mass layoffs?

But then, somewhere along the line, that changed. In the mid-2010s, you started to see these companies talking about diversity. DEI initiatives became a thing. Progressive benefits came into play. I remember covering a lot of announcements about parental leave. What changed?

As these companies got larger and more structured, they grew up a little bit. They realized that they had to have HR departments, they had to have management systems. They were too big to just run on the ideas of whoever the genius founder happened to be. So there were more and more people coming into the industry to impose some sense of structure and rules on what had previously been pretty freewheeling.

At the same time, tech companies also came to embody this new idea of what an office could be, because they brought in more structure and more of a sense of rules, but they maintained a sense of fun and playfulness. Google was famous for having a big slide. There were companies that had happy hours and fitness classes on site. And that was really in the name of making people feel like they could just have their whole lives take place at the office. When you think about who that type of work style best serves, of course it's going to be people who don't have child care responsibilities. So that system was still set up to best serve men.

laid-off workers were more likely to be in positions that tech companies might have been considering peripheral to the core work of the company.

So if the companies still have men—and especially white men—overrepresented in their leadership ranks and in C-suites, then the people who get the best mentorship and the best kind of support and opportunities are often going to be the younger men—and especially white men—who have people who look at them and see younger versions of themselves.

Then, just weeks into her time away, with a newborn at home, Selim got an email. She learned she was one of hundreds of thousands of workers who had been laid off from their very good, benefit-heavy tech jobs earlier this year. Women were overrepresented in the recent wave of tech layoffs, and many got the news while they were out on maternity leave.