Inertia, Progress, or Regress? Observing and Explaining Heterogenous Tech Firm Demographic Diversity Trajectories

Abstract

Tech firms are under strong pressure to increase their demographic diversity. While activists and scholars have tended to treat the sector as homogenously hostile to women and racialized minorities, recent theory on organizational inequalities stresses heterogeneity in firm-level inequality regimes. Beginning with an inductive exploration of variation in executive, managerial, and professional workforce trajectories, we find that between 2008 and 2016 most Tech firms show little change, but that there are also significant clusters of firms that were becoming either much more or much less diverse for all three occupational levels. We model these trajectories as a function of firm visibility, the regulation of federal contractors by the U.S. Department of Labor, and leadership composition. Multinomial logistic regression models show that firms with an increasing (decreasing) diversity pattern in managerial and executive positions are also more likely to become more (less) diverse in their much more numerous professional jobs. Managers are more influential than executive in this regard. Regulatory pressure is associated with increased executive diversity trajectories, but not with managerial or professional trajectories. We conclude that increased Tech diversity is possible but requires leadership, particularly at the middle manager level. In addition, regulatory and visibility pressures primarily produce symbolic shuffles in top jobs.