Daily Times

Any advocate of diversity in business has excuses to despair galore these days. White, predominately privately educated men run corporate Britain. The gender pay gap is doggedly stuck in double digits and, as of late last year, more than half of FTSE 100 companies did not have any directors of colour. Only nine BME executives held the position of chair or chief executive.

Elsewhere it’s still not unusual for professionals of any seniority level to hide their sexual orientation, fearful that it might sway their image or potential in the workplace. Case in point: it took until 2014 for Britain to have its first openly gay CEO of a FTSE 100 company, courtesy of Burberry’s Christopher Bailey.

Especially in London, we have a tendency to pinpoint the finance industry as the worst offender when it comes to attracting talent of all genders, skin colours, religions and beliefs. And why wouldn’t we? The Oxbridge-educated bankers and investors, with their double-barrelled surnames and corner offices in Canary Wharf’s ivory towers, are an easy target for our grievances.

But as the tech industry continues to balloon, enticing graduates with golden handshakes, free food, yoga breaks, exotic “off-sites” and the opportunity to help save the world one driverless car at a time, we need to reassess the targets of our frustrations.

By most measures, at least half of the world’s 10 biggest companies are tech firms and, at the explosive rate at which they’re swelling, it’s only a matter of time before the tech world dictates the culture of global business. Perhaps it already does.

A recent survey of more than 60,000 UK university students awarded Google the title of most popular graduate employer. Tech peers Microsoft and Amazon cruised into the top 10 too, pushing the highest placed banks, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, into 12th and 20th place respectively. A separate study showed this month that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were the fourth and fifth most attractive employers in the UK for business and engineering students – but Google and Apple triumphed in first and second spot.

Understandably, an office full of bean bags and resident pooches may seem more appealing than working under the staid auspices of Wall Street luminaries, but if role models really are a magnet for new talent, then we may be degenerating at a petrifying pace when it comes to progress towards stamping out archaic homogeneity.

The most recently available data shows men account for 69 per cent of Google’s workforce, 59 per cent are white and a measly 5 per cent are black or Hispanic. If you think that’s poor, then take a look at the company’s tech teams, where the male contingent shoots up to 81 per cent, with just 4 per cent black or Hispanic. Men hold 76 per cent of leadership positions, and blacks and Hispanics just 3 per cent. Asians hold 25 per cent.

The picture is similar at Facebook. As of July last year, the company’s representation in senior leadership was 6 per cent Black and Hispanic and 27 per cent women, mirroring Apple where the figures came in at 10 per cent and 28 per cent respectively. In other words, Silicon Valley is dominated by tech bros.

Progress of any scale in the tech industry is of course commendable, especially when companies commit to concrete goals and very public campaigns: cloud computing behemoth Salesforce has appointed a chief equality officer, who reports directly to the CEO. The company runs at least a dozen resource groups promoting a diverse and inclusive working culture, and commits to interviewing at least one female candidate or underrepresented minority for every executive position. But that’s far from the norm.

As the pace of hiring hastens, as companies surpass new valuation benchmarks and gobble up the smartest graduates who are the most likely to be able to change the outdated make-up of our corporate culture, full marks for effort may be praiseworthy but far from good enough.

Of course most other industries – not least banking and finance – still have a mountain of progress to scale. But in the world of tech, where a “CE Bro” culture rules, the threat of being bulldozed by an army of white, male coders and programmers, who know everything about you (thanks to their command over the Internet of Things) is perhaps more real because it’s less obvious. Tech companies may generally be seen as progressive, future-focused, inclusive, open-minded and liberal. But the vicious sexism row that’s engulfed Uber offers just a small, deeply terrifying peek into a dark world.

Until now we might have considered a well-tailored suit and tie, member-club cufflinks and an expensive watch to be the uniform most emblematic of a homogenous workforce, but beware of the hoodie and trainers. Those who don them are proving that they can pack a powerful punch when it comes to cultural progress. And although they’re doing a good job, we’re going to need more than Sheryl Sandberg or Arianna Huffington to save us.