The state of gender and racial inequity in the high-tech industry was never made clearer than in 2014, when Google became the first of the FAANG companies — a group of the most influential high-tech firms comprising Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google — to release its employment figures by gender and race. At that time, 30% of Google’s workforce and only 17% of its technical staff were women.1 Just 2% of the company’s employees were Black and 3% were Hispanic.
Other major tech firms soon publicly admitted to disproportionately low numbers of women and people of color in technical roles, as well as gender-related pay gaps and underrepresentation in leadership positions. Prevalent theories as to why these issues persist vary from the exclusionary, hyper-masculine “bro” culture pervasive at many high-tech firms to the lower numbers of women graduating with computer science and related degrees. However, research by Sigrid Willa Luhr, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, points to an additional factor: Men working for tech companies are informally encouraged and mentored into high-tech roles, while women are not.
While most engineering fields require college degrees for entry and/or promotion, in information technology, or IT, only 24% of employees have a four-year computer science or math degree, and 36% do not have a college degree at all.3 This includes some of the most venerated high-tech leaders, such as Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. There is a widely held belief that many of the men who have made it to the top technical roles are self-taught.
In her paper, “Engineering Inequality: Informal Coaching, Glass Walls, and Social Closure in Silicon Valley,”2 Dr. Luhr reveals that while both men and women are often hired into tech companies without related degrees, men somehow learn high-tech skills on the job and often transition to more valuable and lucrative technical positions, enhancing their value to the companies. For a variety of reasons, women are often not approached for these same informal learning opportunities, Dr. Luhr found, and therefore lack the same opportunity to transition to highly paid, highly valued technical roles.
“Men see other men — even men who don’t even have training in computer science, don’t have degrees in it — as potential engineers, as people who could learn these skills. But they’re just not making that same connection with the women they see, even if those women are just as gifted and just as interested in learning those kinds of skills.”
— Sigrid Willa Luhr, Ph.D.
For her study, Dr. Luhr conducted in-depth interviews with 50 tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area — including Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland — between 2017 and 2019. They discussed their experiences working for more than 70 companies, past and present. Participants included 21 women, 27 men, and two who identified as nonbinary. The majority, 31, were white. Nine identified as Asian, three were multiracial, four were Latinx, and three were Black. They ranged in age from 24 to 60 years. Interviews took the form of structured questions and narrative answers.
“What I’m finding is [men are] learning some of these technical skills outside of formal educational institutions, and they’re learning them with the help of other men,” Dr. Luhr says. “This idea of [being] self-taught hides the fact that they’re actually learning these things through a kind of social process.”
During her interviews, several men told Dr. Luhr that they had learned technical and coding skills from other men during what would otherwise be considered a social situation — such as after-hours get-togethers. One man said he had started as a customer service representative but was taught how to write code by a colleague after the two had been playing ping-pong together. Another learned tech skills from a supervisor with whom he played music. “We were friends and played a lot of music together. When I decided I wanted to learn how to program, he really mentored me and helped me a lot about software engineering,” he told Dr. Luhr.
“Men see other men — even men who don’t even have training in computer science, don’t have degrees in it — as potential engineers, as people who could learn these skills,” Dr. Luhr says. “But they’re just not making that same connection with the women they see, even if those women are just as gifted and just as interested in learning those kinds of skills.”
Women are also left out of these informal training opportunities precisely because they are informal, Dr. Luhr says. Mentoring may be happening after regular work hours, when women are less likely to remain in the office or attend after-hours functions. “They’re not hanging out and playing ping-pong with the guys after work, so the opportunity doesn’t arise for them to sit down and learn something after hours,” Dr. Luhr says.
One woman in the study told Dr. Luhr that her company chooses company-sponsored events such as viewing superhero movies or golf trips, in which she has little interest — but she tries to force herself to attend. “I joke sometimes that the hardest part of my work is going out for the work happy hour,” she told Luhr. Several others mentioned that they had been sexually approached or touched inappropriately during after-hours events. “Many women were therefore deterred from socializing with their co-workers, despite the fact that these were precisely the settings where men experienced informal coaching,” Dr. Luhr wrote in her report.
Another path
Dr. Luhr found that instead of being taught valuable high-tech skills, women are often steered toward either managerial positions or diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, roles — both of which have disadvantages.
In many industries, attaining a management position is seen as a good career move, leading to better pay and greater influence. In the high-tech field, however, individual contributors who are more technically adept are often valued more highly and paid better than anyone else — including managers. “I have heard it called an inverted-role hierarchy, where managerial roles are actually seen as less desirable than somebody who really has a lot of technical skills,” Dr. Luhr says.
Women in the study said that when they took on DEI roles, they were often expected to take on the additional work without extra pay. This work might entail collecting companywide diversity data, developing onboarding instructional materials, or establishing affinity groups, according to the women Dr. Luhr polled. Several women who engaged in this work said they enjoyed it and leveraged it into future roles, but some said it took time away from the hours they could have spent learning high-tech skills to make themselves more valuable. “I had to stop because I was like, ‘I’m getting behind in my own work here,’” one woman said. And when companies consider layoffs, less technical employees are often more vulnerable. And at press time, many businesses, including those entrenched in high-tech fields, were eliminating their DEI programs altogether,4 further threatening the jobs of anyone working in this arena.
Moving forward
Despite the current political climate, some companies are standing by their DEI programs.5 Dr. Luhr says that based on her research, high-tech firms that genuinely want to improve their equity results should establish more formalized training and mentoring programs that start as soon as employment begins. And while women are often encouraged to find a mentor who is also a woman, that may not be possible — or even desirable — in tech. “If we’re looking at the stats in the tech industry, there are only a very few women, and especially, workers of color, working in these software engineering roles. So, matching on the kind of role you want to be in, instead of just [going by] race or gender could be useful.”
Dr. Luhr is currently wrapping up research based on a second set of interviews conducted from 2022 to 2024 with many of the same employees, she says. These new interviews are showing that even in 2022, tech company commitments to diversity were already beginning to waver, especially as companies began layoffs.
There is also evidence that nontechnical roles — which tend to show more diversity to begin with — have been more vulnerable to these layoffs.6 While engineers have not escaped layoffs entirely, men who were able to make the leap from nontechnical to technical roles may be more insulated, Dr. Luhr says. Workers who instead moved into diversity-related positions may be particularly vulnerable to job losses as some companies roll back their diversity initiatives.
Endnotes
- Bock, L. (May 28, 2014). Getting to Work on Diversity at Google. Google blog
- Luhr, S.W. (March 2024). Engineering Inequality: Informal Coaching, Glass Walls, and Social Closure in Silicon Valley. American Journal of Sociology
- Salzman, H., Kuehn, D., and Lowell, L. (April 24, 2013). Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market: An Analysis of Supply, Employment, and Wage Trends. Economic Policy Institute
- Forbes. (Feb. 7, 2025). Amazon Removes Diversity References From Annual Report — Here Are All The Companies Rolling Back DEI
- ABC. (Jan. 23, 2025). These Companies are Standing by Their DEI Policies Amid Backlash
- McCabe, S. (2023, Conference). “Coming Back from Tech Layoffs.” The Society of Women Engineers, SWE Magazine
