Every time I write something about diversity in Silicon Valley, and the gross disservice that today’s tech giants are doing to women and people of color by consistently overlooking them for jobs and promotions, I get comments to this effect: What about the pipeline problem? Less than one-fifth of computer science graduates are women. It’s not Google’s fault it can’t find qualified women to hire.
To which I say: Pleeeease.
So, okay, yes, colleges and universities need to do more to make computer science programs inclusive, but that doesn’t let off the hook the most powerful tech companies on the planet for saying one thing and doing another.
Either you want a diverse workforce, or you don’t. You can be someone who pays lip service to a problem; or you can be someone who tries to understand how you’re contributing to that problem, then take corrective action.
That goes for journalists, too. Which is why, two years ago, I set out to better understand gender representation in my own work. And it’s why, with the help of Nathan Matias, a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, I did it again.
But before we get into what I found—and it wasn’t good—let me explain why I wanted to do this in the first place.
Male dominance in global media is well documented, and has been for many decades. Both in newsrooms and in news articles, men are leaders—they make more money, get more bylines, spend more time on-camera, and are quoted far more often than women—by a ratio of about 3:1. I notice male biases in journalism all the time. Which means I know that readers of The Atlantic do, too.
[For more of this story, written by Adrienne Lafrance, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...y-journalism/463023/]
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