Many in the tech industry have described their companies as ‘meritocracies’, which should, in theory, be a good thing. Thinking that a company is a meritocray leads to a lot of problems though, as Github recently acknowledged by doing away with it’s rug claiming that they are a meritocracy. Many have said this was the move of Nicole Sanchez, Github’s new social impact team leader. Many on reddit have critized her and even stated that Github will go out of business because of this and other diversity moves. I believe that this was a strong move for the company that has many benefits, and others in the tech industry should follow.

Merit isn’t measurable

One issue with the idea of a tech meritocracy is that there really isn’t an effective way to measure merit. Even taking aside the fact that it’s almost impossible to objectively measure how good of a programmer someone is, there are certain cognitive biases which will come into play when company heads try to measure the merit of individual employees. Scientists have known about these congnitive biases for years and perform double blind trials in order to attempt to negate the affect of congnitive biases when evaluating different findings.

It’s long been studied that people tend to choose people who look like what society deems desirable, shown by a famous study stating that both black and white children are biased towards lighter skin. It’s not really any wonder that white males who fit the classical idea of a programmer are being thought to have more undue merit than their minority counterparts.

The Numbers on Race and Gender

White men far and away make up most of the United States tech employees, which should come as a shock to no one. NPR ran an article stating that 61% of Google’s staff is white, and 70% are male. Some will say this is because there are simply less minorities in the field than whites, but the amount of black and hispanic people earning degrees in computer science nearly doubles the amount of black and hispanic people in the field.

There have also been well studied declines in the number of women pursuing degrees in computer science since 1980, when the percent of women in the field was nearly 40%. NPR blames this decline on the marketing of computers towards men in the late 80s, which is certainly a factor as well in the idea that a person in tech should be a white male.

The Problem for Companies

Many treat the issue of diversity in tech as an evangelical one, an issue that should be simply fixed because of morality, but there are other factors in diversity for the company: companies which are more diverse tend to perform better than less diverse companies. According to data gathered by the Association for Computing Machinery “Companies in the top quartile for women in the executive committee from 2007–2009 had 41% greater return on equity, and 56% greater earnings before interest and taxes than companies with no women in the executive committee, for companies within the same industrial sector.” The ACM also references a study which found that the strongest indicator for collective intelligence is the closeness of the gender ratio of that team.

Tech companies should try harder to hire a more diverse workforce because of the direct benefits to themselves. The current state of minorities and women in technology causing companies and groups to be less effective than they could.