Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)
Some of this looks quite.... questionable, and ironically for people that spend so much of their time attacking &quot;the media&quot;, this authors would do well to learn something about journalism, and some of it seems downright disingenous. For example, the author talks about representation and talks about that in terms of percentage of white people hired in big tech, but if you dig in to those numbers you find out that basically the reason the big tech companies have a low number of white employees is because they have an <i>enormous</i> over-representation of asian employees. It&#x27;s all well and good to say &quot;Only 51.7% of employees at Google are white, so clearly we&#x27;ve got great diversity&quot; - but using the same statistics you can also say &quot;93% of the workforce is white or asian and that rises to 95.5% in leadership positions&quot;. Sudenly that doens&#x27;t look so stunning. In fact it almost looks deliberately misleading.<p>Then you look at their methodology for looking at who is in Tech journalism. There are just some glaring issues.<p>First of all - are we really grabbing a single month of authors in the NYT? And if you&#x27;re grabbing the data from the NYT website, why not just do that over a few years?<p>Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I&#x27;m assuming that the NYT is included literally just because the people who did this study don&#x27;t like the NYT? And meanwhile, they therefore completely skate over a massive obvious problem - a massive amount of Tech journalism is independent or covered in publications that aren&#x27;t listed here - does AnandTech not count as tech journalism now? Let&#x27;s completely ignore independent journalists shall we?<p>The second list of tech journalists is literally just &quot;We found this random list of tech journalists and took it at face value&quot;.<p>Now there are about 1000 different problems I have with this study (I think it&#x27;s frankly just quite shoddy) but a real highlight was where they just admit to basically finding the list of jouranlists (a list I quite frankly think is just worthless due to the methodology) and then just start <i>guessing</i> whether they&#x27;re white.<p>The author complains that no tech journalists will cover this, but this is just really really shoddy work, and that doesn&#x27;t even get into the <i>obvious</i> fact that Big Tech and Big Tech journalism are not the same! We&#x27;re literally comparing a list of less than 1000 journalists to companies that employ <i>hundreds of thousands of people</i>.