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Inconsistent messaging, such as when a company’s executives espouse the virtues of diversity but do nothing to drive change, can also lead to employees tuning out of the conversation.

many companies continue to focus only on recruitment instead of retention, which Blanche likened to seeing that the canary in the coal mine is having problems and throwing in 50 more canaries as a solution.

Rather than adopting platitudes such as “empower women,” companies should instead consider implementing rules such as “no interruptions during meetings,”

Software maker Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) found some surprises in its second such poll looking at diversity and inclusion at major tech employers. Big tech companies that have poured millions into becoming more diverse failed to show significant improvements from last year to this year. Its first survey found early last year that 83 percent of tech employees believed their company was already diverse.

Bay Area tech workers said they’re seeing fewer formal diversity initiatives from their companies, dropping from 55 percent in 2017 to 45 percent this year.

The lack of progress is reflected in several recent studies, including one from the Ascend Foundation last fall that found representation of most women and minority groups in tech sector leadership roles has been stagnant for the past decade, and the number of some minority groups in tech is actually declining.Blanche said she would have expected companies would be investing more in addressing the issue. Companies might be more afraid than ever of taking big leaps and failing, though.

it was a reminder that as a woman in tech, she should be prepared to have her authority questioned at any moment, even by some guy trying to get a job at her company.

at some point, something inside her broke. Maybe it was being at tech conferences and hearing herself, the “elder stateswoman,” warning younger women to cover their drinks, because such conferences—known for alcohol, after-parties, and hot women at product booths—have been breeding grounds for unwanted sexual advances and assaults, and you never knew whether some jerk might put something in your cocktail. She couldn’t believe that women still had to worry about such things; that they still got asked to fetch coffee; that she still heard talk about how hiring women or people of color entailed “lowering the bar”; that women still, often, felt silenced or attacked when expressing opinions online.

At one party, the founder of a start-up told Wu she’d need to spend “intimate time” with him to get in on his deal. An angel investor leading a different deal told her something similar. She became a master of warm, but firm, self-extrication.

Google’s workforce is, by its own accounting, 69% male and just 2% African American. Just 20% of technical jobs are held by women. Google may be unequivocal in its “belief” about diversity, but the figures make its shortcomings clear. The company tends to hire white and Asian men over women and other racial minorities.

ack of diversity in Silicon Valley is an old story. Eighteen years ago, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson first launched a campaign to encourage the region’s tech companies to hire black and Latino workers.

Google is the subject of an investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has accused the technology corporation of systematically discriminating against women (the company denies the charge.)

Why, then, does it spark a backlash? The answer has to do with biases deeply entrenched in most people’s patterns of thinking — attitudes not about race or gender per se, but about the nature of autonomy and choice, and about group membership. The political conflicts around “political correctness” and inclusiveness stem from the same cognitive issues.

Diversity training involves hiring practices and helps ensure legal compliance. Inclusion training focuses on creating the kind of unbiased atmosphere and broad leadership opportunities that will attract diverse employees to stay.

All of these programs directly address the problem of bias. But the unfortunate truth is that you can’t eliminate bias simply by outlawing it. Most people don’t like being told what to believe, and anything that feels like pressure to think a certain way makes people want to do the opposite.

at least one small component of this problem is immediately solvable: Many companies are alienating the qualified women who want to work for them, and who they want to hire, during the interview process itself.

While Silicon Valley companies are enthusiastically putting money into STEM programs in schools and nonprofits focused on diversity, with the goal of creating a richer pipeline of talent in 10 years, they’re missing opportunities to make simple, immediate improvements by changing how they communicate with women who are sitting across the table from them now.

here’s how it usually goes in the introductory meeting: A well-meaning executive boasts that his company has been financially supporting a number of nonprofit coding organizations that aim to train female engineers. He tells us he’ll have a booth at the Grace Hopper conference, the largest annual gathering of women in tech. He complains about how hard it is to “move the needle” on diversity numbers, especially when a staff is in the thousands.

In 2014, Google started publishing employee demographic data and pledging to invest in major initiatives to recruit a more diverse workforce, spending at least $265 million on the efforts.

it seems to have made little headway since it began publishing its workforce demographic data three years ago. For example, U.S. Latino employees now make up 5% of the overall workforce and professional jobs, up from 3% each in 2013, and women now hold 13% of leadership positions, up from 8%. At the same time, black employees still only make up 2% of all U.S. jobs, 2% of technical ones, and 3% of executive roles.

Here’s my theory: We tend to talk about the advancement of women as a macro issue—something to be tackled by corporations, industries, society. But in reality, so much of it comes down to the micro. Let’s start with bosses.

even the most well meaning and diversity-positive individuals are, let’s face it, implicitly drawn to working with people like themselves. There are a host of reasons for this, but one is that we believe we understand them better. That’s a reason that men tend to be promoted based on their “potential”—because the male boss can project that the candidate will be successful, based on his own experience—while women are more likely to promoted based on their experience.

In order to overcome that bias, Andy Grove—the late founder of Intel—suggested that new products should be 10x better than the product they are replacing. We’ve all heard that minorities and women have to work harder and be better to advance in business. There are certainly times that I’ve felt that. But 10x better is really asking for a lot, don’t you think?If even those who support diversity are subconsciously holding candidates who don’t look like them to such a high bar, what’s to be done?

Research shows that unstructured interviews — which lack defined questions and whereby a candidate’s experience and expertise are meant to unfold organically through conversation — are “often unreliable for predicting job success,

Bohnet suggests using an interview scorecard that grades candidates’ responses to each question on a predetermined scale.

A growing body of research suggests that diversity in the workforce results in “significant business advantages,” says Gino. She recommends that “at the end of every hiring process, leaders track how well they’ve done against the diversity goals they set out to achieve.”

female-identified workers make up 41 percent of the workforce among survey participants, up from 38 percent in 2016

Minorities represent 20 percent of the workforce, up from 18 percent last year.

The number of LGBTQ employees held steady at 11 percent. The workforce for these companies also remains young with 52 percent younger than 35 years old and just 3 percent over the age of 55.

A small but growing number of women are forming women-only investment networks, or raising starter capital in other ways.

With venture capital's big money bro-culture behavior coming to light, there’s a new fear, mingled with the relief: That, in reaction, male financiers will avoid women founders altogether. There’s talk of some men following the "Mike Pence rule," referring to the vice president's comment years ago that he does not eat alone with any women other than his wife. 

Lisa Curtis, founder and CEO of food start-up Kuli Kuli, says she has already heard of investors canceling meetings with female founders and she's worried. "I think that's the wrong reaction," Curtis says. 

“Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?”That question, whether it’s been asked outright, whispered quietly, or simply lingered in the back of someone’s mind, has weighed heavily on me throughout my career in technology.

Time and again, I’ve faced the slights that come with that question. I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men.

I thought about the women at Google who are now facing a very public discussion about their abilities, sparked by one of their own co-workers. I thought about the women throughout the tech field who are already dealing with the implicit biases that haunt our industry (which I’ve written about before), now confronting them explicitly. I thought about how the gender gap persists in tech despite declining in other STEM fields, how hard we’ve been working as an industry to reverse that trend, and how this was yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science.

The recent leak of a Google engineer’s screed against the company’s diversity initiatives is a reminder that the notion of Silicon Valley as the seat of human progress is a myth — at least when it comes to the way the women behind the latest in technology are treated.The tech industry is stuck in the past, more closely resembling “Mad Men”-era Madison Avenue or 1980s Wall Street than a modern egalitarian society. It may take the force of our legal system to change that.

While the document may be unusual in its explicit embrace of this kind of backward thinking, the attitudes that underlie it are nothing new in Silicon Valley.

Sadly, these types of cases represent only one element of the industrywide discrimination against women in tech. There’s also an alarming gap in pay and promotions, which has devastating effects on women’s careers.

Last year, female founders received about 2 percent of venture capital funding — and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. While the average investment in companies led by men jumped 12 percent, to $10.9 million, the average investment in companies led by women dropped 26 percent, to $4.5 million. Statistics tell us that funders award women founders just a quarter of the funding they ask for. Male founders, meanwhile, are getting half.

only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture firms are women. Fewer than two in five firms had even a single female partner.

there is a lot of evidence that unconscious biases are impacting the way female founders are received. Consider, for example, the finding that investors tend to describe young male entrepreneurs as “promising,” and young female entrepreneurs as “inexperienced.” Or that the managing partner of one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms admitted that one of the things he looks for when deciding whether to invest is an entrepreneur who fits the Gates, Bezos, Andreessen or Google model — which is to say, “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.”

Male bias? That was not the Valley’s fault; women just would not knuckle down and get engineering degrees.

Moreover, Mr Damore’s outburst backfired, drawing attention not to his grievance but to his employer’s grievous lack of diversity. The company’s leadership is 75 per cent male. A mere 20 per cent of its engineering team — where most of the clout resides — are female. In an ongoing lawsuit, the Department of Labor claimed that “compensation disparities” are systemic across its workforce.

This year, Uber — one of the most highly valued private companies in Silicon Valley — lost 20 of its employees, a board member, and its chief executive officer after numerous scandals involving bullying, sexual harassment and even interference in investigation of a rape by a driver in India. In the computer games industry, the Gamergate campaign publicly targeted women with harassment, bullying and threats of rape.