The State of the Community: 2020 Edition
In 2017, PDX Women in Tech (PDXWIT) began conducting our annual State of the Community survey to quantify the depth and breadth of lived experiences of people working in tech. The survey focuses on those who are underrepresented in the industry (women, non-binary and BIPOC folks to name a few) and aims to identify specific challenges that must be addressed in our collective journey towards equity in the workplace.
Leading up to the launch of this year’s survey, a dedicated team of volunteers spent hundreds of hours laying a foundation for data collection processes that were more equitable, robust and intentional than previous years. PDXWIT founder and leader in this effort, Megan Bigelow, shares details on the process the team underwent in this article. Thanks to their prep work, PDXWIT was poised to launch its most successful and far-reaching survey yet.
And then the global COVID-19 pandemic hit.
And it wasn’t just the pandemic. Locally and nationally, our community members collectively faced more grief, adversity and struggles in 2020 than most years in recent memory, including record unemployment levels among all demographics. Worse, the lack of an appropriate national response to COVID-19 disproportionately harmed Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. And the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd are just two examples of Black lives taken by white supremacy this year that sparked a much needed reckoning to confront racial injustice. It’s been a lot.
Time out.
This is an opportunity for PDXWIT to be transparent and continue to show our work when it comes to dismantling the white supremacy that permeates this industry and our organization. We should have taken a beat and read the room before moving full speed ahead with the survey this year. In hindsight, it’s completely understandable that answering previously useful questions around compensation preferences, work-life balance, and general job satisfaction was a low priority for our community at the time the State of the Community survey was launched.
In our organization’s journey towards expanded literacy around equity, we have learned that a sense of urgency, perfectionism, and quantity over quality are all elements of white supremacy culture, as well as tendencies of our organization. But we still forged ahead to launch the survey as planned (sense of urgency), followed through with our targeted launch time frame (perfectionism), and attempted to get the highest number of responses in the survey’s history (quantity over quality).
It’s tough to unlearn this stuff, and it's sometimes painful.
The outcomes of the 2020 survey are reflective of our numerous blind spots when we administered it this summer:
We saw a dramatic drop in the number of survey responses this year: 1138 as opposed to 5186 in 2019.
We saw a significant decline in the diversity of participants: 78% white this year versus 27% in 2019.
There was an overrepresentation of cisgender white women, a population that is underrepresented in tech but has scores of unearned privileges when compared with other groups, including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people.
We did not see anywhere near the engagement hoped for from the populations PDXWIT aims to dedicate the majority of our energy and resources toward as indicated in our mission. These results are indicative that we can and must do better in the future.
To those who did take this year’s survey: thank you for lending your voice. We have some impactful data to reveal to the broader community. We are even seeing glimmers of hope that the industry seems to be making forward progress on a few fronts. We took away many patterns and narratives that must inspire action by both PDXWIT and the tech community at large.
We will continue to offer transparency when we stumble and are more committed than ever to live up to our mission of dismantling inequities and paving pathways for marginalized communities to enter, stay and thrive in tech. You can see our 2020 State of the Community report for our next steps, as well as our recommendations for the broader tech industry.
Elizabeth Stock is the executive director of PDXWIT. Her work is centered on disrupting systems in the technology industry to shape an equitable future for all of humanity. Through events, advocacy, mentorship and scholarships, PDXWIT is advancing the careers of BIPOC, women, non-binary folks, and those traditionally underrepresented in technology.