Tech layoffs are impacting women at a disproportionately higher rate than men, representing a possible setback for the industry’s efforts to improve its gender diversity, according to research by talent intelligence platform Eightfold AI.
The key finding: women in tech are 65% more likely than men to lose their jobs.
The research was led by Sania Khan, Eightfold’s chief economist and a former U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics senior economist. The analysis used data including the percentage of women in different roles in the industry in 2021, and the types of roles impacted by cutbacks, using probability theory to arrive at the estimate.
Examples include recruiting and marketing, two areas hit hard by the cutbacks.
Tech cutbacks have been making major headlines in recent months, from big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and others. However, Khan noted, the cutbacks began quietly in the early summer of 2022, when rising interest rates made investors more cautious and caused startups to start focusing more on profitability than growth.
Eightfold’s research focused on the industry at large, not individual companies.
The analysis also looked at race, using the same approach, and found that Asian and Black tech employees were laid off at a disproportionately lower rate, 9 percentage points below their share of the tech workforce; Hispanic workers were laid off in proportion to their share of the tech workforce; and white workers lost jobs at a disproportionately higher rate, 11 percentage points.
In raw numbers, due to the greater number of men in tech, the cutbacks are impacting more men than women. However, the research finding means that an individual woman in the industry is more likely to lose her job.
The good news, Khan said, is that tech layoffs still represent a small portion of the overall job market, and many of the roles that have been subject to recent cutbacks are still in-demand at other companies and in different industries.
However, even when they find new jobs, the risk is that women will exit the tech industry, Khan said, particularly given the industry’s ongoing challenges with gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace.
“It’s something that we should be looking into,” Khan said. “Does this mean that all of our DEI efforts go down the drain for the last few years, if we have females leaving tech with these layoffs and not coming back? It’s something that’s very important, and that we should be focused on.”
Sania Khan discusses the research on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast.
Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
