In 2018, at the outset of my career as a tech sales professional, I found myself face-to-face with a recruiter, and my first question was, “Why should I work for you?” Some might have seen my inquiry as audacious, but it was genuine. As a Black LGBTQ woman, I needed to understand why I should invest my talents in a company that lacked Black leadership. The recruiter had little answer for me, but I believed I could make a difference and accepted the job offer at GitHub, which Microsoft acquired a few months later.
I immersed myself in my work, and found community in BlacktoCats, GitHub’s first official Black employee resource group, established in 2015. Our mission was clear: to attract Black talent to tech. We created safe spaces for Black employees, hosted events at HBCUs, and sparked the creation of more employee resource groups. What began as a modest effort blossomed into a global initiative. I felt immense pride in this work and making a tangible difference.
Working in Big Tech during this era, we were hopeful for real change. GitHub and Microsoft were among the few companies making strides in diversity reporting, with GitHub publishing its first diversity impact report in 2016. Though modest, I was proud of my company’s work and even prouder of myself and my colleagues for pushing for change.
Then 2020 arrived, with it, a racial justice reckoning that Big Tech leadership was not immune to. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s letter to employees promised substantial changes to foster a more inclusive company. The company pledged an additional $150 million investment in diversity and inclusion (D&I) and aimed to double the number of Black and African American leaders at Microsoft by 2025.
Fast-forward to a few weeks ago—a year short of their 2025 commitment—Microsoft made headlines after letting go two members of its events team who did DEI work.
Some publications initially claimed Microsoft was dismantling its entire DEI team, but the company says those reports were incorrect. (“Our D&I commitments remain unchanged,” said Jeff Jones, Microsoft spokesperson, in a statement to Fast Company and other outlets. “Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work.”)
The news made me think about how different this moment is for DEI work, compared with 2020. There has been limited follow-up from the company on whether the promises made in 2020 were actually fulfilled. But of course this trend isn’t isolated to Microsoft. Across Big Tech, DEI programs are being deprioritized. Zoom laid off a DEI team earlier this year, and Google and Meta have also made DEI-related cuts. Leaders, including Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, have criticized and ridiculed DEI work.
When I left Microsoft in 2022, I was proud of my work and impact on other Black employees. But I was also weary of the constant need to mask my true self and navigate relentless microaggressions. While I envisioned a long tech career, I couldn’t reconcile the trade-offs required to stay. I know that my experience is not an isolated incident and that organizations can make the changes necessary to foster a diverse workforce with accountability and dedicated resources toward shifting culture.
This is a real problem, not just for people of color with incredible leadership and ingenuity to offer every industry, but for any business’s bottom line. Research consistently shows that diversity drives better business outcomes. Diversity fosters innovation in investment portfolios or executive teams and mitigates blind spots. A national survey by Morning Consult for the Public Private Strategies Institute found that most senior business executives across the political spectrum believe diversity initiatives are crucial for positive business performance. And they’re right.
A 2020 McKinsey series found that companies with ethnically and culturally diverse leadership outperformed those with lower diversity by 36% in profitability. Perhaps even more pressing is the blindspots’ team of people who think, look, and act too similarly. The issue of egregious racist biases in AI have been well documented, resulting in costly and embarrassing mishaps for global giants like Google. We have to wonder if these issues could have been averted if there had been more diversity in the teams building the technology.
Today, I’ve found a professional space that champions DEI in its business model and has proven results to show for it. ICA Fund in Oakland is an accelerator and investment fund focused on underrepresented founders, including women and people of color. Here, our business goals align with diversity, making my work profoundly fulfilling. We’ve invested in dozens of iconic Bay Area businesses, like Red Bay Coffee and Cupcakin’ Bakeshop. We operate on a smaller scale, but the impact is real and personal.
When Microsoft says “our D&I commitments remain unchanged,” I believe them, mostly. Data shows us about the benefits of diverse workforces. And I know that smart CEOs see the business case for ensuring diversity. They must, however, also ensure that they are building systems that can create real safety and accountability for diverse employees at big companies, like DEI programs were designed to do.
Big Tech has a long way to go before safely saying it does not need these commitments, and I encourage others in Silicon Valley to continue DEI programs. For now, I’m glad to be doing work where I can see the benefits happening locally in the Bay Area because of our model of investing and prioritizing DEI—and where bringing my whole self to work isn’t an afterthought. I hope that our model will soon be the norm, not the exception.
