Show HN: Employees.fyi – Easily compare U.S. workforce demographic data (employees.fyi)
In the U.S., the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requires the collection and submission of demographic workforce data. We collected and organized the publicly available federal data from the EEOC as well as publicly available EEO-1 submissions from individual companies. By doing so, we hope to make it easy to compare U.S. workforce demographic data across companies and against industry reference data.
The URL contains your current selection. Just copy the URL and share it!
Some examples:
* A comparison of 2018 data for the "Professionals" job category across the Information industry, Facebook, and Netflix: https://employees.fyi/?year=2018&job=PROFESSIONALS&reference...
* A comparison of 2018 data for all job categories across the Finance and Insurance industry, BlackRock, and PayPal: https://employees.fyi/?year=2018&job=ALL&reference=52&compan...
* A comparison of 2018 data for the "Exec/Sr Officials & Managers" category across the Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services industry, Accenture, and Nvidia: https://employees.fyi/?year=2018&job=SRMANAGERS&reference=54...
If there's a company with EEO-1 data that you would like to see, consider submitting a URL via this form: https://forms.gle/8cVfXpg69fiiemzc8
Let us know what feedback you have for us! For those who are curious: at runtime, Employees.fyi uses normalize.css and the Open Sans font. They are hosted with the website.
84 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] threadI'd love to be able to reference against US (and maybe world) population numbers, too, to see how a company's employee base compares to the population they hire from and (sometimes) the population they are trying to serve.
We are considering expanding the reference column to have more options, including population and CBSA (core-based statistical area). This would also align with some of the aggregate data available from the EEOC. For example, companies could be compared against the "New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metropolitan Statistical Area".
More info:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core-based_statistical_area
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_core-based_statistical...
We definitely want to make it as easy as possible to do those comparisons and understand the data. For example, adding an additional selector to further tune the comparison as you are suggesting is definitely on the list.
That'd be more useful to me.
This industry is absolutely brutal if you are not white or asian, and that's seemingly just how it's gonna be.
Compare against Coca Cola's professionals:
> 5.82% - Black or African American Male
> 13.66% - Black or African American Female
> This industry is absolutely brutal if you are not white or asian, and that's seemingly just how it's gonna be.
I didn't start out in tech, and I feel like I was dropped on Mars. The demographics are so wildly skewed, and there are so many people who believe that the skew is right and just. I hate it.
Here on HN we talk about CS more… because we’re on a CS discussing site, and CS generally pays better than nursing, and women have historically faced more discrimination across society.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also care about male underrepresentation in nursing, it’s just less relevant here.
Look no further than a sibling comment from sjsbdkj: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31090862
> We receive 1 woman candidate application per 20 male on average.
Unsurprising, given the first part of your answer. If a company gaslights women when they say that they face hostility, why would women want to work there?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This isn't a formal debate. Nobody owes anybody else a response, and choosing not to reply to baiting posts, opting out of poisonous back-and-forth, is not only not ceding the argument, it's upholding the spirit of the HN guidelines.
If you actually want to engage, try to show that you're actually listening to the person you're engaging with and not throwing rocks at some straw man caricature of them. A good exercise would be to couch your post in terms that your interlocutor might agree with.
Even if you feed more people into one end of the woodchipper, very few will make it out the other end intact.
The same nonsense about aptitudes, interests, whatever was thrown at women about careers in medicine. Eventually, the tech industry will even out too, because today's tech demographics are not the result of some unchangeable destiny. I just wish it would happen in my lifetime.
Others have addressed other aspects of the disparity, but I'll chime in here and respond to this common misdirection with the reminder that everyone that everyone who works at a tech company does not have or need a computer science degree.
The thing about a tech company is that it's still a company with many of the same corporate functions as a railroad or oil company: finance/accounting, sales, marketing, human resources, facilities management, legal, etc. While it's fine for your head of HR to have a CS degree, it's definitely not the main criteria for the job. I don't have current numbers for FAANG, but would be somewhat surprised if more than ~40% of the headcount of any big tech company comprises roles that require or use a CS degree.
Incidentally: there was a robust discussion on this site today about the merits of whether a degree was even necessary, and HN commenters posted to indicate that not having a degree has not been an impediment to them working in the industry. I think having a CS degree is perhaps not the gating factor here. (Yes, I have a CS degree.)
Google has sushi chefs on staff, and yet it's still a misconception (misdirection?) that aggregate corporate numbers are skewed because of a dearth of Hispanic/Black/women CS grads. Whether that is actually the case or not, we can say for certain that tech does a terrible job at hitting their diversity in non-engineering roles, areas where Coke/AT&T/Accenture are not having a similar problem.
I suspect one thing they did was avoid making the assumption that hiring candidates from marginalized communities compromises quality.
Second, it's not like non-FAANG tech companies, despite lower standards for engineering positions, have higher numbers in the Black, Hispanic, or female demographics.
Third, if you look at the data for Coca Cola's "Exec/Sr Officials & Managers" where the "standards" without question are comparable to those at tech companies, the percentages aren't as high but they're still way better than you see in tech leadership:
> 3.37% - Black or African American Male
> 4.31% - Black or African American Female
This is an interesting way to contrast Coca-Cola with FAANG, of which the majority are routinely under antitrust scrutiny. Put another way: does Coca-Cola (market share: 43%) sell itself any more than Google (market share: 92%)?
(Aside from which: most tech companies are probably on the order of 60% non-engineers. The "engineer" part is a common bit of misdirection to elide the presence of the majority of FAANG employees, who are not engineers. People who can successfully sell plain water can probably sell other things too.)
I guess I do wonder what, if anything, it has done to my view of the world to have virtually no professional interactions with women for nearly 20 years. The other thing is even when I've had a woman or two women on my team, all but one time it has been in a management role. I've only had one woman teammate ever in a technical role.
Actually, the BLS has detailed tables on this by occupation. Scroll down to construction jobs and women are virtually non-existent: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm. Most of them are not even annotated, with cement masons being 0%. My dad was a plumber, so apparently neither of us ever worked with women.
This goes even more for remote dev roles. A job post will get a ton of Indian applicants.
>"nothing brutal about it. whats the percentage of asian females working as auto mechanics in the usa? if low, why is that?"
Because being an auto mechanic is a brutal physical job that destroys your body and pays a barely liveable wage. Something no one really wants to do regardless of gender or race. However, being a computer programmer is one of the best jobs on earth. We are paid like lawyers and coddled like children to write text files in our underwear. Everyone across the socioeconomic spectrum wants what we have. So why do only asians and whites get it?
To you, maybe. I’m going to surprise you, but just because you find X one of the best things in life and Y is worse than X to you – it doesn’t mean that X is universally better than Y for everyone.
> We are paid like lawyers and coddled like children to write text files in our underwear.
Because that’s what software engineering is. Uhuh.
> Everyone across the socioeconomic spectrum wants what we have.
And you found that where? On ad websites for every generic bootcamp?
There is less asian females doing manual labour because they can get better jobs.
An average white, male employee might accept that their mid-level, unfulfilling but acceptable cubicle at eBay is as good as they're going to get and stay for years. An otherwise identical minority candidate will be getting 10 recruiter messages a day for better opportunities.
Systemic discrimination against Black Americans both historically and today is well documented and understood. I could have written a long preamble about the many elements of society that factor into racial disparities, but I assumed I could skip that for brevity since everyone on HN is already well aware.
You need to look at this data with an intersectional perspective. An overly generalized label of just "Black" as an identifier does little to help and may actively mislead in certain situations. Considering multiple attributes- race, educational attainment, location, industry, job function, seniority, etc is critical because the intersection of these may cause dramatically different experiences.
Consider this example to maybe make it clear. Imagine a gay man pursuing a career as a Broadway dancer versus a gay man pursuing a career as an elementary school teacher in Alabama. Will being gay have the same risks and challenges for each man? Is it fair or useful to try to group their experiences into one "score" for if that attribute is an advantage or disadvantage?
We are considering expanding the reference column to have more options, including population and CBSA (core-based statistical area). The idea of limiting it to "population employed/seeking employment" is certainly a way to mitigate some of the challenges of providing a general population comparison.
I'd like to see more companies at once, ideally 5+ columns
The military keeps a lot of stats about post-service folks that they show you before you get out. One is that most veterans end up in blue collar fields, which is curious by itself given how technical many jobs are (the direct skills don't translate but the mindset does). The second is the graduation rate, which is generally why I encourage companies to hire SWEs without degrees (this also has overlap with other DEI goals). I don't worry about libertarians or the far left too much. Usually those folks warm up after a while once they realize you're not Baba Yaga.
(There's also a huge difference between opposing military conflicts and supporting veterans, which is evident in the equal support for the VA among Democratic and Republican voters[1]).
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/05/the-changin...
We're a little less than 10% of the population, that aligns with other protected classes. If you have no veterans that signals you have some issues. Having few is to be expected, but still not "good" imo.
> There's also a huge difference between opposing military conflicts and supporting veterans, which is evident in the equal support for the VA among Democratic and Republican voters
There is, but pay attention to how those folks speak. A lot of their attitudes about the MIC will usually leak to veterans, veteran issues, and policies that would affect us. It's treading a very close line. One good start would be to include that in unconscious bias training, but you actually need veterans at a company in the first place to necessitate that.
Veterans are also people who are more likely to end up in certain industries, unlike (say) a Black person. You'd expect a lot of veterans in military, law enforcement, and government.
How many does that leave for the rest of us to hire? And how many are getting the degrees necessary for certain fields, like nursing or civil engineering?
I don't agree that 0 veterans (up to a point) says something about a company until you can show that they had a pool of qualified applicants and chose not to hire any. I would say the same about racial bias, too, by the way. A company with no Black people isn't confirmed racist until you know their applicant demographics.
ESG initiatives are a crime. Figuratively and literally. Absurd that people are so willing to go along with this crap - but not entirely difficult to believe when pushback carries the risk of termination.
And of course no one is complaining about the far greater overrepresentation of Asians. Unless it's politically expedient to claim that they're "white adjacent".
There's no justification for any of this. Its pure, petty racism. We have regressed as a society.
Especially when one takes two seconds to actually consider the implications of these policies: if you are going to far as to acknowledge that discrimination is ok because different demographics bring different professional attributes to the table, then you are implicitly acknowledging discrimination is OK because some of these attributes are worth more than others. You can't claim that diversity of skin color == diversity of thought and pretend that the differences are only positive - that's not logically consistent.
Race blindness is the optimal solution so long as humans are products of genes and culture. We were on a decent path for a few decades - now all these policies are doing is justifying a resurgence of classical racism; except the racists think they have the moral imperative because they've convinced themselves that all of their ills, past and present, are entirely the fault of evil white men (and women when convenient). This is a disgusting, dangerous game, doubly so when you're not allowed to question it.
What's the reason?
You know, the same way that white guys are, on average, more likely to pick up and practice programming out of interest than, say, females of any race.
So I see that McDonalds is far more diversed than Netflix...
However, an average salary in Netflix is 5-6 times more than the one in McDonalds.
Meanning, one can support more people with their salary in Netflix (or Alphabet, Meta, Apple, et al).
The impact on an entire family when a single member "makes it" to the outer circles.
This is something I have learned on myself when I "made it" to the tech industry, ~25 years ago.
https://employees.fyi/?year=2018&job=PROFESSIONALS&reference...
The data can be used to help find if people are getting proper representation, etc. Racism is rooted in superiority. This is more like, race-consciousness, which is rooted in humane treatment and empathy
I guess for me these statistics would be easier to digest if they were centered around poverity: e.g. How many cars did your family own, size of childhood home or something of that sort
Employers are required to provide this data to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: the federal agency charged with enforcing federal law which makes workspace discrimination illegal.
This agency came to exist through the legendary Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was supported by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, along with Presidents JFK and LBJ.
You'd be forgiven for not understanding American politics.
But any American would be foolish to consider that race and ethnicity do not play a role in how our society is structured after over 200 years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow.
Racism has been a poison built into the structure of our country's institutions, and being race conscious is a part of the cure.
That's not what I understood from their comment.
I think a lot of controversy on the topic stems from people defining racism differently. From how I remember - racism was initially about categorically treating people differently depending on their race. That still exists in some areas/workplaces etc but has been mostly solved from a societal viewpoint.
What were now arguing about as racism is no longer the categorical mistreatment/favoritism and instead what people end up with, while ignoring the way how we got there - and that issue is indeed incredibly hard to solve.
Fwiw, I agree with the initial statement by them: statistics around race are always inherently racism and don't really show issues unless you drill down into the localities (checking racial representation in localities, as there is where the initial racism continues to exist).
The other issues have to be solved differently, as they're not about race and more about how that person got into that position (which might be caused from the initial racism, but that's unlikely to be the reason limiting them today)
This is the John Roberts "our country has changed" perspective. There is definitely not consensus across US society for it. It is a view strongly held by some and strongly rejected by others, correlating largely with political affiliation.
There's not even consensus that discrimination is bad. About all you can say is that spouting explicitly racist views is no longer accepted in polite society.
> What were now arguing about as racism is no longer the categorical mistreatment/favoritism and instead what people end up with, while ignoring the way how we got there - and that issue is indeed incredibly hard to solve.
The struggle today is the same struggle it's always been. The same factions who opposed having laws punishing discrimination passed decades ago are arguing for the dismantlement of those laws today. Those factions didn't accept that the discrimination those laws outlawed was problematic before, and they still don't today.
After more than 10 years, I came to accept it as an almost innocuous quirk of the English-speaking mind, something akin to the Italians complaining about pineapple pizza.
If we didn’t already have the concept of race I certainly wouldn’t want to conjure it up out of thin air, but in a country where we openly and explicitly discriminated against people on the basis of their race within the lifetime of my still living parents, it’s not something you can simply ignore the effect of and just hope they go away.