I no longer trust the stats that companies publish on the gender equality in their tech roles

b3_k1nd_rw1nd
Sun, 04 Jan 2026 07:55:25 +0000

I am really not sure if this topic belongs in ~tech or ~society or ~talk but I trust the moderators to re-assign accordingly.

So, this is the layout of the "development" team of my companies.

there are 4 "development" teams which reports to the development manager who also occasionally codes.
There is one team, that's the one I am on. 7 people, 6 males.
there is another team, 4 people, 3 males.
there is another team, 5 people, 4 males.
The last team, I don't really consider "development" team. its a team of 4 females. What they are best suited for is QA in the sense of manually testing the product to ensure the experience is sufficient for push to PROD, But because of budget restrictions, they are being forced to learn code and testing suites so they can be the people to develop our testing structure. They are great people and excellent Manual QAers but they really are not developers.

All our tech managers and team leads are men with the exception of the team lead for QA (obviously).

And just to be clear, the culture is friendly and respectful and no complaints. It's just the gender ratio is pathetic.

So our tech gender ratio is really 17 people and 3 women which is 17%.
If you want to consider the QA team a dev team to bump up the numbers, you get 21 with 7, that's still only 33%.

At a recent company meeting, they were talking about how diverse our workforce is and blah blah blah (I tune out most of that stuff as we are fully remote and I spend most of my time coding), but then they showed a slide that claimed our gender ratio for tech roles was like 50% or something.....

I message a colleague at work, being like "where on earth did they get that number??", he was like ":shrug: maybe they are counting the people who use the product we are making?"

To clarify that, the product we work on is rarely used by external customers. Instead we have employees who know how to use our product and correspond on our behalf with external customers. So all these employees are doing is using a webapp the real tech employees develop.

So long story short, my company pulled a number out of nowhere to claim we have gender equity in the tech roles and now I dont know how to trust any stats a company puts out about how equal the gender roles are in their "tech" departments.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tech/1s13/i_no_longer_trust_the_stats_that_companies_publish_on_the_gender_equality_in_their_tech_roles

Votes: 31

Comments: 6