As of April 2024, tech companies have laid off more than 60,000 people in this year alone, a drastic addition to last year’s layoffs that impacted more than 260,000 people in the U.S.. Of those numbers, around 20,000 employees in the Bay Area were affected by layoffs from major Silicon Valley tech giants, including Google, Apple, Meta, and X.

A hidden, but major impact of these layoffs is the fact that many of these large tech companies have cut back their DEI programs (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) following layoffs and loss of labor in these of their DEI teams. These actions—although minuscule at first—have potentially outsized the longstanding efforts towards more equal representation and compensation for underrepresented minorities in tech, an initiative that started back in 2020.

Many tech companies have cut DEI teams by as much as 90% in 2023, CNBC states, and some have made this move to redirect their budgets to more vital areas, such as Zoom. Zoom has disproportionately laid off 150 employees just this past February. CNBC, however, details that  Zoom’s DEI program was barely 2% of their entire company, revealing their aim to target their DEI team as a whole. The recent layoff by Zoom has shown the minuteness of their DEI program prior to the cuts, and how other large companies in tech follow similarly. 

Google’s 2023 Diversity Annual Report displays their workforce representation by race, ethnicity, and gender. In the United States, employees from Asian and White communities take up the majority of the corporation. On the other hand, underrepresented groups such as Black, Latinx, and Indigenous add up to less than 15% of the workforce, and even less in leadership, estimating to only be 10.3% of its total workforce. While the numbers increased marginally from 2022-2023, they still show the significant gap between the DEI representation and overrepresented groups.

Other large, well-known companies show similar results to Google’s. In Apple’s latest Inclusion and Diversity Report, 13.8%, from Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities in the tech workforce, has been recorded in 2022, and The Global Diversity and Inclusion Report by Microsoft this past year reports 15% of employees being from underrepresented minorities in DEI.

The layoffs in the tech industry in the Bay Area continue to reveal the lack of representation for minorities in the DEI program, and there is still a long way to go before equality is seen. These layoffs, however, especially targeting DEI employees and leaders, raise awareness to matters that should not only concern members of DEI in tech, but everyone here in the Silicon Valley.