Thread by @reveal

1/ Tech cos @Oracle, @PalantirTech & others gave some weak excuses for trying to keep their diversity numbers secret.

They said:

*Other companies would steal their workers.

*It would invade employee privacy.

*And the kicker: They'd face bad PR. revealnews.org/article/oracle…

2/ We challenged those excuses, suing the government. We won.

Now, government contractors can't hide their EEO-1 reports, which show their workforce broken down by race, gender and broad job category.

3/ It also means we can see the wild arguments they have made for hiding their numbers.

Buckle up.

4/ @Oracle and @PandoraMusic both warned that revealing their diversity numbers would lead to “raiding of minority or female employees.”

5/ Couple problems there, though:

*Oracle only had one woman of color executive in 2015.

*Pandora overall was whiter than half of its peers, at 68 percent, and its executives were 89 percent white.

6/ And another thing: While some tech companies, such as Pandora, refused to release their EEO-1s, citing competition for talent, a bunch of the competitors they listed *already post them publicly.*

7/ Pandora, by the way, is headquartered in Oakland, where about 26 percent of the population was black in 2015, but only 3.5 percent of the company’s workforce was black.

8/ Meanwhile, the data mining firm @palantirtech has faced criticism for its role in helping law enforcement track citizens and target immigrants.

It told the government it must hide the number of women and people of color it employs so competitors won’t “steal” them.

9/ In a letter it *also* tried to keep secret, @palantirtech said that “competitors could identify where Palantir has made significant progress in hiring women and minorities and target recruitment strategies at specific job categories to steal this talent from Palantir.”

10/ You can read that letter here: documentcloud.org/documents/5448…

11/ Never mind the fact that Palantir actually performed dismally compared to its competitors when it comes to female managers and women of color in management.

12/ Thanks to our lawsuit, we now know that just under 13 percent of Oracle’s executives in 2015 were women, including co-CEO Safra Catz. Two-thirds of major Silicon Valley companies had a better representation of female executives that year.

13/ You gotta hand it to other companies, who didn’t even bother disguising their pleas to the government.

Synnex, an information technology services company, cited potential “public relations harm” if its diversity reports were released.

14/ It said “unwarranted assertions made against the Company would be harder to refute if they are somehow tied to an official document.”
documentcloud.org/documents/5448…

15/ This is all part of our ongoing project to provide the most detailed look at the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. We showed how companies that are designing the future have by and large left out women and people of color, especially in leadership. revealnews.org/topic/silicon-…

16/ It builds on work we started back in 2017, when reporters @willcir and @cynduja first began collecting – or trying to collect – EEO-1s from Silicon Valley’s power players.
revealnews.org/article/hidden…

17/ @cynduja kept at it. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, she found that while racial and gender disparities are grave, many companies haven’t been held back by conventional excuses.
revealnews.org/article/heres-…

18/ Last April, we sued the government to stop companies from withholding their EEO-1s on the grounds that they're trade secrets.

revealnews.org/blog/we-sued-t…

19/ And in November, the government agreed, reversing its longtime policy.

revealnews.org/blog/we-got-th…

20/ We’re going to continue investigating this issue. To keep up with our work, subscribe to our newsletter. revealnews.org/newsletter