White dudes the lot of them. But then again I just picked these three names. What do I know? Let’s see what the data says.
There are 3960 rows in this dataset, one row for each combination of our four hierarchical variables: Company Race Gender Job Category
It’s hard to figure out from the data alone what the gender balance in Silicon Valley is.
We can use a data type called a tree to represent how Silicon Valley workers break down into subcategories.
Let’s create a tree where the 354,964 workers are firstly divided into companies, and then into gender groups. Here’s the start of the tree:
This begins to show us that 23andMe is unusual in having more female than male workers.
Because 23andMe’s 297 workers gives them such a small area on the horizontal axis, they don’t even warrant a name on the diagram. But they are the unusual 50/50 blue-red split second from the left.
This diagram says “patriarchy” much better than a list of data could.
Now, off to find a Silicon Valley summer internship! Which company wants to expand their blue box?