90% Of IT Leaders Are Still White Men, According To the Business Of Tech

The Business of Tech’s Diversity report has revealed that diversity in IT leadership still has a long way to go. 

What is The Business of Tech’s report all about? 

The report, created by Dave Sobel, examines diversity development in tech leadership.

Sobel, the host of The Business of Tech podcast, is a leading expert in delivering technology services. Through his podcast, Sobel discusses uncomfortable topics associated with tech and business – one of which is diversity. 

“We love metrics in our industry. We have data and statistics and performance numbers and best-in-class performance, but when it comes to looking at diversity, we don’t,” said Sobel in an online statement. 

“In an industry that measures everything, there aren’t actually a lot of metrics here to measure,” he added. 

The platform’s Quarter 4 2022 survey took a deeper look into the race and gender of the leaders delivering IT services, and unsurprisingly, not much has changed. 

Key findings from the report 

The report collected data by monitoring multiple IT companies’ leadership pages and categorizing people into different race categories. 

“I started creating these reports in September of 2020 to investigate both what’s missing from the DEI conversation and how diverse leadership contributes to business outcomes,” said Sobel. 

Using the results gathered from the report, the industry’s leadership remains prominently white, with 88.92% of the industry’s leaders being white men. 

Although there had been a slight decrease in white leaders between Q3 2022 and Q4 2022, Black people were still not promoted to leadership positions.  

Additionally, the report revealed that Q3 2022 to Q4 2022 saw an overall increase in Black leadership, with the figure now reaching 2.14%. 

“It’s clear that there’s a gap between the desire to improve diversity and what’s happening on the ground – to me, that oversight is a missed opportunity on multiple fronts.”