Aron Vellekoop León/Ikon Images
Transparency can be a powerful lever, yet it is also combustible. When businesses raise visibility faster than they build the capacity to deliver on what they’ve disclosed, transparency produces resistance and often backlash from multiple directions, even from those who share the same social-progress goals. This dynamic is particularly explosive with so-called DEI efforts.
Skeptics consider diversity disclosures an ideological and political agenda dressed up as data, while some like-minded allies — the employees and advocates pushing for more women and people of color to be represented in prestigious industries like tech — see the same disclosure as a hollow gesture of tokenism in place of real change. And often, when lawsuits or elections change the risk calculus, the business retreats back into the silence where it began, releasing no data at all.
Before 2014, Silicon Valley kept its workforce data secret. It was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the late civil rights leader widely known for his 1980s presidential campaigns, who managed to persuade Silicon Valley to publish its demographic data, triggering a transparency wave that reshaped corporate behavior for a decade. By the count of the aide who ran Jackson’s Silicon Valley campaign, 24 of the 25 companies he targeted complied with his demand to publish the data. (Oracle was the conspicuous holdout.)
A dozen years later, the reports have largely stopped. Jackson forced the move from secrecy to disclosure, but the conservative movement against “woke” corporations has forced the move back toward silence on worker demography. A deeper look at Jackson’s tactics points to a different possible outcome — one sought by leaders who want social responsibility to last through political cycles — rather than reversals.
Bridging the Digital Divide
Among his compatriots in the civil rights movement, Jackson was perhaps the most focused on economic progress. He framed the first three phases of the Black freedom struggle as a fight against things: battles against slavery, Jim Crow, and disenfranchisement. Jackson’s corporate work, which he called “the battle for access to capital,” was a fight for things.
In the 1990s, Jackson built the Wall Street Project to pry open the doors of the finance industry — then the fastest-growing sector — widely enough for ethnic and racial minorities to enter. He turned to technology in 1999, launching the Silicon Valley Project to “bridge the digital divide.” The 2014 campaign for tech companies to publish their diversity numbers was the latest front in that same fight.
By that point, to Jackson, tech was the fastest-growing industry and Silicon Valley was where the country’s wealth and influence were concentrating. If Black Americans and other underrepresented groups were shut out of that growth, they would be shut out of the future. The question was how to make them players in tech. Jackson knew well that broad moral appeals had never moved the industry. What he needed was a demand concrete enough that a data-driven business could not dismiss it.
‘Where Are the Numbers?’
The demand that eventually worked was for transparency: Publish the numbers. That the technical workforce became the number everyone watched owed less to Jackson than to an engineer whose idea he borrowed to great effect. In 2013, Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou asked in a widely shared online essay, “Where are the numbers?” She posted her own team’s data on gender demographics and built a public spreadsheet that 250 others in Silicon Valley filled in.1 Her crowdsourced push set the measure that stuck: tech vs. non-tech (engineering vs. other) workers by gender.
Those demographic numbers moved the numbers that spoke loudest in the valley: dollar amounts. When investors first learned which companies were more gender-diverse than expected, they marked the diverse ones up and the others down, by more than a billion dollars, resulting in a sizable gap.2
The press had long ago grown impatient with the tech industry for calling its own demographics a “trade secret.”3 Legally, every employer with a hundred or more workers must file a federal EEO-1 report, which requires that they share head count data disaggregated by race, gender, and seniority. But the government never releases these reports, so the public sees a company’s numbers only if the company publishes them itself.
Persuading a company to actually disclose its data came down to whom Jackson knew. One of his most important relationships in Silicon Valley was with David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and its only senior Black executive at the time, who was the executive best placed to sell a controversial idea inside the company.
At Google’s May 2014 annual shareholder meeting, Jackson rose and asked the company to publish its workforce diversity data. Drummond conceded on the spot. The seemingly spontaneous reversal stunned the industry, but it was the public airing of a private understanding. The two men had met quietly beforehand; Drummond knew that Jackson would ask for the numbers, and Jackson knew that Drummond would agree to release them. They had made disclosure thinkable in private before making it popular in public.
Two weeks later, Google released data that had long been held secret. Laszlo Bock, the company’s head of people operations, admitted, “Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity.” The company’s report was damning: Its U.S. workforce was 60% White, 2% Black, and 3% Hispanic. The engineering corps numbers were even worse: 1% Black, 2% Hispanic, and just 17% women of any race. Drummond had conceded the principle, but Bock supplied the proof.
Establishing a New Norm
That report was the breakthrough Jackson needed: Google was the first elite tech company to make disclosure look like leadership rather than surrender. Success in getting others to get on the bandwagon would depend, in part, on which company moved first, and Google was the ideal initiator. A concession from Google was a signal from one of Silicon Valley’s most imitated companies — one that had worked hard to make itself an HR thought leader. It was the most important domino to fall.
The Jackson coalition’s task now was to make one company’s disclosure into a general norm. They moved fast to spread diversity reporting, urging other companies to “follow Google’s lead.” The phrasing was strategic. It recast disclosure as the next thing a respectable industry leader was expected to do — which made nondisclosure look backward and out of step. The campaign worked. Within weeks, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter followed, and by 2015, disclosure had become the rule rather than the exception.
Jackson’s earlier moral appeals for companies to take action on the “digital divide” had been easy to ignore. A demand to publish the numbers was harder to wave away, because it worked through constructive ambiguity, the same way skilled diplomatic language works. Both sides could agree to coo
