Do tech layoffs hurt women more?

The women who sued Elon Musk

In December 2022, Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal, two former Twitter employees, filed a class action lawsuit against the social media giant. They argued that women had been discriminated against during the layoffs at Twitter soon after billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company in October 2022. 

Before the layoffs, Twitter employed 2234 female employees (43.5%) and 2900 male employees (56.5%). Yet, 57% of female employees were laid off, compared to 47% of men. The discrepancy could not be explained by a desire to retain more mission-critical engineering roles; the data showed that 63% of women in engineering-related positions at Twitter were laid off, compared to 48% of their male counterparts.

Elon Musk has had a long and well-documented history of sexist comments, from his musings about starting a university with the acronym ‘TITS’, his tweet that “Testosterone rocks ngl”, to his dubbing of US Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Senator Karen” over her calls for him to pay more income tax. 

While it may be tempting to dismiss Elon Musk as an extreme case due to his notoriety, the evidence is strong that layoffs disproportionately affect women. If poorly managed, layoffs can hurt efforts to make the tech industry more equitable and inclusive. 

A gendered picture: tech layoffs in 2022 and 2023

In 2022 and early 2023, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and other tech giants conducted rounds of job cuts. Smaller SaaS companies and startups soon followed suit. After the hiring boom by tech companies during the pandemic, the economic downturn, rise in interest rates, and a cooling off in investor appetites saw the focus shift from rapid growth to careful cost management. Layoffs.fyi data shows that from the start of 2022 to the end of June 2023, 1855 tech companies collectively let go of 375,000 employees globally.

In an interview with Fast Company, Layoffs.fyi founder Roger Lee estimated that close to 45% of those layoffs were women, despite women accounting for less than a third of employees in tech companies. Economist Sania Khan’s research showed that women in tech companies in the US are 65% more likely than men to lose their job. Even in Europe, where women make up a higher proportion of tech workers (more than a third) compared to the US, they still represented 41.6% of those affected by layoffs. 

Why layoffs affect women in tech disproportionately 

The roles that were hit hardest in the tech layoffs were in non-technical roles like marketing, talent acquisition and customer service – all roles with a higher proportion of women. Even so, women in technical roles were more adversely affected compared to their male colleagues. Here are a few reasons:

1. Women in technical roles occupy more junior positions and fewer leadership positions 

Women make up a higher percentage of interns and junior employees in tech roles than they do for mid, senior and executive-level positions. A 2022 survey by AnitaB.org of 400,000 US-based technologists found that 38.5% of interns and 33.8% of entry-level tech workers identified as female, compared to 28% of mid-career employees, 23% of senior employees and 23.1% of executive staff. Only 8.1% of CTOs identified as female. 

While more women graduating from STEM degrees and entering the workforce in recent years could account for why they make up a higher proportion of junior employees, there are persistent barriers for women to advance to more senior positions. The widely studied ‘broken rung’ phenomenon shows that for every 100 men who are promoted from entry level to managerial positions, only 87 women and 83 women of colour were promoted. Additionally, women are more likely to leave the tech industry entirely, exacerbating the seniority gap. A shocking 50% of all women who take on a tech role leave the industry by age 35, compared to 20% in other industries. This rate is 45% higher than for men in the same age group. 

A common technique that many companies use when making redundancy decisions is “Last In, First Out” (LIFO), sometimes known as the “last hired, first fired” method. This particular criterion may impact more roles of female technologists due to the higher portion of women in less senior and less tenured roles.

2. Women occupy more remote and flexible work positions

As some companies start to wind back the working-from-home arrangements that became commonplace during the pandemic, remote workers are more anxious about their job security and the risk of layoffs. Women are more likely to take up remote and part-time work opportunities compared to men, simply because they are more likely to be primary caregivers. In Australia, women make up 67 per cent of the part-time workforce and are nearly three times more likely than men to use flexible work arrangements to manage caregiving responsibilities. Consequently, long commutes and rigid work schedules tend to penalise women more.  

Several CEOs and business leaders, including Disney CEO Bob Iger, Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and Apple’s Tim Cook have publicly announced policies that mandate a return to in-office or hybrid work arrangements. Concerningly, attitudes that link in-office presence to better career opportunities are prevalent. IBM’s Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News that “in the short term you probably can be equally productive, but your career does suffer.”

A survey of US managers by Beautiful.ai found that there was a perception that remote employees were more vulnerable to layoffs. Of the managers surveyed, 60% agreed that the likelihood of remote workers being laid off was higher, with 20% on the fence. Only 20% felt that remote employees were not more likely to be laid off.

3. Women are harmed by post-layoff burnout and ‘hustle’ culture

In the wake of the Twitter layoffs, Elon Musk issued his vision for “Twitter 2.0”, a hustle culture where remaining employees were expected to commit to “extremely hardcore work” with “long hours at high intensity” or lose their jobs. Several offices in Twitter HQ were reportedly turned into bedrooms for employees to enable them to work late. This type of hyper-competitive "tech bro" rhetoric contributes to highly toxic workplace attitudes that are hostile towards those who seek work-life balance. They are also unwelcoming to women and other underrepresented groups in tech, who already expend significant cognitive effort adjusting to cultures where micro-aggressions are commonplace and where they do not feel safe and included. 

Return to office mandates, the increase in workloads resulting from leaner teams, and the pressure to ‘prove oneself’ in the wake of a layoff can lead to: 

• anxiety about job security and career progression  
• increased levels of presenteeism 
• less emphasis on supporting and enabling distributed work cultures 
• a deterioration of work-life balance
• increased levels of stress and burnout.

Mitigating the negative impacts on DEI after a layoff

Layoffs are sometimes unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean that your Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives should be rolled back. In fact, the opposite holds true – diverse and inclusive cultures are more resilient during times of disruption and volatility. After a layoff, companies should reevaluate their DEI strategies and set new goals and metrics to hold themselves accountable for championing diversity and inclusion in their workforces.

1. Rebuild diversity in the talent pipeline

As companies restart their hiring cycles, they should look for opportunities to embed a diversity focus in rehiring, reskilling and mentorship programs. 

Men are still afforded more job opportunities in tech compared to women

Research shows that on average, men are still selected for interviews for tech jobs more frequently than equally qualified women. A study by Hired shows that 40% of roles are still offering interview requests exclusively to male candidates. During the recruitment stage, women also face more rigorous scrutiny of their credentials compared to men with the same qualifications. 

Many companies hire by referrals, so if existing tech team members do not have diverse networks, extra effort needs to be made to source candidates from job boards aimed at women and underrepresented groups or from non-traditional channels like coding bootcamps. Community groups, such as meetups that support women in technology, offer further networking opportunities for hiring companies. 

Some other ways to address unconscious bias during the hiring process include:

• using tools that identify and eliminate gendered languages in job ads
• having hiring managers undergo blind evaluation of resumes
• ensuring that interview panels have diverse compositions. 

2. Ensure performance and promotion evaluation is free from bias

When the next cycle of promotions, performance evaluations and pay reviews begins, it is crucial to eliminate systemic bias to drive equitable outcomes. 

One of the challenges that women face is that they are less likely than men to receive concrete feedback tied to business outcomes from their managers. Instead, they are more likely to receive feedback on personality and communication styles – what Correll and Simard term ‘vague’ feedback. Correll and Simard’s analysis of more than 200 performance reviews in a technology company found that vague feedback was given to women 57% of the time, compared to 43% for men. This holds women back as managers don’t put forward compelling, evidence-based cases for women to be promoted, nor provide specific feedback to women to develop the skills and behaviours needed for them to advance to the next level.

3. Restore a culture of support and inclusion

Layoffs represent a fundamental erosion of trust with employees, a trust that needs time and investment to rebuild. During the fragile post-layoff period, there is a greater imperative to ensure that all affected team members are treated with humanity and empathy. Companies need to prioritise the wellbeing of their staff, and vigorously protect a culture of safety and belonging.

Stamp out any first signs of the company culture turning toxic due to overwork. While reduced team sizes result in opportunities for remaining team members to pick up new responsibilities, care must be taken to ensure they are well supported with training and skill development. Managers need to keep an eye out that no individuals are overloaded to the point of burnout. A 2022 Microsoft study found that toxic work cultures are the major reason for attrition, beating out other reasons such as dissatisfaction with compensation levels. Mental health reasons and lack of work-life balance were significant factors for why employees quit. 

When employees are left isolated, demotivated and reeling after a layoff, glue work becomes even more critical to protect and rebuild team morale and cohesiveness. ‘Glue work’, a term first coined by Squarespace principal software engineer Tanya Reilly, are all the skills besides coding that are essential for software teams to succeed. These could be setting up new communication processes, mentoring others, creating and sharing documentation, and supporting less experienced employees. Female technologists, Reilly contends, take on more glue work, and notably, managers expect women to take on more glue work – labour that is not always recognised or rewarded in performance evaluation systems that over index on technical skills or acts of ‘individual heroism’. The solution is for managers to identify, recognise and fairly allocate glue work across teams. The contributions that support and strengthen teams should be explicitly rewarded, considered promotable work, and assessed as vital skills for progression into leadership pathways.

Conclusion

As the Twitter case study shows, strong organisational cultures take years to build and can be damaged in a matter of days and weeks. Because women tend to occupy a higher proportion of non-technical and junior roles in tech – roles frequently perceived to be more ‘expendable’ – the ongoing tech layoffs that began in 2022 and continue into 2023 have had an outsized impact on women. Calls from leaders to mandate a return to the office and inflexible work schedules can end up penalising women who still shoulder the majority of caregiving work and require more flexible working arrangements. 

To rebuild DEI efforts and regain the trust of their employees in the wake of mass layoffs, companies should focus on retargeting diversity in their talent pipelines and ensure they continue to make inclusive and safe cultures a core part of their organisations. The skills and behaviours that help knit together and heal teams – contributions that have historically been undervalued – become even more important to recognise, reward and divide fairly among team members. 

Society comprises people of various backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and beliefs. So too, should the teams that build the technologies that shape society. During challenging economic times, it is the companies that continue to invest in DEI efforts who can best leverage the resilient nature of diverse and inclusive teams and capitalise on eventual recovery.