Diversity, Disrupted: A Critique of Neoliberal Difference in Tech Organizations

Since 2014, technology companies have spent an estimated $1.2 billion on diversity efforts. Despite these investments, Black and Latinx Americans remain starkly underrepresented. How is this problem understood by people in tech? Connecting theories of white racial ideologies and research on racialized organizations, I show how understandings of tech’s “diversity problem” paradoxically serve to naturalize tech organizations as white spaces. Using interviews and surveys of 69 tech workers, I identify several semantic maneuvers used to defend predominantly white workplaces as “diverse.” Together, they demonstrate a pattern I call neoliberal difference. Neoliberal difference is a culturally authorized ideology that expresses support for pluralism and progressive ideals while ignoring systems of racial exclusion. The theory of neoliberal difference expands and complicates our existing knowledge of white racial ideologies using the tech industry as an important case study. Implications for a sector so powerful in shaping social life are discussed.