Big Tech skews male but female employees brunt the burden of layoffs - Axios

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Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios

The tech industry skews male, but tech layoffs paint a different picture: A disproportionate percentage of the workers laid off since last fall appear to be women.

Why it matters: There are fears that the Big Tech layoffs that rocked the industry may set back its yearslong push to diversify.

By the numbers: From October 2022 to June 2023, women made up 45% of laid-off tech employees, according to an analysis of 3,404 workers by Layoffs.fyi, shared with Axios.

About 55% of laid-off workers were male, the analysis shows. But most industry statistics put the share of male employees in tech at a much higher level, said Roger Lee, the founder of Layoffs.fyi.
For example: At Meta in 2022: 63% of employees were male, according to the company's data.
Meta said it does not disclose demographic data around layoffs.

Methodology: Layoffs.fyi, which tracks industry downsizing, ran the full names of laid-off U.S. tech employees, taken from opt-in lists, through a gender name analyzer.

Caveats: The analyzer isn't perfect and the opt-in lists may have a bit of selection bias.

The big picture: Tech layoffs were less "tech-y" than you might realize, hitting hardest the parts of these companies that are typically more female-dominated — like human resources, recruiting and marketing.

Almost half of HR people and recruiters were laid off in tech, compared to 10% of engineers and 4% of salespeople, found a separate analysis of Layoffs.fyi data.

These are the teams (they're usually smaller) that are typically first to get cut in a round of layoffs since they're viewed as less essential.
Meanwhile, tech companies have also pared back their diversity, equity and inclusion staff.

💭 Our thought bubble, via Axios' Ina Fried:Some in the industry say that tech companies that care about diversity can take steps to mitigate this by paying attention to where they cut jobs.

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