Underrepresentation, fewer pathways to success and a lack of institutional support: these are some of the setbacks people of colour have experienced, and continue to experience, in nearly all industries.

It’s only within the past few years that many workplaces, including large tech firms, have opened up about the lack of diversity in their workforces, following decades of non-diverse hiring practices. 

Most recently, companies have invested billions in diversity and inclusion initiatives to improve these long-standing inequities and increase representation of marginalised workers.

Data shows the most significant of these investments, particularly in tech, came in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement. In many cases, these initiatives showed promising results; for example, before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in late 2022, the company received positive press for hiring more black employees: in US locations, the numbers went from 6.9% to 9.4%.

The same year, the US-based telecommunications conglomerate Cisco documented a 120% increase in black vice presidents, beating diversity targets they’d originally set for 2023.

However, these diversity efforts – along with workplace representation for people of colour overall – may be stalling out amid global layoffs.

An analysis of publicly available data for 2022 conducted by workforce-intelligence firm Revelio Labs shows that black and Latino workers represented 7.42% and 11.49% respectively of the tech layoffs in 2022, even though they make up only 6.05% and 9.96% of the industry, respectively. In May 2022, Netflix laid off 150 workers, 26.6% of whom were identified by Protocol as workers from underrepresented backgrounds.

While these numbers are useful for tracking the impact of layoffs on diversity in some companies, there is not enough publically available data to confirm employees of colour have been laid off in higher numbers than their white counterparts, overall.

However, hiring patterns and layoff policies, as well as data on diminishing budgets for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) resources, show many marginalised workers are struggling in the wake of corporate cuts.

Several companies have adopted layoff policies that use position and tenure as deciding factors for cost-cutting.

Many of these policies were adopted in the wake of a series of high-profile lawsuits around gender and racial discrimination filed against companies including Google, Uber and Riot Games in 2018.

The stated goal of these layoff policies is neutrality, but targeting employees with less tenure and seniority makes workers of colour statistically more likely to be let go, particularly in companies who homed in on diversity-focused hiring only in recent years. In a ‘last in, first out’ layoff policy, these jobs are more likely to be cut.