Whenever a new workplace “diversity” report surfaces from Silicon Valley – like the new one demonstrating that Twitter is even whiter and maler than you imagined – we are treated to a flurry of well-deserved hand-wringing about what this means for the tech industry. Why aren’t women and minorities getting hired? Are they not leaning far enough in? Are employers leaning too far out? Is the problem even at the hiring level, or is it way far back down the pipeline? What, in short, does this mean for the handful of people who work in tech?

These are important questions, but also ... screw those guys. About 4m people in the US work in the tech sector, according to the Pew Research Center – that’s not even 1% of the population. Meanwhile, 87% of Americans are users of the internet. So why does it feel like we spend 87% of our time talking about how to improve the prospects of women and minorities in science, tech, engineering and math – and 1% talking about what the overwhelming white-dude power bloc in Silicon Valley means for the users of all that technology?

Like half the Twitter-using population – men and women use Twitter at similar rates – but only 10% of Twitter’s technical team and 21% of its leadership, I am a female Twitter user. And judging from my experience as a woman on Twitter, the diversity stats aren’t just a problem because of what they mean for the industry itself. They’re a problem because white men unconsciously build products for white men – products that subtly discourage anyone else from using them.

This year’s #YesAllWomen hashtag made it clear, even to people who’d managed not to notice yet, that Twitter has become a strong platform for feminists to gather, organize and make our voices heard – and, for the same reasons, a roiling cesspool of harassment. In the wake of the Isla Vista killings, where a young man named Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 13 for explicitly misogynistic reasons, #YesAllWomen encouraged women to talk about the environment of relentless sexual threats that women often experience but men rarely hear about. Women participating in the hashtag felt a powerful sense of global support and community when we spoke out on about our experiences – and we faced a wall of threats, insults, and ugliness from people who prefer that women maintain the silent status quo.







During #YesAllWomen this dynamic was unmistakable, but really, it’s standard; women on Twitter are subject to verbal violence and threats at almost any time. Non-white users get threats, too, in addition to racist hate speech and extended, targeted harassment campaigns. Many women and people of color make their accounts private, take the time to block individual users at a heavy rate and still find that dedicated trolls seem to view harassing others as the best feature of Twitter, rather than a bug.

Yet in late 2013, Twitter briefly changed the “block” function so that, instead of preventing abusive users from interacting with you, it simply spared you from seeing their tweets. Abusers could then read their targets’ timelines while logged in, retweet their words and even follow them – negating much of the work users had undertaken to prevent those harassers from accessing their accounts. Twitter reverted new block rules by the end of a single day, but that change required a tsunami of negative feedback. By the same token, it took rape threats and bomb threats against female politicians and journalists (in a totally different incident) – plus a 120,000-signature online petition – to get Twitter to make it possible to report a harassing tweet or account with the push of a button.

If more than a nominal number of Twitter’s leaders and engineers had been members of groups that experience harassment, it wouldn’t be such a struggle for users to get the company to make the service safer. One function of white privilege and male privilege is that these things often slip your mind, because they can.

There are even strong economic reasons for Twitter to have the in-house capacity to address the needs of non-white, non-male users. “Black Twitter”, for instance, is a robust and thriving online subculture, and it’s become a demographic powerful enough that Twitter should be working hard to find out which, if any, specific needs and preferences black users have for their experience with the service. As a white person I can’t predict exactly what would make black users’ experience better, but the point is, neither can Twitter. Still, it should try – 40% of black internet users between 18 and 29 use the service. Yet with barely any black employees – only 2% of its leadership! Only 1% of the technical staff! – Twitter can’t really anticipate the needs of an enthusiastic, devoted chunk of its user base.

Listen, I could be here all day waving my hands about features that Twitter’s underrepresented populations might like, but I’m not going to do that. (OK, one more: it’s usually tremendously difficult to properly credit the originator of a viral hashtag – which are often created by black Twitter users in general and by activist populations in particular – because Twitter searches are so damned difficult.) That’s not my job; I don’t have the authority to establish best practices or make changes.

But it is the job of the overwhelmingly white male workforce at Twitter – and every other tech company whose users come from all races and genders but whose leaders and engineers look like a float at the Pasty Man Pride Parade. The problem is, when so many of the people who build my tech are members of the dominant culture, I don’t trust them to have my best interests at heart.