The Fight for Equality in 2023 Is a Very Long Game
This year has had more setbacks than progress—but the fight for equity has always required patience.
In 2016, Facebook released a diversity report revealing that the company’s employees were 90% White and Asian, and 67% male. Then it blamed the American public school system for making it that way.
“Appropriate representation,” Maxine Williams, Facebook’s head of diversity, said at the time, “will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system.” She went on to lament how few women and minorities take the Advanced Placement exam in computer science. In other words, Facebook didn’t have many Black or Latino employees, because they didn’t take the right high school classes.