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REMARKS
Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
being outside the U.S., would be widely considered an
anti-Trump choice; Washington would put Bezos near the
Capitol and the newspaper he owns; Chicago lacks the polit-
ical overtones of the other two.)
Whatever city it chooses, Amazon could consider mak-
ing changes to its hiring process that would level the playing
ield. It could set goals for diversity across the company and
make its progress public. Smaller tech companies have shown
they can beat the averages when they try. Slack Technologies
Inc., a workplace collaboration company, made hiring women
and people of color an explicit priority three years ago. Today
women make up almost half of its managers and one-third of
its technical employees.
Or Amazon could end its employee referral bonus, a prac-
tice that, like alumni preference in college admissions, tends
to undermine diversity. Or it could tweak the bonus criteria,
rewarding employees who successfully bring people of color
and women into the workforce.
As of now, a high-ranking executive says, most of
Amazon’s hiring managers are left alone to meet recruit-
ment goals, which often leaves them leaning heavily on their
personal networks and internal candidates—neither of which
lends itself to increased diversity. “There’s no incentive or
alignment with any sort of diversity initiative,” says the exec-
utive, who asked to remain anonymous. “Whatever you can
do to get butts in seats, that’s almost certainly what you’re
going to do without regard to any bigger mission.”
Amazon could add more support for recruiting and better
train recruiters to focus on broader candidate pools, the exec-
utive suggests, or allot additional head count to managers who
successfully add people of color and women to their teams.
And about that candidate pool: Amazon’s job applicants
do skew male, more so than rivals Google and Facebook
Inc. Although the company may be the most-searched on
Glassdoor, twice as many men as women are looking for open-
ings there. (The site doesn’t track race.) That’s not surprising—
male STEM graduates outnumber women 3 to 1—but Amazon
makes it worse by loading up its job ads with words that
research suggests appeal to men.
We asked Textio Inc., a company that helps businesses
develop gender-neutral job postings, to analyze Amazon
employment ads. Amazon’s are much more likely than other
tech companies’ to use aggro words and phrases such as “wick-
edly” or “maniacal.” According to Textio, the data revealed that
about 30 percent of Amazon’s posted job descriptions skew
male in their language, whereas only 1 percent skew female, an
imbalance that doesn’t plague most of its tech industry peers.
There’s no single, simple ix for a hiring process that,
like in the rest of tech, has favored white males for decades.
If it were only about having less gendered job ads, well,
Facebook and Google are doing that, Textio says, and their
workforces aren’t signiicantly more diverse than Amazon’s.
Still, if any company can igure this out, surely it’s Amazon.
There’s at least as much value in hiring women and people of
color as there is in moonshots like reinventing grocery stores,
delivering packages by drone, perfecting the smart speaker,
and tackling the broken health-care system.
Recruiting is only the irst step. Amazon’s hiring process,
from the language in its job ads to an internal process that
prizes eiciency above all else, relects its broader organiza-
tional culture. More than any of the big tech companies, it’s
known to be a relentlessly demanding work environment.
Bezos likes to brag that employees work “long, smart, and
hard.” Data is king. Emotions are unprofessional.
“It’s not for everyone,” says Muge Erdirik Dogan, director
of Amazon Flex, the company’s last-mile delivery service. “It’s
an amazing place. It’s not an easy place.” In 2015, a
New York
Times
story revealed how bruising Amazon’s culture could be
to women (and many men). Amazon disputes that portrait.
But shortly after, it implemented a long-planned change to
its parental leave policy. It now ofers 20 weeks of paid leave
for birth mothers and six weeks for all new parents regard-
less of gender. It encourages employees to use the time. It also
created what it calls a “leave-share” program, which helps
employees transfer paid time of to partners who work else-
where but might not get leave through their own employers.
Plenty of tech companies ofer paid leave, many of them
more generous than Amazon. But it’s the irst to create a
leave program for partners who work elsewhere, a policy
that in a small way illustrates Coulter’s broader point: When
Amazon wants to solve a problem, it can. HQ2 ofers a chance
it shouldn’t pass up.
A City for Alexa
Female employees in finalist cities and regions* for Amazon’s new headquarters
○
Share of programmers
○
Share of total workforce
Montgomery County, Md.
Northern Va.
Washington, D.C.
Toronto
Indianapolis
Chicago
Raleigh, N.C.
Pittsburgh
Philadelphia
Newark, N.J.
New York City
Boston
Columbus, Ohio
Nashville
Atlanta
Los Angeles
Dallas
Denver
Miami
Austin
15%
30%
45%
Average
Average
*SOME LOCATIONS ARE REPRESENTED BY THE SAME METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA
DATA: EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY TABULATION BASED ON AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY FIGURES, STATISTICS CANADA