Techies Project launches, offering photos and interviews of people from underrepresented groups in tech
Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Techies Project arrives at the start of what became a run of diversity-focused coverage: weeks earlier, 500 Startups had published batch-level diversity statistics for its accelerator cohort, and a month later the EEOC concluded the tech industry was underutilizing the diverse talent pool. Megan Rose Dickey's project answers that gap with portraits and interviews rather than headcount data.
It matters because the industry's own numbers were becoming public benchmarks — by 2019 Twitter would publish its workforce composition alongside a dedicated diversity executive hire, per its VP of People Experience announcement. A visibility project gives those statistics human faces.
First-order effects
- People from underrepresented groups in tech get a dedicated platform for photos and interviews, shifting representation work from aggregate statistics toward individual narratives.
Second-order effects
- Companies and recruiters under scrutiny from the EEOC's findings gain a ready-made source of visible role models, which pressures employers with lagging published numbers like Twitter's to compete on inclusive branding.
Third-order effects
- If documentation projects, regulator findings, and accelerator disclosure continue converging, diversity reporting shifts from optional PR to a standing benchmark against which firms are measured — the pattern the later industry-wide retrospectives tracked.
The trend: Tech's diversity conversation is moving from private initiative to public record, with media-led visibility projects and government findings reinforcing each other as accountability mechanisms.