Survey: 37 Percent of Tech Employees Deal with Sexism at Work

Earlier this month, Microsoft employees confronted their CEO and HR director to address the company’s alleged failure to tackle harassment and the widespread complaints of sexism. Currently, over 52,000 Microsoft employees are on our anonymous workplace social network, Blind, so we decided to survey these employees (and others in tech) about sexism in the workplace.

We asked users to answer “TRUE” or “FALSE” to this one simple statement: I have witnessed or experienced sexism at my current company.

The survey ran from April 11 through April 16, 2019 and was answered by 7,930 users on our app Blind. Overall, 36.8 percent responded with “TRUE,” they have either witnessed or experienced sexism at their current company, while 63.2 percent responded with “FALSE.”

We also broke down the results by companies with at least 100 unique responses from employees. Here’s what we found:

  • 1,076 Microsoft employees responded to our survey, with 40.15 percent answering with TRUE, which is about three percent higher than the survey average.
  • 59.38 percent of Intel employees answered with TRUE, which is the highest among any other companies with at least 100 employee responses.
  • Rounding out the five companies with the highest percentage of employees indicating that they have witnessed or experienced sexism at their job, are Adobe with 41.18 percent, Oracle with 40.51 percent, Microsoft with 40.15 percent, and Amazon with 38.93 percent.
  • Google had the lowest percentage of employees answering with TRUE, with 25.85 percent.
  • Rounding out the five companies with the lowest percentage of employees indicating they witnessed or experienced sexism at their job are Facebook with 29.29 percent, Uber with 32.26 percent, eBay with 31.68 percent, and Apple with 36.54 percent.

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In 2018, a user posted a survey on Blind asking if other users have witnessed sexism in the workplace, and 47 percent answered that they have. Though only 247 users answered the survey, the results are clear – sexism is still a problem at companies today.

sexism in the workplace, sexism
Credit: Blind user survey: 47 percent witness sexism in the workplace

 

Have you experienced sexism at your current company? Let us know by tweeting at us @teamblindapp.com.

At Blind we’re on a mission to bring transparency to the workplace. Transparency results in voice and voice results in change, often for the better. That’s why we created Blind, an anonymous social network for working professionals. Our user base includes over 52,000 employees from Microsoft, 38,000 Amazon employees, 15,000 Google employees, 11,700 Facebook employees, 10,000 Uber employees, 8,800 Apple employees, 7,000 Oracle employees, 6,500 LinkedIn employees, 6,200 Intel employees, and 5,500 Salesforce employees, just to name a few. With such a large user base of tech professionals, it makes it easy to quickly poll these employees about important and popular topics, such as this.