Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

Much, much smaller population.

From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications."

It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger proportion of people that are different than the initial population that you started with. If you're not growing, then that means people have to leave the original population, either by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company, and tech journalism, which has much less.

Some of this looks quite.... questionable, and ironically for people that spend so much of their time attacking "the media", this authors would do well to learn something about journalism, and some of it seems downright disingenous. For example, the author talks about representation and talks about that in terms of percentage of white people hired in big tech, but if you dig in to those numbers you find out that basically the reason the big tech companies have a low number of white employees is because they have an enormous over-representation of asian employees. It's all well and good to say "Only 51.7% of employees at Google are white, so clearly we've got great diversity" - but using the same statistics you can also say "93% of the workforce is white or asian and that rises to 95.5% in leadership positions". Sudenly that doens't look so stunning. In fact it almost looks deliberately misleading.

Then you look at their methodology for looking at who is in Tech journalism. There are just some glaring issues.

First of all - are we really grabbing a single month of authors in the NYT? And if you're grabbing the data from the NYT website, why not just do that over a few years?

Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming that the NYT is included literally just because the people who did this study don't like the NYT? And meanwhile, they therefore completely skate over a massive obvious problem - a massive amount of Tech journalism is independent or covered in publications that aren't listed here - does AnandTech not count as tech journalism now? Let's completely ignore independent journalists shall we?

The second list of tech journalists is literally just "We found this random list of tech journalists and took it at face value".

Now there are about 1000 different problems I have with this study (I think it's frankly just quite shoddy) but a real highlight was where they just admit to basically finding the list of jouranlists (a list I quite frankly think is just worthless due to the methodology) and then just start guessing whether they're white.

The author complains that no tech journalists will cover this, but this is just really really shoddy work, and that doesn't even get into the obvious fact that Big Tech and Big Tech journalism are not the same! We're literally comparing a list of less than 1000 journalists to companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people.

Can you explain more? It seems like it would only encourage equality of outcome if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true.

Yes. I'm convinced the most racist people are those who can't stop talking about race, and that would include a fair amount of self-proclaimed and vocal "anti-racists".