Katie Benner, Columnist

The Color of Money in Silicon Valley

Why is there so much wage disparity in Silicon Valley, the breadbasket of lush compensation? Katie Benner explores.

October 9, 2014 at 5:06 PM UTC

Katie Benner is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about technology, innovation, and the cult and culture of Silicon Valley. She lives in San Francisco. Benner previously wrote a tech and finance column for the Information. She has worked at Fortune, TheStreet.com and CNN Money, and was a freelance writer based in China covering culture, business and politics. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bowdoin College.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Silicon Valley's most powerful companies released statistics on race and gender in their workforces last summer, largely because Google revealed its own employee data and said that it would strive to be more diverse. The numbers confirmed long-standing suspicions about the culture of tech. White men made up the biggest piece of the worker pie at Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn and eBay.

But there seemed to be a bright spot in that otherwise grim parade of diversity numbers. Asians comprised a big chunk of the tech workforce -- 23 percent at Apple, 34 percent at Google, 41 percent at Facebook and 34 percent at Twitter. Asians were the majority at Yahoo, LinkedIn and eBay, coming in at 57 percent, 60 percent and 55 percent, respectively.