Tesla's Lack of Female Diversity

^{Photo by Cam Bradford via Unsplash}

There’s no doubt that there is a lack of gender diversity in the tech sector. Tech giant Tesla, is no exception. While the Fortune 500 company has some of the most cutting edge and innovating technology in the car industry, it fails to continue that modern approach in its gender diversity. 

Unlike many of its peers, the company has yet to release a diversity report. Even its board of directors is 80% male with online two female Tesla executives represented on the board. In comparison, 46% of Google’s executive leadership team are women according to Business Insider. However, it was only announced that Tesla would appoint two females to their board after the state of California passed a law requiring any publicly traded companies with more than five directors on their board, to have at least two female members on their board by 2021. 

Moreover, reports of lack of gender representation continue beyond Tesla’s leadership team, into their automotive engineering department. In 2015, an anonymous female employee told the New York Magazine that only 10% of her team was female, and that there were more men on the team named Matt than women. Even more disturbing was the claims that women faced harassment and unequal pay. The unfair treatment eventually lead to a female employee suing Tesla for sex discrimination.  

However, with the encouragement of the MeToo movement and the increased, yet slow, efforts to diversify Silicon Valley, Tesla shows promise for a future with more females in its engineering and leadership teams. Recently, a Tesla representative acknowledged “females mak(ing) up only a fraction of the engineering workforce in the US”. Then, they held an event called “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day” in its factories in California and Nevada. At the event, eighty Tesla employees introduced 200 middle school girls to civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering. The company appears to be taking the right steps to encourage more females to pursue the technology industry by educating young girls. Now, other companies must be willing to do the same in order to increase the amount of women in technology.