Developed by Cecilia Baek, Linda Lee, & Sarah Yoon
Although the tech industry is relatively young compared to other fields, they have come to dominate our social and cultural world and have attracted more and more employees, both young and old. Despite the initial glamor associated with Silicon Valley and the seemingly welcoming environment of comfortable workspaces and touted wellness days, the tech space continues to be plagued by mental health issues from its employees. So what is the root of the problem? Where can we do better?
*Data source: "Mental Health in Tech" Surveys from Open Sourcing Mental Illness (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)
Mental health has already been a widely discussed issue within the tech industry, which has resulted in a growing trend in companies that offer benefits and policies to address mental health over the past few years. We define "benefits" to mean any formal healthcare coverage extending to mental health. Regardless of company size, the rise in benefits indicate a widespread recognition of the problem within the tech space.
While policies around mental health seem to be improving on paper, simply offering benefits is only half
the battle. The visualization below depicts employees' responses to questions that investigate the cultural
environment surrounding mental health within their workplace. Despite these widely available benefits,
the data show that tech employees are still reluctant to utilize these benefits or to disclose their
mental health with their employers, especially if they currently struggle with mental health.
Although the conversation around mental health has started, the industry still has a wide gap to cross
between the potential of benefits and their actual efficacy. How can we begin to cross that gap and see
actual change?
Hover over the paths for a focused view on specific responses.
The tech industry is notoriously dominated by men. In this visualization, each dot represents one survey
respondent (i.e. tech employee). The number of respondents vary by year and by company size, as shown by the
different sizes of the circle.
Given that mental health is still a sensitive topic, in this industry and in general, and that an employee’s experience
can be vastly different depending on their gender, we will next explore how these two issues intersect and even compound
the reaches of their impact.
Hover over the dots to see individuals' gender self-descriptions.
This stacked bar chart visualizes the survey responses to various questions pertaining to employees' perceptions
about mental health in the workplace, partitioning each bar by the gender of the respondents. From this data,
we can see an overwhelmingly high representation of male respondents in comparison to other gender demographics.
What sort of influence does this have on the distribution of data? Use the dropdown to see the distribution
of responses to other questions pertaining to mental health in the workplace.
Hover over each bar for a closer look at the gender breakdowns for each response and company size. The
observed pie chart illustrates the actual gender breakdown of the bar in greater detail, and the expected pie
chart shows the gender breakdown we would expect given the distribution of gender within that company size.
In an ideal world where gender has no impact on navigating mental health in the industry, we'd see no difference between the observed and expected gender breakdowns, but we've seen how that isn't the case. But how drastic is the gap? In other words, is the distribution of gender within the industry consistent with the distribution of gender among positive perceptions of how the workplace handles mental health? For this exercise, we define positive perception to be an affirmative response that the respondent is aware of mental health policies or comfortable with the culture surrounding mental health at their company. To measure the gap, we subtracted the proportion of each gender identity among the respondents who indicated a positive perception from the proportion of that gender out of the total respondents. The resulting proportion depicts the difference in gender representation for a given statement where 0 indicates no difference in perception based on gender.
So what does the data tell us? When considering the representation of men in the industry, males disproportionately believe there are inadequacies in policies and benefits offered by their companies but would feel comfortable utilizing them in comparison to women and gender-nonconforming groups. However, women and gender-nonconforming groups disproportionately perceive a cultural stigma against mental health in the workplace compared to men and do not utilize the available benefits despite their awareness of them.
*Positive perceptions are mapped to a positive value (+) whereas a response implying a stigmatized or inadequate perception of mental health response is encoded as a negative value (-).
Statements pertaining to company policy or official stances are in blue, and statements pertaining to company culture are in green.
This leaves us with an alarming gender discrepancy within the tech industry’s understanding and attitude
around mental health. While it may seem that gender identity may impact perceptions about mental health
differently, both opinions are rooted in a problematic cultural stigma around mental health. Within the
industry, men are assumed to not need mental health benefits as much and therefore lack an awareness about
the benefits out there. Women and gender-nonconforming groups, on the other hand, receive more priority
when companies promote their benefits in theory, but the remnant discriminatory attitude about these
gender identities have created a hostile industry culture that stigmatizes mental health concerns in practice.
In order to truly improve mental health in the tech industry, we must begin with reforming the cultural
understanding and attitude about how mental health impacts everyone. Men, too, struggle with mental health,
and within an industry that favors them, they will utilize these benefits if they are encouraged. As for
women and gender-nonconforming groups, we must “walk the walk” by creating a supportive culture that makes
them feel safe and valued. Only in a culture that fully empowers all can we truly improve the mental health
that so many struggle with in the tech world.