That’s what the first-ever Web Design Survey commissioned by A List Apart found.
According to the survey, only 1.2% of web professionals are black. I’m no statistician, but I believe it would only take a 2% margin of error to validly infer that no web professionals are black.
ALA is one of my favorite feeds and I commend them for commissioning this much-needed data collection effort. However, I take issues with its findings.
I personally know of more than 100 fulltime black professionals who fall into the job categories covered by this survey. As far as I know, none of them participated in this survey (or even heard of it.) I know that’s just anecdotal, but the point is that the survey respondents—more than half of whom were from countries with essentially no black people—are probably not representative of the real population of web professionals. If they were, the results would have been more in-line with the results of previous surveys—and common sense.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that African-Americans are underrepresented among fulltime web professionals, especially in back-end technical positions. I just don’t think it’s to the extent claimed by this survey.
The report sure is pretty though.
P.S. - Shout out to this post at Black Web 2.0, which is where I found out about the survey.
Or use my
2 responses so far ↓
1 The Meshverse Journal » Blog Archive » African-American Tech Bloggers // Jan 28, 2008
[…] is below the national average and for engineering and science these numbers drop by nearly half. Statistically black web designers barely exist. We can’t change that overnight but I believe we can have a major impact because there are a […]
2 Lashanda Henry // Jul 28, 2008
I’m a black web designer and both myself and my many black sites do exist
msoy, blackgirlclick, blackmomsclub, black women network, etc….. We are out there, you just have to look a little harder to find us.
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