Lola Odelola
Reviewing the data for the State of Devs 2025 survey, a few data points struck me as interesting. I am a self-employed Black British-Nigerian cis woman, with ADHD and Cluster Headache, which is to say I cross a few intersections. This is the context I’m bringing to reading and interpreting this data.
Some of my experiences are echoed in the data. For instance, 21% of Black or African respondents reported facing workplace discrimination, regardless of gender. This is something I’ve also experienced while working in both British and American companies, even in teams that appeared diverse on the surface.
That being said, collecting race and ethnicity data on a global scale is tricky because there are multiple understandings of race. It's important to know that I'm a Black Cis Woman but the "Black" becomes less meaningful if I'm in Nigeria, employed by a Nigerian company.
Due to the discrimination I've experienced, I consider my self-employment an accommodation so that I can still get to do the work I care about in the safest environment possible.
But this comes with its own set of challenges, with 15% of self-employed respondents reported a drop in income over the past year, and I’ve found myself in that group too.
This is all happening at a time when worker rights are under attack across the globe: while Western governments are trying to remove workplace protections (especially for those with disabilities), tech workers in the Global South are being exploited and underpaid by big tech companies.
I hope to see this change through more collective worker action and alliance, where workers across roles shape the conditions of their labour and the products they build, redistributing power and profit in ways that are more just.
And in the future, collecting additional data on nationality could help provide more context beyond race–and so would improving the under-representation of African and South-Asian countries in the survey. This will all let us learn more about who holds power within global tech.