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Clubhouse: another sign of lacking diversity in Silicon Valley?
If you are in the tech industry then, like me, you cannot have missed the hype lately around the Clubhouse app, launched last year. It offers a new twist on virtual gatherings, focusing purely on audio meetings with very select rules of joining and participating. It is a fantastic experience, allowing people who would otherwise not meet to get together and share ideas, advice, support in an intimate setting. Or so I hear. Because as this tsunami of endorsements from my community have drowned me in love for this new app, I am excluded from using it. Clubhouse is currently only available for iOS and neither I nor anyone in my household own an iOS device.
When the first reports came in, and I saw that it was not available for browser or Android, it did not bother me much. But it has become impossible to not daily be reminded about what an amazing experience I am excluded from. It made me wonder how unusual I am, so I did some research on iOS versus Android users which made me realise that this app is just another sign of a well-known problem in the tech community: white, affluent men writing code and creating products for white, affluent men.
Let’s look at some of that statistic of iOS versus Android users. Overall, the market share of iOS is 27.4%, versus Android’s 72%. Whoa! So already there, a decision was made…
