Twitter released employee composition data on Wednesday afternoon due to growing pressure from civil rights groups, but the results were not too satisfactory.
Overall, 70 percent of Twitter's employees are men and 30 percent are women. However, if you take a closer look at the gender gap in the tech industry, you will find that the gender gap is widening, and 90% of workers are men.
In terms of ethnic diversity, 59 percent of employees are white and 29 percent are Asian. Only 2 percent of employees are black or African American, and 3 percent are Hispanic or Latino. That's the opposite of the company's user base, which for years had a higher percentage of African-Americans.
The report follows the publication of the report on Twitter, civil rights group Colorof Change and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Push Coalition held a social media initiative calling on Silicon Valley companies to provide more information about employee composition.
Unfortunately, if you pay attention to reports of Silicon Valley-like companies, these figures are not surprising. Twitter's numbers appear to be in line with those of Facebook and Google, both of which report that 70 percent of employees are men. Both companies say about 60 percent of their employees are white.
LinkedIn and Yahoo have a slightly better ratio. Both companies reported a gender composition of about 60 percent for men and about 40 percent for women, and both companies had about 50 percent white employees.
Apple hasn't released its own report yet, though CEO Tim Cook has said it will be released soon.
Janet Van Huysse, Twitter vice president, said in a blog post announcing the report: "To achieve this goal, we join some of our peers to share our racial and gender diversity data. Like our peers, we still have a lot to do. ”
In the article, van Houthé listed the steps Twitter is taking to make the company more inclusive. They have formed multiple employee-led groups such as The Women in Engineering Group and Blackbirds.
She said Twitter is also actively taking steps to recruit from women's colleges and universities that have historically been more black. They have invested in Girls Who Code in seed funding and partnered with Year Up, an internship program for low-income students.
The company just hosted a Hillary Rodham Clinton interview on Monday. Hillary clinton spent a lot of time answering questions about women's empowerment at the beginning of the Q&A section.
It's nice that companies like Twitter and Google are aware of the problem and take action, but it's clear that the problem exists in most companies in Silicon Valley, not a minority.
Last year, I attended an intern networking event. About 2,000 interns registered online for the event, and about a third were women. About half of those I spoke to were particularly keen to pursue jobs in the tech industry. This issue will not be resolved anytime soon.
While the above data is less satisfactory, at least more companies are following Google's lead and publishing data. If resource-rich businesses like Twitter and Google can't diversify their hiring, who else can?
Twitter’s Diversity Report Is More Of The Same
(Translator: Ho Man Wai)