Twitter is the latest tech company to run with the recent trend of releasing their employee diversity numbers. They’re also the latest company to release hard evidence that they’re made up of mostly white dudes. Overall Twitter is 70% male, and the tech category is even more jarring with 90%. Twitter’s also the latest company to say they’re trying to improve these numbers.
Gender isn’t their only issue either. Ethnic diversity is pretty one-sided as well.
Janet Van Huysse, the Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion at Twitter wrote a blog post last week sharing the data and saying:
It makes good business sense that Twitter employees are representative of the vast and varied backgrounds of our users around the world. We also know that it makes good business sense to be more diverse as a workforce – research shows that more diverse teams make better decisions, and companies with women in leadership roles produce better financial results. But we want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of.
To that end, we are joining some peer companies by sharing our ethnic and gender diversity data. And like our peers, we have a lot of work to do.
Van Huysse has been in charge of Human Resources at Twitter for the past four years and has now moved to her new role of trying to fix the problem of lack of diversity, but she’s not alone. She also mentioned several employee groups that are working towards the same goal. The groups mentioned are:
[Listed with Van Huysse’s descriptions]
- WomEng (women in engineering)
- SWAT (super women at Twitter)
- TwUX (Twitter women in design)
- Blackbird (Tweeps of color)
- TwitterOpen (LGBTQ folks)
- Alas (Latino and Latina employees)
Van Huysse said of the groups, “These affinity groups are inclusive of anyone passionate about their mission, and they have done tremendous work to make Twitter a more awesome place to work.”
Twitter has also partnered with Girls who Code and other organizations dedicated to promoting STEM fields for women and minorities because the best way to fix this problem for Twitter or any other tech company is to hire more people from these underrepresented groups, and to do that they need to make sure there are enough qualified candidates.
(via Twitter)
- Facebook also released similarly one-sided diversity numbers
- So did Google…
- …but they’re actively trying to get women to code
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