After mounting pressure, today Twitter revealed its workplace diversity demographics, conveniently one-minute before Facebook's earnings release, as Valleywag points out.
The breakdown is pretty much exactly what we previously predicted: 70% of employees are male, 30% female, and 59% white. Twitter's tech team is almost completely dominated by white and Asian (92%) men (90%). The leadership team is 79% male.
The numbers are on par with what we’ve seen from Google and Facebook. Yahoo leads the pack in gender diversity with 37% female employees.
Like all the other tech giants, Twitter says it’s “building” something better in its blog post announcing the figures. “We have a lot of work to do,” writes the company’s Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Janet Van Huysse.
Huysse states that employee-led initiatives are helping Twitter to be more diverse and inclusive, but some of these groups don’t look large enough to fill a conference room:
- WomEng (women in engineering) — 10% of workforce
- SWAT (super women at Twitter) — 30% of workforce
- Blackbird (Tweeps of color) — 2% of workforce (also that name!)
- Alas (Latino and Latina employees) — 3% of workforce
- TwitterOpen (LGBTQ folks) — Undisclosed
- TwUX (Twitter women in design) — Undisclosed
Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow PUSH Coalition have been pushing tech companies to disclose their diversity numbers, even going as far as to gather 25,000 signatures at ColorofChange.org to demand that Twitter step up. USA Today has Jackson’s response to Twitter's announcement: "The numbers are pathetic but this is a step in the right direction.”
