After a whole lot of public pressure, Twitter has finally released gender and ethnic breakdowns of its employees. To no one’s surprise, the social media company is mostly comprised of white and Asian males.
Most technology jobs in the U.S. are held by either whites or Asians, so it is not much of a shocker that Twitter follows that same pattern. According to the company’s breakdown, around 90 percent of Twitter’s workers in the U.S. are either white or Asian. On top of that, men make up 70 percent of the entire staff, and a whopping 90 percent of the technology staff.
Of course, Twitter has vowed to make changes, saying that it needs to step up its act in creating a more diverse workforce.
“We want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of,” said Janet Van Huysse, the company’s vice president for diversity and inclusion.
Although Twitter has around 3,000 employees worldwide, it only provided data on its U.S. employees. According to a blog post written by Huysse, whites make up around 59 percent of the U.S. workforce, while Asians make up 29 percent. Blacks make up a tiny 2 percent, and Hispanic workers only made up 3 percent.
Sadly, those numbers make Twitter slightly more racially diverse than other social media networks, including Facebook. Even so, Huysse said that Twitter is “committed to making inclusiveness a cornerstone of [its] culture.”
Twitter had been under fire from a number of organizations, including Rev. Jesse Jackson‘s Rainbow Push Coalition, to release its workforce data. Although Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition was not entirely pleased with the data, it did note it was pleased that Twitter published it.
“While slow to release these paltry and pathetic numbers, it’s a step in the right direction,” the coalition said in a statement
To read Twitter’s blog post statement and see what the company is doing to fix the issue, click here.
Why is there no discussion in the media on how racially imbalanced the NBA employee base is?