Yahoo says its workforce is 37 per cent female
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo! Inc. revealed its workforce is less than 40 per cent female and that many of the women are in non-leadership roles, in the web portal’s first such disclosure amid a Silicon Valley debate over diversity.
Yahoo said 77 per cent of its leaders — defined as vice presidents or higher — are men, according to the report this week. Women make up 15 per cent of the technically focused positions and have 52 per cent of the jobs in non-technical posts. Almost 90 per cent of Yahoo’s U.S. workforce is white or Asian.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company, one of the few led by a female chief executive officer, Marissa Mayer, is disclosing the makeup of its staff after similar reports by Google Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. in the last few weeks. The data shine the spotlight on the lack of minorities and women at technology companies, an issue that has received growing attention. Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and others have faced pressure to increase the number of women directors on their boards.
Mayer, a former Google executive, was brought on board in 2012 to turn around the Web company. In total, Yahoo had about 12,400 employees as of the end of March.
“Yahoo works to ensure that our existing employees feel welcome and supported during their time at the company,” Jackie Reses, Yahoo’s chief development officer, wrote in the blog post.
The disclosures show Yahoo, at 37 per cent, is slightly ahead of Google in the composition of women in its workforce, with the world’s largest search engine recently saying that 30 per cent of its employees are female. The two companies are relatively in line on ethnicity in the U.S., with just two per cent of Yahoo’s U.S. workforce being African-American and four per cent Hispanic.
The company has many employee resource groups to serve people of diverse backgrounds, according to the post.
Sarah Meron, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, declined to comment beyond the diversity report.