Twitter touts its (very modest) 2016 diversity gains
This time last year, Twitter was under fire.
The embattled social media company had just lost its only black engineering manager — one of just 49 black people employed among the company’s nearly 3,000-person U.S. team — because he felt unsupported and alone.
As racial tensions nationwide played out in hashtags and tweets, some of the social network’s users also began questioning its commitment to supporting people of color.
That’s when Twitter decided to set some goals: By the end of the year, the company said, it would increase the number of its employees who are women or underrepresented racial minorities.
Its goals were modest: upping the number of women in the company’s U.S. offices from 34 to 35 percent, and the number of non-white and Asian employees from 8 to 9 percent.
On Thursday, Twitter announced it had met most of its 2016 diversity goals.
“Our commitment to inclusion and diversity is fundamental to who we are and crucial to the effectiveness of our service,” wrote Jeffrey Siminoff, Twitter’s vice president of inclusion and diversity. “One-and-done measurements don’t apply here, so we’re again setting representation goals for 2017.”
Though Twitter did improve its diversity, the strides were small and the goals it had set at the outset of 2016 trailed some of those set by other tech companies. That may have been why the company was so successful.
Pinterest, the online scrapbooking service that long led the charge toward a more inclusive and diverse workforce among tech firms, set more aggressive hiring goals than Twitter did. It missed those goals by a wider margin.
Pinterest had set a goal that 30 percent of its engineering workforce would be female by the year’s end, but it reached only 22 percent. It has pulled back its goals for 2017 to reflect a more modest ambition: 25 percent female engineers by the end of this year.
“Just having good intentions around diversity hadn’t been enough, so we thought setting goals would help us focus across the company,” wrote Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann in a blog post. “We didn’t make as much progress as we’d like, but we learned a lot that’s going to help us create an even more diverse Pinterest next year.”
The company pointed out that of its engineering interns, 49 percent were female.
Twitter’s 2017 aspirations again move the mark only slightly — a few percentage points here and there.
The microblogging firm wants to up the number of women in technical roles from 15 to 17 percent and the number of underrepresented minorities in technical roles from 9 to 11 percent. That’s a difference of about 120 people, about 60 women and 60 black and Latino employees.
Setting measurable goals allows companies to zero in on diversity benchmarks rather than attempting to tackle a complex problem with no immediate solution, experts said. Making those benchmarks public also holds companies accountable.
Twitter, which pledged to increase the number of women in leadership positions from 22 to 25 percent, saw a jump to 30 percent after the company filed five vacant countryhead positions with women.
Overall, Twitter’s gender gap closed slightly as the company exceeded its goal of one percentage point. Twitter went from 34 to 37 percent female in 2016.
Twitter also went from having no underrepresented minorities — blacks, Latinos and Native Americans — in leadership positions after Leslie Miley, the engineering manager, departed, to having racial and ethnic minorities make up 6 percent of the company’s leadership.
All told, the company met its goal of increasing its ratio of underrepresented minorities to 11 percent.
The company fell shy of its effort to push the percentage of women working in technical roles at the company from 13 to 16 percent.
“We know that the effects of our actions — many of which were new for 2016 — cannot be immediate,” Siminoff wrote. “And we will continue to come together with and learn from our industry peers, in the spirit of doing better not just for ourselves but for the industry as a greater whole.”
Twitter has pushed some of its numbers to best those of the tech industry as a whole, though not by much. Women make up about 30 percent of jobs in the tech industry, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but about 37 percent at Twitter.
Meanwhile, black and Latino workers comprise about 11 percent of Twitter’s workforce, but make up at least 15 percent of the tech workforce at large.
For companies the size of Twitter, experts said, the onus doesn’t fall solely on recruitment, but also on retention.
That’s where Joelle Emerson comes in. Her company, Paradigm, a consulting firm that focuses on diversity and inclusion, was called in to help Twitter and its employees learn what unconscious bias is and how it may affect them — and their co-workers — day to day.
Unconscious bias, or deeply held biases that may influence unequal treatment of workers who are not white and male, exists across all levels of a company, Emerson said, but can be particularly powerful when it comes to hiring.
Paradigm worked to train Twitter’s global workforce of 3,860 in what unconscious bias is, and how to be aware of it and mitigate its effect. She said that by surveying employees before and after the training, the company was able to see the extent to which it had an impact.
“What we were able to find is our workshop not only raised awareness — which is the baseline goal of any training — but it also motivated people to do things differently,” she said. “This really helps when it comes to team dynamics and drafting interview questions and rubrics ... so (hiring managers) can ensure they’re applying the same standards to all candidates.”
Twitter also credited its own employees for pushing the company to be more inclusive and aware of issues facing various communities.