Twitter users are diverse — its staff, not so much
Nine of 10 employees are white or Asian; two-thirds are men
Jeffrey Siminoff, SAN FRANCIS CO vice president of inclusion and diversity at Twitter, is fond of saying that Twitter is “where inclusion lives.”
“We strive to meet that spirit of inclusion in our workplace, too,” he wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Inside the social media company, inclusion is a work in progress. The people who frequent the service may hail from diverse backgrounds, yet employees of the social media company still do not. That’s the bottom line from the latest report on the company’s demographics.
Underrepresented minorities and women continue to lag at the company where nine of 10 employees are white or Asian and about two-thirds are men, according to the company’s latest EEO-1 report from September that Twitter released Thursday.
The EEO-1 report is the federally mandated data that companies supply each year to the Department of Labor on the demographics of their workers. Twitter says year-end statistics it released Thursday along with its EEO-1 better illustrate the demographics of its workforce.
According to those year-end calculations, the overall percentage of African Americans and Latinos in the Twitter workforce has barely budged in more than a year. In 2016, Twitter said 4% of workers were Latino or Hispanic, same as in August 2015, the last time Twitter reported its diversity numbers. Twitter said it increased the share of African-American workers to 3% from 2%.
Twitter has made some progress in closing the gender gap, crediting public goals it set for achieving small increases in key areas by the end of 2016.
The ranks of women grew to 37% in 2016 from 34% in 2015, surpassing Twitter’s goal of 35%, Twitter said. Twitter exceeded its goal of 25% of women in leadership roles, going from 22% to 30%. But the company fell short of its target of having 16% of women in technical roles, with women now accounting for 15% of those positions, up from 13%.
Twitter made some gains with underrepresented minorities, whose ranks grew to 11% from 10% overall, and to 9% from 7% in technical roles.
According to its EEO-1 report, Twitter employed 134 Hispanic or Latino workers and 76 AfricanAmerican workers as of September. Of 47 people serving in executive or senior positions, none were African American or Latino, according to the EEO-1. Of 399 people in manager roles, nine were African American, or 2%, and 14 were Latino, or 3.5%.
Starting in 2016, Twitter says it also began to collect data from new hires in the U.S. on sexual orientation and gender identity. Of those new hires, 10% chose to self-identify as LGBTQ.
Siminoff declined an interview request from USA TODAY.
“We know that the effects of our actions — many of which were new for 2016 — cannot be immediate,” he wrote in the blog post.
But, he said, Twitter’s push for greater diversity is “crucial to the effectiveness of our service.”