Facebook shares diversity advice

As Silicon Valley’s biggest companies continue to reveal the truths about their workplace diversity — or lack thereof — Facebook has pulled back the curtain on what it’s doing about them: It made its retooled internal diversity training public. It also announced other companies can freely use and adapt the training.

The social network shared Managingbias.fb.com, which features seven TED Talkstyle videos that cover a handful of issues, including the way mothers and women are perceived in the workplace. The public can also download the slide presentations used in the videos.

So why does this feel like a case of “Do as I say and not as I do?”

Facebook’s own diversity data, released in June, revealed that the company’s U.S. employee base is just two per cent black; Hispanics make up four per cent. There was no change from the previous year. Women hold just 16 per cent of the company’s tech jobs, up one percentage point from 2014. White and Asian workers make up 94 per cent of tech staff this year, just as they did last year. There was no change in the number of black employees in senior jobs.

Companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google began releasing their demographics last year, and the numbers, both for gender and ethnicity, show hiring and retention is far behind the demographics of the general population.

Facebook acknowledges it has far to go before its staff begins to resemble the very people who use its service. In announcing Managingbias.fb.com, CEO Sheryl Sandberg wrote: “To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook.”