Facebook’s diversity hiring plan yields scant progress
Number of minority employees miniscule but is rising slowly
Facebook’s third diversity report in two years shows its demographics have shifted very little, with African Americans and Hispanics still comprising a tiny fraction of the tech giant’s workforce.
Hispanics represent 4% and African Americans 2% of Facebook’s U.S. workers, percentages that have not budged since 2014 and that fall below other industries’ averages. Facebook has made slightly more progress on gender diversity, yet nearly seven out of 10 employees around the globe are men.
The report, coming weeks after similar results from Google, raises serious questions about the technology industry’s progress in addressing the chronic shortage of women and minorities.
“As with anything, I would say if you are trying to accomplish something and you make no visible progress, then what you are trying is probably not working,” said Joelle Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a strategy firm that consults with technology companies on diversity.
Of Facebook’s technical workers, Hispanics still make up 3% and African Americans 1%. The percentage of African Americans working in non-technical positions increased to 5% from 3%, while the percentage of Hispanics remained unchanged at 7%, Facebook said.
African Americans in senior leadership positions at Facebook increased to 3% from 2%, with Hispanics holding steady at 3%. Facebook’s global diversity chief Maxine Williams says Facebook’s leadership hires over the last 12 months show improvement — 9% were black, 5% Hispanic — an example, she says, of “good signals” Facebook is seeing.
“That has given me a signal that a lot of the short-term initiatives that we have put in place have been working,” she said.
Williams would not release any other hiring data. “We are still tracking all of it,” she said.
Facebook released its diversity numbers for the first time in 2014, following the lead of Google. Since then, there has been a flurry of diversity reports from major technology companies, which are working on a range of initiatives to create more inclusive hiring and retention practices and policies and more inclusive work cultures. So far, these efforts have yielded few results.
How long before they do? In an interview, Williams says it could be years, even decades, before any dramatic change takes place.
Williams cited a recent study from McKinsey & Co. and Lean In.org that found women are moving ahead so slowly that it will take more than a century for them to reach parity in top positions in corporate America.
“I hope that is not the case in the tech industry,” Williams said. “I hope the entire country joins with us ... and we will be able to see more change sooner.”
The latest diversity figures show that Facebook is making slight progress with women. Sixty-seven percent of global employees are men, down from 68% last year. Women now account for 53% of non-technical workers, up from 52%. Women in technical positions are inching forward, making up 17% of those workers, up from 16% last year. Of senior leaders, women now make up 27%, up from 23%, Facebook said. Twenty-nine percent of leadership hires over the past 12 months were women.
Williams’ contention: Addressing demographic disparities in Facebook’s workforce depends on the nation educating more young people in the skills needed in the tech industry and increasing exposure to the industry in underrepresented communities. For instance, to see a 50-50 split in women and men in computer science jobs would require far more women getting the skills in college or by other means.
To that end, Facebook says it will give $15 million to non-profit Code.org to train young people how to code.
“It’s hard to know when we will be where we want to be because I don’t know when these fixes will start to take root,” Williams said.
Facebook and other tech companies say their efforts to recruit women and minorities are being stymied by a “pipeline” problem: not enough women and underrepresented minorities studying computer science or pursuing other tracks to work for tech companies. Yet top universities turn out African-American and Latino computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate leading tech companies hire them, a USA TODAY analysis showed.
“If you are trying to accomplish something and you make no visible progress, then what you are trying is probably not working.” Joelle Emerson, tech consultant