Silicon Valley has a major diversity problem. While this information is in no way shocking, it has recently been corroborated by data released by (some of) the companies in question. Until this May, most Silicon Valley tech giants were not in the business of releasing their EEO-1 reports detailing staff diversity numbers. When journalists filed requests for the reports under the Freedom of Information Act, many companies including Google went out of their way to ensure the public did not have access to these reports. That all changed in May when Google decided to voluntarily release their dismal employee diversity numbers. After Google released their numbers, other companies like Facebook, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn soon joined the ‘transparency movement.’ One of the biggest crusaders for the movement is civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. The Coalition applauded Google for their transparency, and in an open letter encouraged 20 other tech firms to do the same. Facebook, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn have already released their numbers, and eBay, Pandora, and Apple have committed to releasing their data in the near future. Twitter released their employee diversity numbers on Wednesday, but only after they received 25,000 petitions in 5 days. The petitions were a joint effort between the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Color of Change. Twitter’s stats are just more of the same. The big take away? Ethnic “minorities” (by 2040, 42% of America will be Black or Hispanic) and women are not well represented at all. Here’s a quick look at the numbers:
Image from facebook.com
Image from google
Image from linkedin.com
Image from twitter
Image from yahoo
As you can see, most companies tend to be about 2/3 male and 90% White or Asian. The numbers shown above are for overall staff, but are even bigger disparities in tech and leadership. In the non-tech section of some companies there is a 50-50 split between male and female employees, but minorities are still disproportionately underrepresented.
