Twitter became the latest major United States company to release a diversity report after civil rights activist and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson requested the social media outlet Twitter publish its findings. According to the report, Twitter employees are mostly white and male, while women account for 30 percent of its workforce.
Conclusion? Twitter’s staff is similar to that of other tech companies like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo: predominantly white males, but the social network wrote in a blog post that “we have a lot of work to do.” Twitter currently maintains roughly 2,700 employees.
When looking at the management team at Twitter, it’s 79 percent male and 72 percent is white. The technology team, meanwhile, only contains about 10 percent of women, a troubling number for those who are concerned about workplace diversity. However, analysis of the non-technology jobs suggest a 50-50 split of the genders.
The ethnicities aren’t broad either. The microblogging social network’s workforce is only two percent black, but its second-biggest ethnicity is Asian, another trait that Twitter has in common with other tech firms.
“We want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of,” wrote Twitter. “To that end, we are joining some peer companies by sharing our ethnic and gender diversity data. And like our peers, we have a lot of work to do.”
Moving forward, Twitter says that it will be proactive in changing the makeup of its workforce to include more women and minorities by working with several other recruitment agencies that represent minorities and other groups.
“We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity — and we are no exception,” wrote Janet Van Huysse, Twitter’s vice-president of diversity and inclusion, in the blog post. “By becoming more transparent with our employee data, open in dialogue throughout the company and rigorous in our recruiting, hiring and promotion practices, we are making diversity an important business issue for ourselves.”
Although some would like to point to discrimination, the facts may show something completely different than the suggested projected narrative. For instance, the statistics highlight that female students are rejecting careers in technology, while minority students account for a small percentage of those who study and work in technical fields.
Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd’s President, told Forbes that her firm has done the research and has come to a number of conclusions: women don’t like technology, they don’t think they’d be good at it and they feel they would work in an industry with people they wouldn’t like.
Similar to the pay gap debate, there are many statistics that prove that companies may not be discriminating but that women aren’t interested in these kinds of fields and minorities aren’t getting involved in the tech industry. Despite this, affirmative action is still being promoted.
Here is what Thomas Sowell wrote in 2004 in Capitalism Magazine:
“In many other situations, women have avoided jobs that demand such long hours of work, or so much travel, that it would make taking care of their children virtually impossible. The biggest difference in income is between married women and everyone else. Women who never married have long held their own economically…..
“Potential may be the same but developed capabilities depend on a lot more, including interest and circumstances. Yet those who start with the preconception of equal capabilities are quick to seize upon numbers showing group differences in results as proof that someone else has done something wrong. That is the grand fallacy of our time.”
