Does Facebook’s White Workforce Hurt Its Image?

According an announcement by company management:

At Facebook, diversity is essential to achieving our mission. We build products to connect the world, and this means we need a team that understands and reflects many different communities, backgrounds and cultures. Research also shows that diverse teams are better at solving complex problems and enjoy more dynamic workplaces. So at Facebook we’re serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics.

The reality is otherwise. Some 69% of Facebook’s workers are male, and 57% are white and another 34% Asian. The numbers among Facebook’s tech workers are more extreme. Of this group, 85% are male.

The numbers are similar to those recently released by other high-tech companies, like Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Under no circumstances have these public corporations given any reasons for the predominance of men among their workers. If any did, the company would have to admit it did not care enough about hiring practices to really promote diversity.

If Facebook looked for excuses and decided to disclose them, the most likely one would be that senior software engineers are largely white and Asian. That excuse may be true. However, Facebook does not have to accept this as a reason for its employee composition. The company could have done a better job of recruiting female and non-white talent. Clearly, that does not appear to have been the case, unless there is virtually no talent in the industry among women and non-whites.

Facebook’s members, advertisers, employees and investors may ignore that disclosure as an admission that the company did not pay attention to whom it was hiring. However, Facebook management is much too smart to have overlooked the pattern.

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