Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) management issued a report showing that only 2% of its workers are black. Among tech workers, the figure falls to 1%. The social media company’s executives claim they are in the midst of improving its racial mix.
Facebook also showed in a study titled “Driving Diversity at Facebook” that 32% of its workers are women. This drops to 16% among tech workers.
The report was authored by Maxine Williams, the Global Director of Diversity.
Among the report’s observations is that Facebook plans to balance its workforce away from being primarily white and male:
While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be. There’s more work to do. We remain deeply committed to building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics. It’s a big task, one that will take time to achieve, but our whole company continues to embrace this challenge.
Looking at the figures, the “there’s more work to be done” observation is obvious.
Additionally, the report said:
Diversity is central to Facebook’s mission of creating a more open and connected world: it’s good for our products and for our business. Cognitive diversity, or diversity of thought, matters because we are building a platform that currently serves 1.4 billion people around the world. It’s vital for us to have a broad range of perspectives, including people of different genders, races, ages, sexual orientations, characteristics and points of view. Having a diverse workforce is not only the right thing to do — it’s the smart thing to do for our business.
The report does not make it clear why the effort is “the smart thing to do.” If the effort was so smart, it would have been done earlier.
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