Many companies take pride in promoting multicultural diversity in the working environment they create. Facebook is no exception. The giant company has announced long time ago that it is its mission to create an open and a connected world. This is why diversity has become a key element to accomplish that goal.
However, the newest update in terms of annual employee diversity report that was released on Thursday, June 25th, announced that the majority of the Facebook’s employees are white male.
Thus, the report reveals that about 68 percent of the company’s current employees are male and 55 percent of all the people working for Facebook are white.
It is misfortunate for the company’s aims that 36 percent of the people employed in its U.S. headquarters are Asian, only 4 percent of them are Hispanic and an insignificant 2 percent are African – American.
There is even less diversity in the tech department, where 43 percent are of Asian origin but only 3 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are African-American. Women only represent 16 percent of the tech staff.
Thus, it is no wonder the leadership roles also belong to white people in the company. Statistics show 73 percent of the senior staff is represented by this category, followed by 21 percent Asian employees, 3 percent Hispanics and 2 percent African-American. Women leaders only comprise 23 percent of the staff.
However, the non-tech departments have a higher percentage of women than the one recorded last year. It was reported that they represent 52 percent of the non-tech staff in this year, which is up by 5 points compared to last year’s 47 percent.
Obviously, these numbers are significant for the company because they have been striving to show they care for diversity for a long time.
“Cognitive diversity, or diversity of thought, matters because we are building a platform that currently serves 1.4 billion people around the world,” said Maxine Williams, who is Facebook’s Global Director of Diversity.
She added that the company is still committed to creating a working environment that reflects diversity in terms of thinking, cultural background, gender, age and sexual orientation. There is still much to achieve in this direction but she is convinced that the company is gradually getting there.
It is perhaps a paradox that these disappointing numbers were published a day before Facebook introduced its new Celebrity Pride tool that allows anyone who wants to support the LGBT movement to apply rainbow filters all over their profile photos.
Image Source: blackenterprise
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