Facebook released a report on the diversity of its workforce amidst a flurry of hand-wringing about the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. The numbers look a lot like the ones at Google and Yahoo: there are lots of male employees, even more White and Asian employees, and not a lot of women or non-Asian ethnic minorities.
Facebook is 69 percent male — compared to Google’s 70 percent — and 77 percent of employees in senior positions are men.
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While Facebook is almost balanced in non-tech positions — 53 percent men to 47 percent women — 85 percent of its tech employees are men.
Facebook says 63 percent of its global employees are white, 24 percent are Asian, six percent are Hispanic and two percent are African-American. At a senior level, 74 percent of its employees are white.
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“As these numbers show, we have more work to do — a lot more,” Facebook’s global head of diversity, Maxine Williams wrote in a blog post. “But the good news is that we’ve begun to make progress.”
So what is Facebook going to do?
It has partnered with several institutes and programs that support women and minorities in tech. It has expanded an internship program for “college freshmen from underrepresented groups” and collaborated with Yes We Code, a new program launched last week in New York.
You can read our interview with Google X’s Megan Smith about Yes We Code here.