Twitter’s workforce has experienced a shift towards higher diversity throughout 2016, exceeding the company’s initial expectations which were revealed two years ago after the firm set a goal to diversify its staff by the end of 2016. Earlier this week, Twitter released its updated employee demographics data, showing that its workforce now consists of more women and underrepresented minorities occupying a wider range of positions. Now that Twitter has met their goals that were set for the end of 2016, they have now set new goals for 2017 to continue diversifying their workforce.
Most tech companies in Silicon Valley have somewhat of a bad reputation when it comes to their workforce, as data indicates that their employees are predominantly white males. Back in 2015, Twitter set a few goals to diversify its workforce in a year’s time, and the company now revealed that it has not only met its goals but actually surpassed most of them. A couple of years ago, only 22% of positions in leadership were occupied by women, but that percentage grew to 30% last year, more than double of what Twitter was predicting. In the technical field, the percentage of female employees has increased from 13% to 15% , and in non-technical areas, the scales now tip towards more women which make 53% of the workforce. Overall, 37% of Twitter’s current employees are women. As far as underrepresented minorities are concerned, they now occupy 6% of Twitter’s leadership positions while they’ve occupied none the year before. In technical fields, minorities account for 9% of the workforce, meeting the company’s predictions for 2016.
Although progress is clearly being made, Twitter’s workforce continues to be dominated by Asian and white men, which is why the company aims to hire more underrepresented minorities in 2017, as well as employ more women in technical, non-technical, and leadership positions. The social media giant is planning to increase the percentage of female employees in technical and leadership fields by 2% and 1% , respectively. Underrepresented minority employees in technical, non-technical, and leadership will likely account for 2% of Twitter’s employees by the end of 2017. Last October, Twitter announced it’s laying off 8% of its workforce in an effort to streamline its portfolio and reduce its operating costs.
