Facebook Diversity: ‘Positive but Modest Change’

Facebook continues to make slow progress in its diversity efforts, and global director of diversity Maxine Williams admitted in a Newsroom post that much work remains to be done.

Williams provided the following statistics about Facebook’s employee roster:

• U.S. overall: 55 percent white, 36 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 3 percent two or more races, 2 percent black, 0 percent other.
• U.S. tech: 51 percent white, 43 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, 2 percent two or more races, 1 percent black, 0 percent other.
• U.S. non-tech: 62 percent white, 24 percent Asian, 7 percent Hispanic, 3 percent two or more races, 3 percent black, 1 percent other.
• Senior leadership: 73 percent white, 21 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, 1 percent two or more races, 1 percent other.
• Global overall: 68 percent men, 32 percent women.
• Global tech: 84 percent men, 16 percent women.
• Global non-tech: 52 percent women, 48 percent men.
• Senior leadership: 77 percent men, 23 percent women.

She wrote in her overview:

Our work is producing some positive but modest change, and our new hire numbers are trending up. In addition to best-practice programs we have been running in recruitment and retention, we are always trying creative approaches that tailor solutions to the challenge of increasing the diversity of our population.

Williams offered details on some of the company’s diversity initiatives:

• Mandating that at least one minority candidate interview for each open position.
• The Facebook University training program for college freshmen, which allows those interested in computer science to spend their summers working directly with mentors from Facebook.
• A revamped managing bias training course, which has been completed by the company’s entire management team, with \"teams across the world\" to follow.
• The launch of the Computer Science & Engineering Chapter on Lean In.

Williams concluded:

While we have achieved positive movement over the past 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.

Readers: What else can Facebook do to promote diversity within its ranks?