Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) too has similar workforce diversification like other Silicon Valley tech firms, as revealed by the report released Wednesday by the company. Most of the high-profile tech firms based in the Silicon Valley have been disclosing the workforce diversity data and there are huge similarities among all of them.
“As these numbers show, we have more work to do — a lot more,” Maxine Williams, Facebook’s global head of diversity, said in a statement.
Facebook join other tech firms
The statistics generated reveal that Facebook has 69% males in its global staff. Males comprise 85% of the company’s tech workers and 77% of the management team. The U.S. workforce of the company has 57% whites, 34% Asian, 4% Hispanic and 2% black.
Some of the prominent positions at Facebook are held by females as indicated by the report, but the ratio of males and females is not different from that of Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn. Last month, Google in its diversity report revealed that 70% of its staff is male and 61% is white while only 30% are Asian. LinkedIn’s workforce comprise 61% male, 53% while and 38% Asian. Yahoo with a female CEO has 50% white, 39% Asian and only 6% black or Hispanic.
Workforce data closely guarded
The companies in Silicon Valley have started paying more focus towards the lack of workforce diversity for the past few months. Seeing the low number of African-American and Hispanic workers in companies like Google and Facebook, Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist, has tried to persuade these companies to hire more of them.
The workforce diversity data is closely guarded by companies, which makes it difficult to make an exact estimate of the problem of diversity. In 2011, CNN Money tried to extract the diversity data from some major 20 tech firms in the Silicon Valley, but did not receive a favorable response from them. CNN Money found a way out for getting the companies disclose the numbers and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. This was resisted by many of the major employers such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, IBM and Microsoft. For getting their data excluded, a successful petition was filed by these tech-firms with the Department of Labor to exclude them from revealing their data.
