Yahoo: Female CEO, Male Dominated Workforce And Leadership

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According to the report, 62% of the global workforce led by Marissa Mayer for roughly the last two years remains male. And that is a misnomer as well, 85% of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)’s technology staff is male as well as 77% of those in leadership positions.

Mayer not the first woman in charge of Yahoo

Mayer is not the first woman to lead the company, Carol Bartz was the company’s CEO for close to three years before being sacked in September 2011 and Sue Decker spent nearly two years as the company’s president before voluntarily leaving the company in 2009.

Switching to ethnicity, the report showed that 50% of the company’s domestic employees are white and 39% Asian. Blacks and Hispanics collectively represent just 6% of the company’s U.S. workforce. 78% of Yahoo’s leadership is white and 17% Asian a big disparity given that the founder of Yahoo and longest serving CEO, Jerry Yang, is Taiwanese-American.

“These statistics are only a part of the story — Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) works to ensure that our existing employees feel welcome and supported during their time at the company,” said the company’s statement that accompanied the report that broke down the 12,200 full-time employees and fixed-term contractors demographically.

Silicon Valley not representative of population

Silicon Valley continues to struggle with a workforce unrepresentative of the U.S. population. According to the Census Bureau, women make up 49% of the U.S. workforce while the population is 63% white, 17% Hispanic, 13% African-American and 5% Asian.

Presumably to regain some relevance, Jesse Jackson has become a proponent of Hispanic hiring along with African Americans and has appeared at a number of tech companies annual meetings in the last few months to urge them to show more diversity in their hiring practices.

One of Silicon Valley’s giants, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), released its own diversity report at the end of last month showing that 70% of its staff is male and 61% white.

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