Twitter has hired an Apple employee — Jeffrey Siminoff – to replace Janet Van Huysse as its vice president of diversity and inclusion. Twitter’s head of human resources, Brian Schipper, announced the news on Yep and Twitter.
Voices against Siminoff’s appointment
Siminoff will join the micro-blogging firm in January. According to his LinkedIn profile, Siminoff has been the director of worldwide inclusion and diversity at Apple since September 2013. Prior to this, he worked in a similar position at Morgan Stanley for three years. Siminoff is also a founding leader of global LGBT leadership organization Out Leadership.
“Super excited to join @Twitter next month as VP Diversity & Inclusion, joining an incredible team to make #InclusionImpact,” read a tweet from Siminoff.
Three are voices against the appointment of Siminoff as he is white, says TechCrunch. The outgoing VP of diversity and inclusion, Van Huysse, has been with Twitter for the past six years. She announced her exit on Twitter but gave no information about her next challenge.
Twitter working to be more diverse
This year has been a bad one for the micro-blogging firm for many reasons, including diversity and inclusion. So Siminoff will have a lot of work to do at the micro-blogging firm. In its 2014 diversity report, the company informed readers that it had 70% men and only 30% women (worse than Yahoo and Facebook). Almost 90% of the tech jobs and 79% of the leadership jobs were held by men. In terms of ethnicity, the company was 59% white.
Since then, Twitter has been working to address the issue, and this past summer came up with a diversity goal of increasing the woman ratio to 35%, women in tech jobs to 16% and women in leadership roles to 25%. The micro-blogging firm also aims to raise the proportion of underrepresented minorities to 11%, underrepresented minorities in tech roles to 9%, and underrepresented minorities in leadership jobs to 6%.
“As we look ahead, we see opportunity rather than a challenge: an opportunity to build a platform and a company that will better serve the diverse community on Twitter and the increasingly diverse one at Twitter,” the company said previously.
Apart from the diversity goals, there have been reports that the company will be restructuring its board of directors to make it more diverse as well.
