Facebook fails to develop a diverse workforce

Like transparency reports, diversity reports have become quite the fashion at the moment. Companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon are keen to demonstrate that they are not dominated by white, middle-class men, and that they are open to the full gamut of gender identities and sexualities. Today Facebook released its second diversity report showing that at Mark Zuckerberg's company things haven’t really improved over the last year.

More than half of the workforce (55 percent) is white, and at senior leadership level this jumps all the way up to nearly three quarters (73 percent). The percentage of black workers at the social network is incredibly low -- just 2 percent. The gender balance is largely skewed as we have come to expect. Across the company 68 percent of employees are male, although in 'non-tech' roles women make up 52 percent of the team. For those striving for equality, the numbers make for somewhat depressing reading.

Just as with race, the gender imbalance is more noticeable the further up the company you look. At the top of the heap, 77 percent of employees are men. The number of women employed by Facebook has increased by one percent, but the report describes little more than "positive but modest change". Facebook admits that there is still a long way to go:

While we have achieved positive movement over the last 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.

Facebook is not just saying that it needs to improve things, it is taking steps to do just that. New interviewing techniques encourage hiring managers to spend longer looking for workers to ensure that no one is overlooked. The Facebook University training program is designed to nurture talent in freshman, while employees are all trained to notice unconscious bias and stereotyping.

But, as Facebook says, there's still work to be done.

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