Facebook recently publicized its workforce diversity report showing that 69 percent of the company were males and more than half of it was white. The company admitted that it still have "more work to do" in improving its diversity.
The diversity report written by Maxine Williams, Facebook's Global Head of Diversity, presented details of the employees' gender and ethnicity of tech, non-tech, and senior level positions. As of June 2014, 69 percent of the employees including those from other sites across the world were male and 57 percent of white. Only two percent of the workforce was black.
Even the tech and non-tech positions were dominated by men. It also seemed that the social networking giant favored men for higher positions since only 23 percent of the senior posts were given to women.
Facebook recognized that they needed to improve their workforce diversity. The company had done necessary efforts to hire more women and non-white employees, as well as retain them in the company. Some of the efforts made include a partnership with a women institute to support the careers of technical women, expansion of the Facebook University prioritizing intern applicants of other ethnicity, and more.
"Diversity is something that we're treating as everyone's responsibility at Facebook, and the challenge of finding qualified but underrepresented candidates is one that we're addressing as part of a strategic effort across Facebook, " Williams wrote.
Meanwhile, the report was criticized by Vivek Wadhwa, author of the upcoming book Innovating Women.
"Clearly Facebook has to step up now and do something about these numbers. They have to lead, not follow," Wadhwa said to USA Today.
Facebook's workforce diversity is no different compared to Google. Google also released a diversity report last month showing that majority of the employees were also men and whites. The company was pressured to release the data after accusations by activists that they were not hiring enough minorities and women. Google also invested $50 million to fund Made with Code, a program that aims to encourage young girls to pursue a career in the field of computer science.
