As calls for visibility on diversity of technology companies are becoming stronger, Amazon.com decided to release its diversity report. And just like Apple and Google, the majority of the employees at Amazon are male, and the top positions there go to men too.
The diversity report revealed that 63 percent of the company's employees worldwide are males. The report also showed the ethnicity of the workforce in the United States, where 60 percent are white, 15 percent are black, 13 percent are Asians, 9 percent are Hispanic and 3 percent accounts for the rest. The top positions are also dominated by whites at 71 percent followed by Asian managers at 18 percent. Black and Hispanic managers are the same, at 4 percent, while other races total 3 percent.
The Wall Street Journal compared the diversity of Amazon with its competitor eBay, where 58 percent of employees are males, and 75 percent of managers are male.
Unlike other tech companies that admitted that they are not happy with their current diversity and promised to work on getting more females and other races to do the job, Amazon didn't make any promises. The published report didn't discuss much about diversity but rather focused on the actions that the company has taken to improve its diversity such as the Affinity Group and Amazon Women in Engineering (AWE).
The Amazon Affinity Group allows employees to share critical ideas to help the company improve its diversity efforts, as well as career developments and activities outside the company. AWE, on the other hand, focuses on making the company an attractive workplace for female engineers. The group has a mentorship program for female employees and interns.
The report was criticized by the PUSH Coalition, a religious and social development organization led by Rev. Jesse Jackson, which has been pushing tech companies to release their diversity reports.
"Their general workforce data released by Amazon seems intentionally deceptive, as the company did not include the race or gender breakout of their technical workforce," the statement said, quoted by the New York Times. "The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses."
