Twitter's minority staff representation shrinks

SAN FRANCISCO – The percentage of underrepresented minority workers at Twitter fell 2 percentage points from 2014 to 2015 and the company appears to have no African-American or Hispanic leadership at all in the United States in 2015.

The numbers came at the bottom of a statement issued Friday by the messaging company announcing its goals for diversifying its staff.

In 2014, 12% of Twitter's staff in the United States belonged to an underrepresented minority, according to the company. That includes African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, American Indians or Alaska Natives.

In 2015, the figure was 10%.

Twitter's stated goal for underrepresented minorities for 2016 is 11% of total staff, Friday's announcement said.

Exactly how many staffers Twitter would need to hire to reach its goal isn't known because the company has not released its U.S. staffing numbers for 2015.

Twitter's underrepresented minority hiring goals are for the United States only.

Despite the drop, Twitter has taken a step forward by articulating its staffing goals and telling the world about it, said Joelle Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a Palo Alto, Calif. firm that helps companies with diversity issues.

"Setting goals is something we've only see a few companies do externally," she said. "I think they still deserve credit for taking a hard and probably pretty scary first step."

The company's global overall staff in 2014 was 30% female. In 2015 it was 34%. Twitter's goal for 2016 is 35%.

Twitter's goal is to make its makeup to reflect the range of people who use its service, it said.

"Doing so will help us build a product to better serve people around the world," the company's vice president for diversity and inclusion, Janet Van Huysse, said in a statement on its website.

Diversity has been a hot topic in Silicon Valley technology companies over the past year as they began to disclose the make-up of their staffs.

Twitter especially has been under pressure because it has a large user base among African-Americans.

More than a quarter of black Internet users in the U.S. are on Twitter and "Black Twitter" — the congregation of black users on the service — is considered one of the driving forces behind the company's popularity and success.

When the number were released in 2014, Van Huysse said, "We want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of."
"This annual type of reporting is a very useful sort of exercise for employers," said Murray Simpson, a quantitative analyst with PeopleFluent, a Waltham, Mass.-based company that does human resources management and technology.

"They can use this information to help them make informed decisions in terms of identifying where they want to be," he said.