Facebook has more black employees, but still too few

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook nearly doubled the number of African American employees last year, but the gains were barely perceptible.

African Americans working at the giant social network still accounted for less than 1.5% of the company's 5,470 employees in the USA last year.

In all, Facebook hired 36 African American employees in 2014 even as it added a total of 1,216 employees, according to the diversity report that the company files each year with the federal government.

The figures were made public Wednesday when Facebook released its EEO-1 filing. Facebook released the report about the same time as it did last year.

The technology industry is struggling with how to make its ranks from the board room to non-technical roles more diverse. Americans use the products these companies make every day, yet the companies do not mirror the demographics of the United States in race, gender or age.

Nearly absent from Silicon Valley payrolls are African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, who make up a tiny fraction of the workforce here, whether in technical or non-technical roles.

Facebook is on the hot seat because its 1.5 billion users span races and cultures around the globe and the majority of its users are women. The No. 2 executive is Sheryl Sandberg, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent female leaders and author of the best seller Lean In. She has championed bringing more gender diversity to male-dominated corporate America.

"We know we have a long way to go," Sandberg said at Facebook's annual shareholder meeting earlier this month.

She was responding to questioning from civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, who continues to pressure Facebook and other companies to set targets and timetables to recruit more women and underrepresented minorities.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also insisted that diversity is a priority for him.

"We have the same talent bar for everyone. But we want to find a disproportionate number of candidates who are women and minorities," he said in May.

For years, technology companies fought sharing any demographic information about their employees, claiming the information was a trade secret.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and other companies blocked the release of the data from theU.S. Department of Labor to news organizations such as the San Jose Mercury Newsthat had filed public records requests.

But some companies are still more transparent than others.

American companies collect and report information about their workforces to the federal government each year in a form called the EEO-1.

The EEO-1 is a standard form that breaks down race, ethnicity and gender of workforces by job classification.

Facebook, eBay, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn are among the technology companies that have made public their EEO-1s.

But other companies chose instead to provide less detailed broad strokes information such as the percentage of tech workers or company managers who are women or minorities.

Chief among the companies that have refused to disclose their EEO-1s are Apple and Amazon.

Twitter disclosed its EEO-1 in December after requests from USA TODAY.

Technology companies frequently complain the job classifications in the EEO-1 don't match up with jobs in the industry.

But observers say the EEO-1 is the best way to judge what kind of progress companies — and the industry — are making, until the high-tech industry develops better standards to measure diversity.