LinkedIn released employee demographic data for the first time on Thursday, revealing a workforce that is mostly male, and mostly white.
Of LinkedIn's 5400-plus total employees, 61% are male, and CEO Jeff Weiner said Thursday at Thomas Friedman's Next New World Conference in San Francisco that 82% of the company's tech positions are currently filled by men. Ethnically speaking, 53% of LinkedIn's U.S. workforce is white, and 38% is Asian.
[seealso slug="google-employee-demographics"]
That means that black, hispanic and other ethnic groups make up less than 10% of the company's U.S. employees.
"We're not where we'd like to be," said Weiner. "We want and can do better than [what we're doing]."
The data is similar to employee demographics released by Google late last month. At the search giant, 70% of employees are men, and 61% of the company's U.S. workforce is white. Tech-related jobs at Google are 83% men, almost identical to the breakdown revealed by LinkedIn.
The data is startling in that it reveals a well-known, but difficult to remedy, gender issue prevalent in the tech community. Women are vastly underrepresented in positions that require STEM education, and Google and LinkedIn are bringing attention to the issue by publicly sharing this data.
Addressing the issue is one thing, of course, but changing it won't happen overnight. LinkedIn has partnered with Year Up, a non-profit that provides job skills and support to urban youth, since 2011, and also partners with the Anita Borg Institute, another nonprofit dedicated to get more women into the tech community.
The company also hosts an annual developer hackathon for female engineers.
"Ultimately, what we want is the best technical talent in the world to work at LinkedIn regardless of identity," a company spokesperson told Mashable on Friday. "A bigger part of the issue for us is doing what we can to increase the talent pool. That's not the sort of thing that will pay off immediately, but that's something we believe will pay off for the entire industry over time."