It took a few weeks, but Twitter has finally released diversity data on its company, joining the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook and Google. The results? Twitter's roughly 3,000 employees are predominately white (59%) and overwhelmingly male (70%).
The company's gender gap, in particular, becomes even more pronounced when broken down by expertise. Of Twitter's technology employees, a whopping 90% are men. For non-technical jobs, the split between genders is 50-50. What's more, almost 80% of those in leadership positions are men (and 72% are white).
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On the ethnicity front, Twitter's numbers mirror those of Facebook and Google. Only 2% of the microblogging network is comprised of African-American workers, and like Google, the second-largest ethnicity among its employees is Asian.
In a blog post on the diversity report, Twitter admitted that the picture is not pretty: "We want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of. To that end, we are joining some peer companies by sharing our ethnic and gender diversity data. And like our peers, we have a lot of work to do."
The company said it's actively working to change this gender and ethnicity gap by partnering with several organizations that can help it recruit from underrepresented minorities and other groups.
"We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity — and we are no exception," Janet Van Huysse, Twitter's vice-president of diversity and inclusion, wrote in the blog post.