Facebook shows little improvement in workforce diversity

Facebook had hired thousands of employees to improve the diversity of its workforce, but it has seemingly failed to achieve the desired results.

The Facebook team is still dominated by white and Asian men. Diversity improved only marginally although Facebook added 2897 employees this year, TechCrunch reported, citing the company's latest demographic report.

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The 10,082-person company has only one percent more women as a share of all employees than a year ago despite a 40 percent increase in the head count.

Also, it made little progress in growing its percentage of non-Asian ethnic minorities across the spectrum. Facebook does not disclose the exact counts of employees in different categories.

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The biggest area of progress was that Facebook's non-tech employee percentage of women grew from 47 percent to 52 percent.

In a blog post about the report, Facebook admitted, "It's clear to all of us that we still are not where we want to be".

"Cognitive diversity or diversity of thought matters because we are building a platform that currently serves 1.4 billion people around the world. It is vital for us to have a broad range of perspectives including people of different genders, races, ages, sexual orientations, characteristics and points of view," the blog read.

"Having a diverse workforce is not only the right thing to do - it is the smart thing to do for our business."

The company has launched several initiatives to improve diversity, out of which the most noticeable is its diverse slate approach, which aims to "present hiring managers with at least one qualified candidate who is a member of an under represented group to fill any open role".

Source: IANS