The Unbearable Whiteness of Tech

Facebook Blames Stalled Diversity Effort on Lack of Available Talent

A disappointing new diversity report finds fault with the educational pipeline.
Image may contain Human Person Silhouette and Airport
From Echo/Cultura/Getty Images.

Despite the best efforts of tech companies to make Silicon Valley less white and less male—including hosting all-male panels to promote diversity—the status quo in the Bay Area remains largely unchanged. Recent years have seen even the biggest of tech giants attempting to be more transparent about their lack of diversity, but the problem persists. Such is the case at Facebook, which just announced an annual diversity report that shows the company has made little progress on either racial or gender diversity.

Last year, women made up 32 percent of Facebook’s global workforce; this year, that number is 33 percent. Women at the company used to hold 23 percent of the company’s senior leadership roles and now hold 27 percent. The numbers on race are just as stagnant: 3 percent of Facebook’s U.S. senior leadership is black this year, compared to 2 percent in 2015. Last year, Facebook’s U.S. employees were 91 percent white or Asian; in 2016, that number ticked down to 90 percent. The percentage of its U.S. employees who are hispanic and black has remained unchanged since 2015, at 4 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

Facebook blames its poor diversity on too few women and minorities entering the tech industry, not on its own hiring practices. “Appropriate representation in technology or any other industry will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system,” head of diversity Maxine Williams said in a statement. Critics, however, disagree with Facebook’s assessment of the talent pipeline. “The tech industry needs to accept the blame for not hiring underrepresented people,” said developer Kaya Thomas in an essay on Medium. “We are here, but you are choosing not to see us.” “There are a ton of opportunities to increase demographic representation in tech companies with the people that already exist in the workforce,” Joelle Emerson, the C.E.O. of diversity consulting company Paradigm, told The Wall Street Journal.

To be fair, a lack of diversity is not a Facebook-specific problem; the entire tech sector is just as bad. Recent years have seen tech giants and start-ups alike becoming more transparent about their diversity numbers in an attempt to introduce more people of different backgrounds and experiences into their workplaces. Google parent company Alphabet released diversity numbers in June, showing that the company had added more female, Latino, and black employees, but was still behind in its ultimate goal of reflecting the U.S. population. Facebook, for its part, is candid about how long it will take to fix a problem it says is rooted in larger systematic racial and gender disparities. “We’re looking at a ten year horizon at a minimum if—if—everyone takes it seriously and invests,” Williams said.