Facebook's diversity efforts failing African-American and Hispanic women

Facebook's diversity efforts failing African-American and Hispanic women

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is inching toward increasing the diversity of its workforce but it still has a big problem: it's hiring very few black and Hispanic women.

The social media giant’s latest diversity report released Thursday shows strides in boosting the ranks of some groups who’ve been underrepresented at Facebook from the beginning, but a closer look at the raw numbers reveals that these women of color are being largely left out of any progress.

You can almost count on one hand the number of black women — six — who work as senior managers or executives at Facebook in the U.S., accounting for less than 1 percent of those 769 jobs. The next layer of managers at Facebook isn't more diverse: 34 out of a total of 2,816, or 1.2%.

The number of Hispanic women who are senior managers or executives can be counted on two hands for about 1.3 percent of those jobs, according to the most recent documents Facebook filed with the federal government. Hispanic women hold 46 of the next layer of management positions at Facebook, or 1.6 percent.

Facebook, whose products are used by more than two billion people around the world, isn’t the only major tech company having trouble reversing decades of hiring patterns and making their corporate cultures more welcoming to women of color. 

Last month Google said it would begin to focus diversity efforts on African-American and Hispanic womenafter similar patterns emerged. Out of the nearly 56,000 people Google employed in the U.S. in 2017, 544 were black women. Hispanic women and Latinas numbered 945 in 2017.