Inclusion and Diversity: Twitter Creeps Closer to Its Year-End-2019 Goals

Twitter reported continued progress toward meeting the two-year diversity targets it set in 2017 for women, black and Latinx representation at the company. The social network released the September 2019 quarterly installment of its Inclusion and Diversity Report this week, with vice president of people experience and head of inclusion and diversity Dalana Brand writing in a blog post, “We’ve made progress increasing representation of women, black and Latinx talent. This work is always ongoing and, as we increase inclusion and diversity investments, we will be particularly focused on retention.” Women made up 41.3% of Twitter’s total work force in August, up from 40.2% at the end of 2018. The year-end-2019 goal is 43%. Blacks reached 5.1% in August, already surpassing the December goal of 5%. They made up 4.5% of the company’s total work force in December 2018. And Latinx representation jumped to 4.4% from 3.9% at the end of last year, still short of its end-2019 target of 5%. [kickout id="1"] Women accounted for 35.5% of Twitter’s leadership roles in August, down slightly from 35.8% in December 2018. Conversely, blacks and Latinx saw leadership roles surge, with blacks rising from 4.7% at the end of last year to 5.6% in August, while those numbers for Latinx were 2.7% and 3.7%, respectively. Brand wrote, “Diversity in our leadership ranks remains a gap and, while that gap is getting smaller, it’s critical to make progress here. We’re implementing new initiatives focused on senior roles and expect to have more to report at year’s end.” She added that starting in the current quarter, Twitter will require diverse candidate slates for all senior roles, meaning that at least one female (global) and one black or Latinx (U.S.) qualified candidate must be considered. Results from this initiative will be shared in the second quarter of 2020. [kickout id="2"] Incremental progress was made on technical representation, with women climbing to 22.2% in August from 20.2% in December 2018, while blacks rose to 3.2% from 2.9% and Latinx to 3.5% from 3.2% over the same time period. Brand wrote, “Our approach to recruiting diverse technical talent is showing early signs of impact. Moving forward, we’ll double down on these programs and extend them to other parts of the business.” [kickout id="3"] Women accounted for 45.1% of new hires from August 2018 through August 2019, while blacks made up 8% and Latinx 6.4%. As far as attrition during the same period, women accounted for 11.5%, blacks 11.1% and Latinx 8.2%. Twitter shared the snapshot below of race and ethnicity representation in the U.S. as of August. [kickout id="4"] The company only reviews promotions on an annual basis, but it shared its data for 2018, saying that women received 40.9% of promotions, while blacks accounted for 3.3% and Latinx for 3.7%. Brand wrote, “Based on these results, we know we can do better. We’re focused on addressing promotion of black and Latinx employees, particularly in entry-level technical roles where we’re launching an onboarding program for new graduates. We are also evaluating opportunities to formally integrate inclusion and diversity into the promotion decision-making process.”