Twitter to Focus on Growing Women, Black, and Latinx Ranks

Twitter’s Candi Castleberry-Singleton, the company’s VP of Intersectionality, Culture, and Diversity, announced on Friday that the company had met or surpassed many of the diversity and inclusion goals it had set for 2017. In a blog post, Castleberry-Singleton wrote that the representation of “underrepresented minorities” -- which Twitter defined as non-white and non-Asian -- had grown to 12.5% in 2017, compared to 11% in 2016. However, these numbers also include 2.9% of Twitter’s workforce who specifically declined to identify their ethnicity on Twitter’s internal survey; there is no way to tell what ethnicity they actually are. If you subtract that group from Twitter’s list of “underrepresented minorities,” it shows non-white and non-Asian employees at Twitter made up just 9.6% of the company workforce, a decline from 11% in 2016. Regardless, Twitter is also now specifically looking at increasing the representation of women, Black, and Latinx people -- groups that continue to be underrepresented in tech. In 2017, Twitter was 3.4% Black, 3.4% Latinx, and 38.4% female. By 2019, Twitter wants to be 43% female, 5% Black, and 5% Latinx. More here.