Twitter, Inc. TWTR has recently hired a new diversity chief to accomplish its goal of increasing women and minorities in its workforce. Jeffrey Siminoff who is presently serving as Apple’s AAPL diversity chief will take the lead position in Twitter in the New Year.
Twitter has faced criticism for a long time now owing to low diversity among its employee base. As per 2014 data, Twitter had only 30% female employees in its workforce. Even in terms of leadership roles, women were far behind men, occupying only 21% of such roles.
The company was also below the mark on the ethnicity aspect. In 2014, 59% of its U.S. employees were white and as much as 72% of the leading roles were also held by white skinned people.
Thereafter, in Aug 2015, the company had set specific goals for 2016 to become more diverse.The company intends to increase the percentage of female employees to 35% with plans to increase the ratio of women in tech and leading roles to 16% and 25%, respectively. In addition, Twitter has been working to increase the percentage of underrepresented minorities in its workforce to 11% in the U.S. with their participation in tech and leading roles increasing to 9% and 6%, respectively.
Siminoff will be replacing Janet Van Huysse, the current VP of diversity and inclusion at Twitter. In the past, Siminoff has gained popularity for his work in endorsing inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people at the workplace. In addition, he was also a key member in establishing a strategic advisory firm for this purpose.
However, Twitter has been facing criticism for this appointment as Siminoff is white and a male candidate. Furthermore, even under his leadership, Apple hasn’t made much headway in promoting diversity at the workplace.
Of late, the issue of diversity has become a prominent one especially in the tech space. Apart from this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company, other tech behemoths that have recently taken steps to diversify their workforce include Facebook FB and Alphabet’s GOOGL Google, among others.
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