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Facebook’s fifth annual diversity report shows slow improvement

Facebook’s fifth annual diversity report shows slow improvement

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Change is coming slowly, if it comes at all

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Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s annual diversity report is out, and if you’ve been following these for the past few years, you already know what to expect: small improvements that, while welcome, are still an indication that bigger change in employee diversity at the company may demand a different approach to what Facebook has been doing so far.

It’s not that Facebook isn’t getting better at hiring more women and minorities — once again, the company has improved in overall diversity by both gender and race across the board. Female representation in senior leadership went up 2 percent from last year to 30 percent, and up 1.3 percent to 36.3 percent across the entire company.

Change is coming slowly, if it comes at all

Black employees have grown from 2 percent to 4 percent of the company over the past five years, and Hispanic employees from 4 percent to 5 percent in that time period — but those numbers look far worse when looking at technical and leadership roles, where numbers have stayed flat for the past half-decade for both of those ethnicities.

Despite improvements, however, Facebook is still a company that is predominantly male and mostly white and Asian — a fact that seems unlikely to drastically change in the near future. And after five years of Facebook releasing these reports, more than two-thirds of senior company leadership are still white men.

It’s not the first time that Facebook’s skewed employee diversity has been an issue, either — earlier this year, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) took some time out of a congressional hearing in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to grill CEO Mark Zuckerberg about increasing diversity at the company, something that Zuckerberg said that Facebook was “focused on.”