Facebook released its latest diversity stats on Thursday, confirming what tech industry critics already know: The Silicon Valley giant is still lagging when it comes to hiring women and minorities.
Since June of 2014, when the company published its diversity numbers for the first time, Facebook (FB) has increased its total share of female employees by one percentage point, going from 31% to 32% women. Women hold just 16% of tech jobs in the company, up from 15% last year. And when it comes to moving women into senior positions, the company made no progress at all, holding steady at 23%.
The last time Coins2Day compared Facebook to 13 other large tech firms that had released diversity data, the company came in at No. 9 in total percentage of female employees. The latest stats are enough to move it one spot up in the rankings, but still places Facebook well below companies like Pandora (roughly 50/50), Indiegogo (45% women) and eBay (42% women).
Things don’t look much better when it comes to racial diversity. The company is now 55% white and 36% asian (vs. 57% white and 34% asian in 2014), leaving all other ethnicities at a piddling 9%. Facebook’s senior leadership, meanwhile, is 73% white, down from 74% last year.
In a post about the new stats, Maxine Williams, the company’s global director of diversity, says Facebook’s push to diversify its workforce is producing “positive but modest change.”
Williams also identified some of the approaches Facebook has been using to help bring more women and minorities into the company. Among the projects she calls out: an “attempt” to present hiring managers in certain parts of the business with at least one diverse candidate for each open job, reworking the company’s training course on managing bias, and increasing the number of college students from underrepresented groups that it invites to participate in its paid training program.
While Facebook is not legally required to release diversity information, the company—along with other tech heavyweights like Google and Yahoo—began sharing the data last year, in response to growing criticism about the lack of women and minorities in the technology industry.
