Snapchat’s workforce is only 4% black

07/30/2020 Technology, World


Now that racial justice protests continue across the country and amid renewed pressure on companies to improve diversity within their ranks, Snapchat’s parent company has finally released its numbers, and according to the company’s own description company, it is falling short in representation and inclusion.
Snap (SNAP) It released its figures on Wednesday, the same day as a highly anticipated antitrust audience with the world’s most powerful tech CEOs, an event that is sure to overshadow Snapchat’s announcement.

Snap’s results showed a workforce severely lacking in diversity, albeit on par with its much larger peers. In 2019, its U.S. workforce was just 4.1% black and 6.8% Hispanic and Latino.

“To date, our DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) results have simply not been good enough,” Snap said in the report. “We will hold ourselves publicly accountable and hope to be judged on our actions and not just on our words.”

Overall, women made up 32.9% of Snap’s global employees in 2019, an increase of 0.9% from the previous year. However, women made up only 16% of their technology teams and only 7% of technology leadership roles. “Lack of diversity is most pronounced in technology roles: 91% of our team members in these roles are white or Asian,” Snap said in the report.

Snap’s leadership and senior leadership roles are also predominantly white. Of the employees in leadership roles, 70.4% are white, while their senior leadership team is 74.2% white.

Snap said it made “progress” in improving the number of women in leadership roles. Woman With a director’s degree or higher, it rose 1% to represent 24% of those roles, and women in VP and higher positions rose 9.6% to cover 30.3% of those positions.

The company had 3,195 global employees as of December 31, 2019.

Silicon Valley has come up short when it comes to improving diversity at all levels. In 2014, when Facebook started publishing diversity figures, its workforce in the US was 2% black. Six years later, it is still only 3.9% black. Similarly, Google’s workforce in the US was 1.9% Black in 2014, and six years later, it is 3.7% Black. It’s a similar situation at other tech companies, which have seen small percentage point increases or, in some cases, even falls since they began publishing reports.
For tech companies, the lack of diversity raises concerns about how the inclusion of their products used by millions of people worldwide affects them. And for Snapchat in particular, there have been multiple cases where the company apologized for the filters that were insensitive to black and Asian people.

Snap nodded to the issue in the report: “We are committed to creating products that fully include gender, race, ability, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, geography, and more. To develop inclusive products, we must achieve a greater diversity in the way we develop our products and content. ”

In addition to publishing the employee breakdown, Snap also outlined several new initiatives to improve diversity, fairness, and inclusion, including linking executive performance in part to their individual diversity efforts and diversity goals for their teams, requiring unconscious bias training for all employees and expansion of their mentoring programs.

The company also set goals for the future, including doubling the number of women in technology at Snap by 2023 and doubling the number of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities by 2025. Its “long-term goal” is to reflect “racial and racial ” gender diversity “of the different places where it operates.

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