Dive Brief:
- Slack released its latest employment figures on Thursday, showing some improvement in hiring women. But, during the period of the study the company hired only three African-Americans.
- The report includes some of the most "transparent and detailed statistics" released by a tech company thus far, according to the International Business Times.
- Since early 2014, tech companies across Silicon Valley have pledged to hire more women and minorities as a way to bring diversity to the workplace.
Dive Insight:
The company’s latest figures show that from June to December Slack improved its representation of women to 44%, but its makeup of African-Americans decreased to 3.4%. This happened during a time when Slack’s workforce almost doubled, to about 290. Slack is a private company that makes workforce chat software and was valued at $2.8 billion last spring.
Proponents of tech diversity are worried tech's push for diversity is focusing too much on white women at the expense of minorities.
Leslie Miley, a leader in the tech diversity movement and a former engineer at both Google and Twitter, told the Business Times that the lack of minority hiring has to do with a problem all tech companies face: extreme pressure to hire as much talent as quickly as possible. That pressure often causes recruiters to rely heavily on their existing networks to find talent, but people rarely have much diversity in their networks, according to studies.
After releasing statistics showing a general lack of diversity among their workers, several tech companies, including Microsoft, Intel and HP, vowed to double their efforts at promoting more diverse workplaces.
