Twitter says that its vision is to become the world’s “most diverse and inclusive tech company,” but the company’s relatively homogeneous workforce still mirrors the broader industry’s, and doesn’t fully reflect the community that it serves.Take, for instance, the popularity and influence of Black Twitter. Aboutare African-American, though they represent just 14% of the total U.S. population, and 40% of African-Americans are on Twitter.
“The stakes are incredibly high and we don’t have the luxury of time or incrementalism. We have a unique responsibility to be bold, move fast–and get this right,” Dalana Brand, Twitter’s head of inclusion and diversity, writes in a blog post. For Twitter, that means committing to new diversity goals. By 2025, the company pledges to have women comprise half of its global workforce, 42% of technical roles and 41% of leadership positions. The company also set a 25% target for the representation of minority ethnic and racial groups–specifically black, Latinx, Native American, Alaskan or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or multiracial–and is launching an Inclusive Hiring Program, although no details were given on when that initiative will begin.
Later this year, Twitter plans to publish its progress on workforce representation of military veterans, employees with disabilities and LGBT+ workers for the first time. Since introducing diversity targets in 2018, the company’s global representation of women has increased by 4% and the figures for black and Latinx employees in the U.S. has climbed by 2.4% and 1.5%. In 2019, nearly half of all new hires were women, 47.1%, and 15.7% of U.S. hires were black or Latinx.