Facebook, dominated by white guys, tells others how to diversify

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook's own diversity data reveals that the company's US employee base is just 2 per cent black; Hispanics make up 4 per cent. Photo / Getty

Facebook has announced that other companies can use its internal diversity training. But is this a case of "Do as I say and not as I do?"

As Silicon Valley's biggest companies continue to reveal some fairly embarrassing truths about their workplace diversity - or rather, their lack thereof - Facebook this week pulled back the curtain on what it's doing about them: It made its retooled internal diversity training public. But it also announced that other companies may freely use and adapt the training themselves.

This week, the sprawling social network shared Managingbias.fb.com, which gives the public and other companies a peek inside Facebook's company-wide training on the subject of recognising and fighting biases. The site features seven pretty dry, TED Talk-style videos that cover a handful of issues, including the way mothers and women are perceived in the workplace. The public can also download the slide presentations used in the videos, which conspicuously avoid the words "racism" and "discrimination" in favour of "bias."

So why does this feel like a case of "Do as I say and not as I do?"

Facebook's own diversity data, released last month, revealed that the company's US employee base is just 2 per cent black; Hispanics make up 4 per cent. There was no change from the previous year. Women hold just 16 per cent of the company's tech jobs, up one percentage point from 2014. White and Asian workers make up 94 per cent of tech staff this year, just as they did last year. And since last year, there was was no change in the number of black employees in senior-level jobs.

Companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google began releasing their workplace demographics en masse last year, and the numbers, both for gender and ethnicity, show the companies' hiring and retention is far behind the demographics of the general population. The Wall Street Journal calculated that industry-wide, women made up 28 per cent of the tech-world workforce. This year, LinkedIn and Yahoo each reported that blacks and Hispanics make up 6 per cent of their staffs.

After LinkedIn's efforts to increase its gender diversity, the company reported that 42 per cent of its US employees were women - up 3 percentage points from the previous year.

But other companies still struggle: Twitter, which announced last year that blacks and Hispanics collectively made up 4 per cent and women made up 30 per cent of its staff, is facing heat this week for hosting a "frat party" for employees, all the more noxious because it's being sued for gender discrimination by a female software engineer who argues that the company's promotion process favours men.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer. Photo / Bloomberg News, Erin Lubin

Facebook acknowledges it has far to go before its staff begins to resemble the very people who use its service. In announcing Managingbias.fb.com, Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, wrote:

"To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook. Diverse teams have better results, so this is not only the right thing to do - it's also good for our business."