Facebook's New-Graduate Hires Help Diversify Workforce
August 02 2017 - 12:29PM
Dow Jones News
By Yoree Koh
Facebook Inc. said its efforts to diversify its workforce are
starting to bear fruit, thanks in part to an effort to hire more
women straight out of college.
The social network has made strides in increasing the percentage
of women at the company over the past year. Women now account for
35% of global employees, up from 33% the previous year, Facebook
said Wednesday. In technical roles--positions where there are
typically the fewest female, black and Hispanic employees--the
percentage of women has increased from 17% to 19%.
Facebook said 27% of all new-graduate hires in engineering were
women. That outpaced the 18% of computer-science graduates who are
women, said Maxine Williams, Facebook's head of diversity, citing a
statistic from the National Center of Education Statistics.
"I'm happy with the trends, I'm feeling good about the growth,
but I want more," Ms. Williams said.
Facebook, like its tech peers, has struggled to make its
workforce more diverse, which experts say is key to producing
technology adapted for a wide variety of audiences. Experts say
there are several causes for the homogeneity, from the universities
companies tend to favor recruiting from, to the referral hiring
programs that limit potential candidates to a narrow network of
friends that typically come from similar backgrounds.
Ms. Williams said there are also systemic issues at play. While
the company can take steps to improve its hiring process and try to
reduce unconscious bias, she attributed problems to the pipeline
issue, referring to the pool of candidates available to hire.
"The pipeline is not everything, but it's part of the issue,"
she said.
Overall, Facebook's workforce still looks overwhelmingly white,
Asian and male.
The percentage of black and Hispanic workers at the company in
the U.S. ticked up 1 percentage point each to 3% and 5%,
respectively. But their presence in technical roles and senior
leadership roles didn't budge in the past year. For technical roles
in the U.S., Black employees still only account for 1% of workers
and Hispanic employees account for 3%.
She attributes the progress, such as women accounting for 21% of
all new technical hires, to efforts such as the company's
implementation of the Rooney Rule, where hiring managers consider
candidates from underrepresented backgrounds when filling
positions. Facebook declined to disclose comparable figures for
other minority groups.
Write to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 02, 2017 12:14 ET (16:14 GMT)
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