Despite Concerted Effort, LinkedIn’s Workforce Is Just Slightly More Diverse

After a year working to diversify its workforce, LinkedIn is seeing some improvement, albeit marginally.

The company released its most recent workforce diversity information Monday, highlighting a slight rise in the past year in the number of women working at the professional network, which is still predominantly white and male.

Women now account for 42 percent of LinkedIn’s workforce, up from 39 percent last year; women also claim 30 percent of LinkedIn’s leadership positions, a 5 percent jump from 2014.

When it comes to technical roles, however, the breakdown was nearly identical to a year ago, with a 1 percent increase in tech roles going to women and non-white employees. Men still account for 82 percent of the technical jobs at the company.

It was a little over a year ago that Google first shared its employee demographics publicly, acknowledging what many in the tech world already knew: The industry is mostly white, and mostly male. It started a domino effect at other tech giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Apple which soon shared their own, similar demographics.

What’s striking here is that LinkedIn’s numbers changed very little despite a concerted effort to diversify its workforce. The company partners with multiple organizations like LeanIn, Year Up and the Anita Borg Institute in the hope of finding more diverse employees, and while its slowly moving in the right direction, it’s clear that diversifying the tech world is going to take a long, long time.

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Apple, for instance, has come under scrutiny for its hiring practices. In a diversity report issued last August, the company said 70 percent of its global workforce are men and more than half are white. The Rev. Jesse Jackson called on Apple earlier this year, as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, to do a better job of recruiting ethic minorities. (He also made an appearance at Twitter’s annual investor meeting last week with the same request.)

Perhaps in response, Apple featured two of its female executives onstage Monday at the opening of its Worldwide Developer Conference — twice as many as in past keynotes.

Additional reporting by Dawn Chmielewski.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.