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LinkedIn’s workforce is a little more diverse than it was a year ago

It’s still mostly white, mostly male.

A crowd of people shot from above, mostly caucasian, outside, holding a banner that says 300,000,000 In.
A crowd of people shot from above, mostly caucasian, outside, holding a banner that says 300,000,000 In.
LinkedIn

LinkedIn on Tuesday became the latest major tech company to release its workforce diversity metrics. The results: LinkedIn employees are mostly white and mostly male, especially in leadership and tech positions.

But the company’s workforce is ever-so-slightly diversifying. Women account for 20 percent of LinkedIn’s technical jobs, up from 18 percent last year. And women also hold 35 percent of LinkedIn’s leadership positions, up from 30 percent in 2015, and 25 percent in 2014. That’s a notable jump.

A donut chart showing that LinkedIn’s employees are 80% male, 20% female.
LinkedIn’s tech jobs are primarily filled by men.
LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s ethnic diversity is roughly the same as it was last year and the year before: 94 percent of its U.S. tech workforce is either white or Asian, down from 95 percent last year but the exact same breakdown LinkedIn reported in 2014.

Update: LinkedIn’s small diversity improvements may be even smaller than we thought. The company has changed the way it categorizes tech roles since last year, which means the data it shared this year can’t be clearly compared to last year’s demographics. So we don’t know for certain whether or not LinkedIn’s tech team is more diverse than it was a year ago even though the numbers look better.

LinkedIn says that it’s trying, though. The company says it’s no longer just recruiting from the nation’s elite colleges, and in May implemented a version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule “with the goal of having a diverse candidate slate for every role we are hiring for,” the blog post reads. (The Rooney Rule requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for key team openings, like head coach.)

“We will continue to strive to do better,” the company wrote in a blog post.

LinkedIn is not the only tech company struggling to diversify its workforce. Facebook’s numbers look similar. So do Google’s and Twitter’s. But they all claim to be making diversity a priority, even if it’s not yet visible in the numbers.

A bar graph showing that the LinkedIn employee makeup is 35% white, 59% male, 3% Latino, 1% black, 2% two or more, and less than one percent “other.”
LinkedIn’s tech jobs are filled by mostly white and Asian workers.
LinkedIn

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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