Square, a rising payments company, had only one person of color — an Asian man — in its 11-member executive ranks as of 2016, according to newly available data.
Square and Pinterest’s latest available employment data reveals a lack of diversity in top ranks
Have a look at the top brass.
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Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Founded and run by Jack Dorsey, the company has a market value of $12.5 billion and had a total net revenue of $1.7 billion last year.
At another end of Silicon Valley, four of the eight executives at social media company Pinterest in 2016 were people of color — two Asian males and a man and woman each of two or more races. Update: Pinterest reached out to us to say that as of October 2017, 44 percent of its leadership team (four executives out of nine) are now people of color and three are women (33 percent of its executive team).
23andMe, a DNA testing company, was the only firm of approximately 20 top tech companies that have recently released such data that had an executive lineup near gender parity. Eight of its 17 top employees were women. Even so, only one of the 17 was a minority.
The lack of diversity among the upper ranks of these companies is consistent with other tech companies, and highlights the ongoing issue within Silicon Valley of bringing in leadership that isn’t white and male.
This new data comes from an ongoing project by the nonprofit Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The project aims to create transparency about gender and race among Silicon Valley companies
The study shows for the first time the diversity stats for seven Bay Area tech companies: Square, Pinterest, 23andMe, Clover Health, MobileIron, Nvidia and View.
Using the data collected by Reveal, Recode looked at the top ranks of tech companies that have made their government diversity data public. We analyzed the racial and gender composition of executives or senior level managers, defined as people who “direct and formulate policies, set strategy and provide the overall direction,” according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Note: The Reveal data and analysis doesn’t include the Seattle-based Amazon, but we’ve added it in. We left out Clover Health from our analysis due to a possible mistake in their data.)
The data from these companies reflect the lack of racial and gender diversity elsewhere in Silicon Valley.
Twitter, for example, had no blacks or Latinos among its 47 executives. Of Amazon’s 105 executives in 2016, just one was Latino and none were black.
Facebook’s 496 executives were some of the most diverse, with 7 percent, or 35 people from underrepresented minorities, specifically executives who are not white or Asian.
Companies with more than 100 employees are required by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to fill out an annual survey that identifies the race and gender of their employees in 10 different employment categories, from laborers to chief executives.
While the data is not public, companies can choose to release their data. So far, just over 20 companies have made their surveys publicly available. (The rest of the tech companies can make their EEO-1 surveys available here and employees can discuss their experiences with diversity in tech here).
Unlike the diversity reports that tech companies release on their own, these provide actual numbers — instead of percentages — of employees by race, gender and job level, allowing for more granular comparison across companies.
The Reveal project is working toward getting more than 200 of the top Bay Area tech companies to release their surveys. The project compiled the list of 200 companies by combining the SV150, a roster of the most valuable publicly traded tech companies based in Silicon Valley (put together by the San Jose Mercury News), as well as private “unicorns” worth at least $1 billion, using data from CrunchBase and CB Insights data.
Here’s some select gender and race data from the available tech companies as a sortable table:
Share of executives/senior-level officials and managers by race and gender
Company | White male | White female | Asian male | Asian female | Latino male | Latino female | Black or African American male | Black or African American female | Total executive count |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23andMe | 53% | 41% | 0% | 6% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 17 |
| Adobe | 60% | 16% | 16% | 3% | 3% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 93 |
| Airbnb | 47% | 21% | 16% | 8% | 2% | 1% | 2% | 0% | 97 |
| Amazon | 74% | 19% | 3% | 3% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 105 |
| Apple | 68% | 14% | 9% | 4% | 2% | 0% | 2% | 1% | 107 |
| Cisco | 58% | 14% | 17% | 4% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 307 |
| eBay | 53% | 24% | 10% | 6% | 3% | 0% | 1% | 1% | 70 |
| 51% | 19% | 15% | 6% | 2% | 1% | 3% | 1% | 496 | |
| 65% | 13% | 19% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 3% | 0% | 31 | |
| HP | 62% | 21% | 8% | 1% | 5% | 1% | 0% | 1% | 210 |
| HPE | 70% | 15% | 8% | 2% | 3% | 0% | 1% | 1% | 599 |
| Intel | 70% | 10% | 14% | 2% | 1% | 0% | 2% | 1% | 106 |
| Intuit | 51% | 23% | 17% | 4% | 2% | 0% | 1% | 0% | 103 |
| 39% | 23% | 21% | 10% | 1% | 2% | 0% | 0% | 326 | |
| Lyft | 67% | 20% | 7% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 7% | 0% | 15 |
| MobileIron | 47% | 13% | 27% | 7% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 15 |
| Nvidia | 58% | 7% | 28% | 4% | 2% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 469 |
| 50% | 0% | 25% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 8 | |
| Salesforce | 62% | 19% | 10% | 4% | 2% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 237 |
| Square | 55% | 36% | 9% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 11 |
| 53% | 15% | 17% | 13% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 47 | |
| Uber | 53% | 20% | 19% | 4% | 0% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 138 |
| View | 56% | 3% | 29% | 6% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 34 |
Source: Reveal from Center for Investigative Reporting | Executive/senior-level officials and managers include individuals who plan, direct and formulate policies, set strategy and provide the overall direction of enterprises/organizations for the development and delivery of products or services, within the parameters approved by boards of directors or other governing bodies.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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