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Twitter aims to be 'world's most diverse & inclusive tech company'
Tue, 17th Mar 2020
FYI, this story is more than a year old

This month Twitter revealed the latest statistics from its Inclusion - Diversity Report March 2020, highlighting its dramatically changing workforce in the United States and worldwide.

Twitter's vice president of people experience - head of inclusion - diversity, Dalana Brand, says that the new decade brings a new approach to public conversation about diversity and inclusion.

Last year 47.1% of its new hires were women, up 1.4% from 2018. In the US, 15.7% of new hires were black or Latinx.

Currently, Twitter's global gender makeup includes 42.5% women, 56.8% men, and less than 1% that identify as non-binary or non-conforming. Women make up 24.1% of global technical roles, while 74.4% identify as men. In global leadership roles, 35.8% identify as women, and 63.9% identify as men.

Brand says that That Twitter is on a journey to be the world's most diverse and inclusive technology company – and it has a roadmap of how to get to that point. She says Twitter needs to be bold, move fast, and get it right.

She explains that the company asked two initial questions: What would it take to realise the vision, and how long would it take to get there?

“While women currently make up 42.5% of our workforce, we're committing that by 2025, at least half of our global workforce will be women. We want women to be represented across our global business, so we've also set targets for representation across technical roles (42%) and leadership (41%),” she says.

While ambitious, Brand is confident that Twitter can achieve those goals, particularly as diversity and inclusion ‘has never been more important' for the company.

Workforce representation targets have helped to boost accountability, investment, the company's organisational alignment, and transparency.

“While goal setting has been a point of controversy in diversity and inclusion, we know representation targets work, because we've seen it in action,” says Brand.

Brand adds that Twitter is launching an inclusive hiring program to further make progress in workforce representation.

The company will also leverage its global business resource groups to introduce an allyship program to bring the groups closer together.

Twitter's supplier inclusion program will also expand to include ‘more communities and regions'.

“At year end, we'll share a comprehensive report on all the activities that contributed to our progress in 2020. Radical transparency drives accountability––to each other and all of you,” Brand concludes.

Twitter is promoting its efforts through the hashtag #UntilWeAllBelong.