Facebook Employee Demographics: A Little Less White, a Little Less Male

Facebook released new employee demographic data on Thursday and the numbers show that while the company’s employees are still predominantly white and male, Facebook’s workforce is ever so slightly more diverse than a year ago.

Facebook’s global workforce is 68 percent male, and its U.S. employees are 55 percent white; those numbers are a tiny bit better than last year, when Facebook was 69 percent male and 57 percent white.

The push in Silicon Valley over the past few years has been toward increasing diversity in tech-specific roles; Facebook, like many of its peers, is still far from equal in those areas. Facebook reported that 94 percent of its tech roles are held by white or Asian employees, the same percentage from one year ago.

It did improve slightly in this category when it comes to gender — 84 percent of Facebook’s tech jobs are held by men, down from 85 percent a year ago. Senior leadership at Facebook remained the same from a year ago at 77 percent male. Even so, Maxine Williams, Facebook’s global director of diversity, says that while the improvements may seem small, they’re not to be taken lightly.

“Every time you see one percent [improvement], there’s huge effort that went behind that,” Williams told Re/code earlier this month.

The company has been making internal efforts to improve these statistics. It recently started testing a new program called the Diverse Slate Approach, which is somewhat equivalent to the NFL’s “Rooney Rule.” The program calls for hiring managers in specific departments to interview at least one minority candidate for each new opening. This is just a pilot program for now, but it’s possible Facebook could try and expand this company-wide down the line.

Facebook also has a specific intern program called Facebook University intended to get college freshmen — primarily women and minorities — onto the Facebook campus for summer tech internships.

“While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be,” Williams wrote on Facebook’s blog Thursday. “There’s more work to do.”

Here’s a look at the demographics in chart form.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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