Facebook’s First Diversity Report: Just About as Bad as Yahoo’s and Google’s

Facebook issued its maiden diversity report Wednesday, revealing that white and Asian employees make up over 90 percent of its total U.S. workforce, and globally, only 31 percent are women.

In comparison to the figures of industry contemporaries, both Google and Yahoo! reported about 90 percent of their workforces were also constituted by white and Asian professionals. With regards to gender diversity, 30 percent of Google’s workforce and 37 percent of Yahoo’s are women.

The revelation came on the heel of a demand by renowned civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, calling for a greater level of transparency about workforce diversities in large-scale Silicon Valley companies.

Expressing her thoughts on the matter, Facebook’s Global Head of Diversity, Maxine Williams, divulged in a blog post: “As the figures were shown, we still have a long way to go. The only upside is that we’ve started making progress. Since the creation of our diversity team last year, we’ve started noticing uplifting metrics with new hires and lower attrition rates for underrepresented groups.”

Remarkably, Facebook remained tight-lipped about the specifics of the new hiring data or the methods adopted to minimize attrition rates. Its refusal to disclose the workforce demographics based on age stands out as well.

In an attempt to change the landscape and integrate a more diverse group of individuals, Facebook announced that they are setting in motion various new initiatives.

This diversity issue is even more prominent in the tech-focused facet of the business. Mimicking the situation at Yahoo!, only 15 percent of Facebook’s global tech staff are women, slightly less than Google’s 17 percent. In America, white and Asian employees account for whopping 94 percent of Facebook’s tech staff.

Regardless of how it is analyzed, Facebook has quite the task ahead in terms of enhancing diversity, especially at senior management levels. According to gender-based statistics, a scant 23 percent of Facebook’s global senior workforce — staffers at the director level and above — are women. In the United States, 74 percent of senior-level positions are filled by whites and 19 percent by Asians, while Hispanic senior employees make up four percent and black employees are at a distressing two percent (Facebook later updated these figures, having initially released an inaccurate statistic).

Light edits were made in 2025 to improve clarity and relevance.