'Monoculture': Left Smacks Facebook for Lack of Staff Diversity

CNN has published a critical article on Facebook’s slight minority workforce gain, which saw the number of Hispanic and Black employees increase by 1 percent each.

Facebook’s Hispanic workforce rose 1 percent to a total of 5 percent, while the company’s Black workforce rose from 2 percent to 3 percent in 2017.

CNN pointed out, however, that there were no increases in the company’s coding, developing, and engineering departments, where Hispanics currently comprise 3 percent and Black employees 1 percent.

“Facebook’s latest diversity report is a stark reminder of the gulf between the goal of a multiracial workforce and the company’s current monoculture,” declared CNN Tech on Wednesday. “Tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook started voluntarily releasing the reports in 2014 to indicate their progress solving a long-standing problem in the technology industry. The effort is praised by diversity advocates as a means of benchmarking the company’s workforce and identifying what efforts are working.”

It isn’t clear why CNN refers to Facebook as a “monoculture” when according to their diversity report, the company’s employees are 49 percent White and 40 percent Asian.

“In three years, the reports have become more robust but the results are still largely underwhelming,” they continued. “They tend to contain language that’s sterile and prescriptive. Most can be reduced to something like: ‘We aren’t where we’d like to be.’ That’s from Facebook’s global director of diversity Maxine Williams in Wednesday’s post about the new report.”

In an interview with CNN, Y-Vonne Hutchinson, the founder of “inclusion consultancy firm” ReadySet, called the slight increase “disappointing.”

“At this rate, it would take them more than a decade to hire black and Latino technical talent on par with their graduation rates,” claimed Hutchinson. “It is telling that numbers for the same group in leadership has remained flat.”

In June, CNN also criticized Google’s diversity report, complaining about the number of white men who are currently employed there.

175 former and current CNN employees are currently suing the news network, alleging racial discrimination.