Twitter Shares Plans To Make Workforce More Diverse
By Melony Roy
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Like many tech giants, Twitter's employee profile has always heavily skewed white and male -- up to 70-percent of the workforce. To combat those stats, the social network has announced new hiring goals for improving diversity by 2016.
Following in the steps of Pinterest, Twitter has released its hiring goals for improving the diversity of its workforce.
"One of the reasons this is happening is because the tech industry is facing an incredible shortage of qualified workers," says Tracey Welson-Rossman, founder of TechGirlz -- a local nonprofit dedicated to reducing the gender gap in technology occupations. "The labor department predicts that by 2020, there will be one unfilled million tech jobs in this country."
She says it's great that they're coming out and talking about this:
"I felt that Twitter's announcement was a little more specific because they were looking at not just saying OK we include the number of women, but really more specific as to where they want to increase the number of woman."
The company wants to boost the women employees to 35-percent and 11-percent for minorities.
"For tech companies it's not just a question of it's nice to have more diversity, it's a question of actual survival of their company to be able to complete work that needs to get done," says Welson-Rossman.
In a blog post, Twitter says it wants the makeup of the company to reflect the vast rage of people who use it.
