Twitter releases diversity data

Twitter has released data on the gender make up of its staff around the world and announced a variety of measures it is taking to help increase gender diversity, an issue for which tech companies like Twitter come in for regular criticism.

Many complain that the vast majority of tech firms are predominantly white and male. High profile sexual harassment cases at web outfits like Tinder, and controversies over misogynistic emails from the founder of the application Snapchat have only helped to fuel these criticisms.

It is for this reason that Twitter posted a breakdown of the gender of its employees around the world on their blog.  It also helped to justify this push for more gender diversity in its ranks by citing research that has shown more diverse workplaces make better business decisions. Twitter also noted research that has shown companies with women in positions of leadership post better financial results.

The gender breakdown of Twitter's global staff revealed that in some aspects of the business, they have made their staff representative of the world's demographics, but in others they are still lagging. For example, on the tech side of the business, 90 percent of employees are male and 10 percent are female. However, on the non-tech side of things, its an even split between males and females.

The leadership of Twitter is sorely lacking in female representation, with only 21 percent of leadership roles going to women.

The blog posting also laid out some of the measures that are being taken by Twitter to further their mission of gender diversity. These include support for Girls Who Code, an organization whose goal is to get young girls interesting in coding, the language of the web.

Near the end of the blog post, Twitter stressed that these initiatives were just the beginning by saying, "We are committed to making inclusiveness a part of our culture."