Silicon Valley works to fix its diversity problem

Microsoft is the latest tech company to release public information on its employee diversity, and today said the percentage of its employees who are women is up compared to last year. The company said its global female workforce grew to 29 percent, up from 24 percent last year. Microsoft also said that the number women or minorities grew from 24 to 27 percent among its senior executives, and from 33 to 40 percent on its board of directors.

As with other prominent tech companies that have been releasing their diversity reports, Pandora hones in on the US when detailing its racial diversity. Here Pandora actually comes off as less diverse than others. The company is 70.9 percent white in the US, compared to companies like Twitter and Facebook, which fall at 59 and 57 percent, respectively. It also has very few black employees, just 3 percent. The figures are predictably worse in leadership roles — 84.6 percent white — while tech roles are primarily held by white employees, with Asian employees accounting for the next largest group, at 26 percent of the roles.

Pandora isn't the only tech company unveiling its diversity this week: Indiegogo did as well. It has a close split between male and female employees (55 percent male to 45 percent female), though that widens for tech and leadership positions, which women only hold 33 percent and 43 percent of, respectively. For racial diversity, white employees make up 64 percent of the company, with Asian employees following that at 23 percent. The figures are similar for tech positions, but white employees account for 86 percent of the company's leadership roles.

Apple's just released its first ever diversity report, following in the footsteps of several other major technology companies. In it, Apple notes that 70 percent of its 98,000 employees around the world are male, but that "inclusion and diversity" are on the top of the list of priorities for Apple CEO Tim Cook. The company also points out that it's been involved in several causes like donating millions to education, and sponsoring organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and National Center for Women & Information Technology.

The new metrics are primarily for the US, where the majority of its employees reside. Apple notes that more than half of its employees in non-tech, tech, and leadership roles are white. Asians come in second highest at 23 percent and 21 percent of employees the tech and leadership areas respectively. Among the company's US employees in the tech and leadership roles, hispanics and blacks come in at 7 and 6 percent, and 6 and 3 percent respectively. Apple did not disclose a breakdown of gender in the US, or in specific countries.

Copying the lead of other big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, eBay has detailed its workplace diversity for the first time. The figures released show a company that hires more women, Hispanics, and black people than its industry peers, but one that is still dominated by white and Asian men.

42 percent of eBay's 33,000 employees are women. By comparison, only 37 percent of Yahoo's and 30 percent of Google's workforces are female. But up at the top of the company, eBay's figures are less impressive: only 28 percent of the company's leaders — people at director level or above — are women. The company's tech division is even less equal, with men making up 76 percent of the workforce, but its non-tech arm is almost perfectly balanced at 49 percent female to 51 percent male.

Twitter is joining the growing ranks of major tech companies that are publishing data on diversity within their workforce. It released the gender and ethnicity breakdown of its employees today, and, unsurprisingly, they're predominantly white and male. Overall, men make up 70 percent of roles at the company; 59 percent of Twitter's employees are white, and the bulk of the others (29 percent) are Asian. "Like our peers," Twitter notes, "we have a lot of work to do."

Both the ethnicity and gender figures at Twitter are all quite similar to those that we've seen from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. Once again, black and Hispanic employees only make up a small percentage of the overall workforce, at 2 and 3 percent respectively. And in leadership roles, white employees represent an even larger bulk of the roles — 72 percent of them. The gender differential is even greater for leadership as well, with women only holding 21 percent of those positions. And the gender difference is even more striking when it comes to the division in tech-related jobs, which women hold just 10 percent of. Silicon Valley has increasingly been trying to address these imbalances, with Google shedding new light on them when it became the first to release its diversity statistics back in May.

For the first time ever, Facebook today publicly revealed statistics outlining diversity among its employees. By offering up the data, Facebook has joined a growing, transparent movement in Silicon Valley; Google and Yahoo have also released diversity numbers, and all of the companies say they're striving to do better. "At Facebook, diversity is essential to achieving our mission," said Facebook's Maxine Williams. "We build products to connect the world, and this means we need a team that understands and reflects many different communities, backgrounds and cultures." But at least for right now, Facebook's diversity figures follow disappointing trends seen across the tech industry.

Yahoo today became the latest tech company to reveal the gender and ethnic demographics of its employees, disclosing that the majority of those workers are white males. Yahoo's broken down both gender and ethnicity profiles for its 12,200 employees globally and in the US where the company is headquartered. It's also detailed those genders and ethnicities across its tech workers, non-tech workers, and leadership group, which comprises predominantly of white males.