A 2014 diversity report revealed that Twitter as a company is overall 70 percent male and 59 percent white.
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In November, Leslie Miley, Twitter’s only black engineer in a leadership position at the time, resigned among a sweep of layoffs and wrote a Medium post outlining why Twitter should continue to push on diversity.
Much has been written about the social network’s lack of racial and ethnic equity throughout the company, especially in its leadership ranks.
Siminoff was not available for comment, Twitter said. Twitter was criticized this year for its diversity statistics, being accused of hiring too few female and minority employees – a criticism many other tech companies face.
However, others on social media have questioned Twitter hiring a white man to head diversity and inclusion.
Jeffrey Siminoff, Apple’s director of worldwide inclusion and diversity, is leaving the company for a similar job at Twitter, the San Francisco tech firm announced on Monday.
A new diversity boss could be good for Twitter, which has had pretty bad year around diversity and inclusion.
These goals involved increasing the role of women and under-represented minorities in different positions of tech and leadership.
In hiring Siminoff – a qualified applicant, yes, but one who enshrines the status quo – the company has basically offered a big fuck you to both its own diversity mandates and to all those who want to see tech become less monochromatic.
Twitter needs a cultural revolution so it can keep up with tough challenges within the industry. For a lot of them, having a formal diversity strategy has improved their overall business.
Currently, Twitter has several employee-led groups that help with the issue of inclusion at work, including Blackbird, whose members include Black employees; Alas, Latino and Latina employees; and TwitterOpen, those who identify as LGBTQ.
In fact, after the job cuts it was unveiled that Twitter no longer has any managers, directors or vice-presidents in engineering or product management. While he is not surprised, he is perplexed as to why Twitter execs are seemingly oblivious to their diversity issues and the potentially obvious solutions.
Luckie, who left the company earlier this year to complete his second book, Do U, and also develop Today in #BlackTwitter, a daily digest of the latest #BlackTwitter discussions, calls the hire a setback.
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For their part, Twitter has not made a statement, however it is important to note that their recent lay-offs were disproportionally people of color.
