Facebook internal employee survey results show LGBT representation for the first time
By: John Hollywood
Facebook, the Menlo Park, California social media behemoth recently shared its third diversity report in two years. The survey of employees shows its internal demographics have shifted very little, with Hispanics and African Americans still making up a small fraction of the company’s workforce.
According to the report, Hispanics represent around 4% and African Americans just 2% of Facebook's U.S. workforce; percentages that have not changed much since 2014.
The stats also show that employment for these two groups falls far fall below other industries' averages. Facebook has made slightly better progress on gender diversity, but when you look at the specs you will see that nearly seven out of 10 employees worldwide are men.
What's new in this year's survey is information on the sexual orientation and gender identity of employees.
As reported by USA Today:
“A voluntary survey of U.S. employees showed 7% identified as being lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender or asexual, higher than the 4% who identified as being LGBTQ in a recent Credit Suisse survey of 270 companies with openly LGBTQ staff as leaders or senior managers. Facebook said 61% of employees responded to the survey.”
The company does try to offer an inclusive environment for LGBT employees. They host an official “Facebook Diversity Page” on their own platform featuring gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees’ events and happenings.
The company actively appears to recruit individuals who identify as LGBT and makes its presence known at various gay pride events throughout the year. Facebook has historically been a strong supporter of LGBT rights and a major supporter of same sex marriage.
Earlier this year, a survey by Payscale was published on the happiness factor for different employees among 18 major tech companies. The results demonstrated that workers at Facebook by far experienced less stress and more satisfaction that the other companies survey.
It should be said that the large majority of these super-happy workers are guys — young guys. According to Huffington Post, the median age of Facebook’s workforce is 29 years old. Just 32 percent of Facebook workers are women, according to self-reported data.
A quick glance at Facebook’s own newsroom page reveals the company has 13,598 employees on the payroll as of March 31, 2016. At the time of this post, Facebook reports it has over 1.09 billion active daily users.
