Pinterest's workforce is mostly white and male too
While the vast majority of the social network's users are women, only 19 percent of the company's leadership is female.
Pinterest released diversity data on its workforce on Thursday and guess what? It's pretty much just as white and male and most other tech companies. This news seems a tad paradoxical considering the service is overwhelmingly used by women.
Overall, 40 percent of Pinterest's employees are women, but when broken down into specific categories, only 19 percent are in leadership and 21 percent are in engineering, product management, and design.
The numbers for racial diversity are even more stark -- 50 percent of Pinterest's employees are white, 42 percent are Asian, and just 2 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are black.
These numbers are pretty much right in line with other social media companies. Facebook's workforce is 31 percent female, 57 percent white, and 34 percent Asian; while Twitter appears to have the biggest bro-force in social media with only 30 percent women, 59 percent white, and 29 percent Asian. Google also recently released its diversity numbers, which are similarly white and male -- 30 percent of its employees are female, 60 percent are white, and 34 percent are Asian.
Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are just a few of dozens of tech companies that have recently become more transparent about the diversity of their workforces. While making this information public is seen as a step toward greater diversity, Pinterest's numbers still reflect a technology industry largely dominated by white males.
Studies show that more women have been hired at tech firms in the past few years, but their roles are not at the executive level. A study by CNN Money last year showed that women in tech dominated the "Administrative" category (which combined clerical workers, as well as skilled and unskilled laborers), but were significantly less represented as officers or managers.
As far as people of color, the Associated Press reported in May that about 7 percent of tech workers are black or Latino, while 13.1 percent of the US population is black and 16.9 percent is Latino.
Pinterest admits that it has work to do to bring more ethnic diversity to its company.
"While we've made some progress in diversifying gender at the company, we haven't done as well in representing different ethnicities," Pinterest software engineer and tech lead Tracy Chou wrote in a blog post, "and we're focused on getting better."
The company has already started to try to bring up its female numbers in the engineering category. According to the data released Thursday, 32 percent of Pinterest's engineering interns are female this year.
"As we look ahead, we've put particular focus on inclusion efforts in hiring earlier in the engineering pipeline," Chou wrote.