After Controversial Frat-Themed celebration, Twitter Says it’s going to Make diversity A priority

Twitter came beneath fireplace last Tuesday when its earnings group threw a frat birthday party-themed happy hour, complete with beer pong, crimson Solo cups, and a Greek alphabet-impressed sign that read “Twitter Frat home.” on the grounds that Twitter is presently weathering a gender discrimination lawsuit brought with the aid of a former worker, the birthday celebration was ill-prompt, to assert the least—however more importantly, it hit too with regards to house given the male-dominated panorama of Silicon Valley.

“This social adventure organized by using one staff used to be in negative taste at highest, and not reflective of the tradition we’re building right here at Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman informed Fusion in a statement. “we have now had discussions internally with the organizing workforce, and they acknowledge that this theme was unwell-chosen.”

For a tech company like Twitter—which, much like its peers within the trade, has a terrible track report of gender and racial inclusion—the lapse in judgment simply drove home the point that range needs to be higher addressed.

Re/code reports that, at an all-arms meeting on Thursday, an worker wondered aloud why diversity wasn’t treated as a “firm-wide intention.” meantime CEO Jack Dorsey cited that it might be going forward, although Twitter has no longer in the past mandated that each one groups center of attention on diversifying the corporate as a complete, in line with Re/code:

whereas Twitter teams are required to set objectives each and every quarter known as OKRs, an acronym that stands for “goals and key results,” diversity-particular OKRs have by no means been company-vast and they’ve never been mandatory. it appears, if Dorsey follows thru along with his message, they soon will probably be.

it is unclear what tangible steps the company will take to tackle this shortcoming—but it surely indisputably has a protracted technique to go. When Twitter embraced transparency ultimate summer time and made its range numbers public, it revealed that 70% of the corporate’s employees have been male, and just 5% of its team of workers was once black or Latino. in the tech sector, issues had been much more bleak: 90% of workers have been male, and a whopping ninety two% of tech workers had been Asian or white.

These issues are on no account specific to Twitter: fb, Google, and different tech giants have additionally shown dismal variety numbers prior to now 12 months.

[by the use of Re/code]