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Slack

Slack diversity stats shows 30% employees are non-white

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By John Glenday, Reporter

September 10, 2015 | 2 min read

Slack, the messaging app for teams, has become the latest start-up to publish its diversity stats, revealing that 70 per cent of its employees are white with women making up 39 per cent of its workforce.

Slack

Ethnic diversity data shows that company-wide Asian’s account for 19 per cent of the business, African Americans 4 per cent and mixed race/other 7 per cent.

This compares favourably with other technology start-up’s such as Airbnb, where just 3 per cent of employees are black whilst at Dropbox and Pinterest the comparable figure is just 1 per cent.

Critically Slack also has a higher percentage of highly paid black engineers than its contemporaries, a discrepancy thought to arise through unconscious bias in hiring processes such as whiteboarding exercises.

Slack VP of policy and compliance Anne Toth said: “These exercises have been shown to disadvantage candidates of colour in the interview process. It’s far too early to say that there is a causal relationship between this practice and our current data for engineering specifically, but I hope that we can demonstrate over time that these practices are having a the positive impact we hope for across the board.”

The figures even reveal that precisely 10.3 per cent of Slack employees belong to the LGBTQ community.

Slack

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