Slack diversity stats shows 30% employees are non-white
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.
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.