Twitter’s White-People Problem
Will the company become a
leader in reforming its workforce, or a case study for how the tech
industry’s relentless whiteness destroys innovation, too?
by Donovan X. Ramsey
Twitter
January 6, 2016
The Nation
January 6, 2016
The Nation
(Reuters / Kacper Pempel)
DeRay McKesson joined Twitter in the spring of 2009 at the insistence
of a friend who thought it would help him be more effective in his role
as student government president at Bowdoin College. “She said that it
was going to be the new wave of communicating with people,” says
McKesson. His first tweet—like most of ours—was awkward, directed to a
friend telling her she was “pretty great.”
Five years later,
McKesson, with about 1,000 followers, was monitoring Twitter from his
home in Minneapolis. He was rocked by the news of the killing of Mike
Brown and outraged by the police force’s militarized response to
protesters. He packed up his car and tweeted, “en route to Ferguson.”
Today, McKesson is a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter
movement, due in part to his adept use of Twitter to report live from
the scene of protests and to communicate with media, his more than
272,000 followers, and even presidential candidates.
“I think Twitter is an incredible platform,” says McKesson. “I want to see it succeed.”
McKesson and other users of color have actually done quite a bit to
help Twitter succeed. Over the past few years, the company has remained
relevant thanks in part to Black Twitter, an informal network of black
users whose interaction on the platform broke the news around Ferguson,
has been credited with fueling the historic success of television shows
like Scandal and Empire, and consistently injects jokes, grievances and
issue campaigns from black America into mainstream media. Blacks and
Latinos make up around 30 percent of Twitter’s active users, and a
recent Pew poll found that both groups use the platform at higher rates
than their white peers.
But while Twitter the platform is bustling with all types of racial diversity, Twitter the company is alarmingly white.
“The central issue is the tenacious myth that Silicon Valley and tech more broadly are perfect meritocracies.”
Twitter isn’t alone. Most of the biggest tech companies in Silicon
Valley are overwhelmingly white and male. While blacks and Latinos
comprise 28 percent of the US workforce, they make up just 6 percent of
Twitter’s total US workforce and six percent of Facebook employees. The
number drops to five percent at Google. The statistics are startling
considering the increasingly important role the technology sector plays
in the American economy. Tech firms employed nearly six percent of
private sector workers in 2014 and the industry is responsible for a
little more than seven percent of the US GDP.
When diversity
activists began campaigning a few years ago for tech companies to
disclose their employee demographics, the truth was revealed. What
resulted was a lot of handwringing over the state of diversity in tech
and some commitment from companies, including Twitter to do better.
Sadly, few companies have moved the needle. But for Twitter, that
failure could be its undoing. Worse, for would-be tech workers, if a
company with Twitter’s user profile can’t get diversity right, there’s
little hope for the sector overall.
When Leslie Miley left his
job at Twitter last year, the company’s number of black employees fell
by two percent. That’s because Miley, as Twitter’s only black
engineering manager, was one of just 49 black members of the company’s
nearly 3,000-person US team.
On his way out, Miley made it clear
that the tech company’s resistance to cultivating a more diverse
workforce, one representative of the country and its users, was indeed a
major factor in his decision to leave. He refused a non-disclosure
agreement, along with a sizable severance package, so he could speak out
on the tech giant’s internal struggles with racial diversity. In a
November post to Medium, Miley detailed his efforts to convince Twitter
higher-ups to hire more black engineers, and the pushback he received.
Miley says hiring-committee meetings became contentious when he
advocated for candidates of color. According to Miley, he and other
members of Twitter’s black employee group, Blackbirds, were also kept
out of meetings between the company’s executives and diversity advocates
like Jesse Jackson and former NAACP head Ben Jealous. A particularly
low point of his time at Twitter, Miley wrote, was during a conversation
regarding diversity with Alex Roetter, Twitter’s senior vice president
of engineering, in which Roetter allegedly told him, “Diversity is
important, but we can’t lower the bar.” Roetter has since publicly
apologized for the comment.
“Not only were we as a company not
doing things about diversity, but the employees who did want to take a
more active role were denied the resources to actually make anything
happen,” says Mark Luckie, another black Twitter employee. Luckie, who
worked for three years at Twitter as the manager of the journalism and
media department, says he witnessed virtually no executive buy-in for
diversity initiatives.
“A lot of the diversity
initiatives—community service, guest speakers—originated from within the
employee resource groups,” Luckie says. “In some cases, there was
executive support, but not many of the initiatives came from the top
down. To me, that sends a message to the company that diversity isn’t a
priority.”
“I’ve learned that a person’s personal conviction doesn’t always translate to how they lead a company.”
Miley argues that the company’s homogeneity is stunting its growth.
Twitter has a reported 320 million active users in comparison to
Facebook’s 1.5 billion and Instagram’s over 400 million, and user growth
at Twitter has been growing slowly. As a result, the company’s value
has dropped from $31.4 billion in 2013 to about $20 billion currently.
To reverse the trend, experts say Twitter needs to either find more
users or increase engagement by the users it has now.
“Twitter is
an excellent case of finding product-market fit, then losing it,” says
Miley. “Twitter found it because it served a purpose, and it’s lost it, I
think, because it doesn’t have diversity in who’s building the product.
You end up with groupthink, where everybody is from the same
background, thinks they’re brilliant and have roughly the same ideas.”
Miley was a part of a diverse team at Twitter that he says proves his
point. His first project as the engineering manager was to fix Twitter’s
“mute” option, a feature that allows users to filter from their
timelines unwanted tweets, such as the kind of harassment and personal
attacks that many prominent women have experienced on the platform.
“Twitter released a version in the past that did not go over well. They
were so badly received by critics and the public that they had to be
rolled back. No one wanted to touch the project,” says Miley. So he
pulled together a team from across the organization, including women and
people of color. “Who better to build the feature than people who often
experience abuse online?” he asks. The result was a new “mute” option
that was roundly praised as a major step by Twitter to address bullying
and abuse.
Research supports the argument that diversity drives
innovation. In fact, a study by the Center for Talent Innovation
published in the Harvard Business Review found that employees of firms
with diversity are 45 percent more likely to report a growth in market
share over the previous year and 70 percent more likely to report that
the firm captured a new market. Ironically, a 2015 study published by
the MIT Sloan School of Management also found that ideas submitted by
Twitter users with more diverse Twitter networks rated higher than those
of users with more homogeneous followings.
To be sure, Twitter
has been engaged in a lot of conversation around diversity, and some
modest action. The company released its workforce representation
statistics in 2014 in a blog post aptly titled, “Building a Twitter we
can be proud of.” The post, by former Twitter Vice President of
Diversity and Inclusion Janet Van Huysse, outlined the company’s
efforts, which included recruiting at historically black colleges and
universities and partnering with organizations that promote diversity in
tech. Van Huysse’s 2015 follow-up post added actual diversity goals:
increase “underrepresented minorities” to 11 percent of their overall US
workforce; nine percent in tech roles and 6 percent in leadership
roles.
Twitter executives were all unavailable for comment. A
press representative did, however, offer a statement. “We’re committed
to making substantive progress in making Twitter more diverse and
inclusive,” it reads. “This commitment includes the expansion of our
inclusion and diversity programs, diversity recruiting, employee
development, and resource group-led initiatives.”
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But many believe that the best chance for a change at Twitter is a change of leadership, in particular the return of its co-founder Jack Dorsey, who recently came back to the company to take the helm as CEO after being fired in 2008. It’s rumored that Dorsey is planning to retool Twitter with a focus on diversity all the way up to its eight-member board of directors, which happens to include just one woman and one person of color but six white men, three of whom are named Peter. More than anything, it’s Dorsey’s individual commitment to racial equity that gives some hope. “In my conversations with Jack, he comes across as authentic and authentically interested in Twitter’s black users,” says Miley.
“I met Jack on West Florissant last fall,”
says DeRay McKesson of encountering the Twitter co-founder during the
Ferguson protests. “In all of the conversations I’ve had with him, it’s
been clear to me that he both understands issues of racial equity and
justice and that he’s committed to acting on these issues.”
In
November, after Miley’s departure, McKesson was invited to Twitter by
Blackbirds. He joined the group for a lunch meeting. “It felt like
family,“ he says. “In many of my conversations,” he adds, “people
expressed their struggle with how the company has done some things,
mixed with their faith in Jack now that he’s returned.”
After lunch, McKesson sat down for a Q and A session with Dorsey, which the BlackBirds also organized.
“I can’t explain it. But when I hear Jack talk about the platform,
about the core of Twitter, it reminds me of why I love Twitter so much,”
McKesson says. “This is more than a tool to him, there’s a magic in his
voice when he talks about it. And I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s
real.”
Twitter parted ways with Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity, after six years. She’s been replaced by a white man.
Not everyone is sold, though. When asked about the potential for a more
diverse Twitter under Dorsey, Luckie says, “Maybe.” “It’s a weak
‘maybe,’” he adds. “I’ve learned that a person’s personal conviction
doesn’t always translate to how they lead a company. So, we’ll just have
to wait and see if Jack will be the savior of diversity at Twitter.”
Freada Kapor Klein has been working for many decades to increase
diversity in corporate America. As the founder of the Level Playing
Field Institute, she’s consulted throughout the tech industry. She has
given presentations at Twitter on the topic of hidden bias and even
attended some of the meetings to which Miley says he and the Blackbirds
weren’t invited. “Let me just say, having done three talks there, I
never met Dick Costolo,” says Kapor Klein of Twitter’s recently departed
CEO. “I’ve also presented at Square, and Jack Dorsey not only attended,
but he sat through the whole thing, in the first row and asked
questions,” she says. “From everything I’ve heard about Jack and
experienced, I think he’ll have a different stance.”
That stance,
she explains, has to be rooted in an understanding that the challenge
of diversifying a workforce does not typically reside in candidates and
employees of color, but in the bias of those in charge. “The central
issue to the lack of diversity in tech is the tenacious myth that
Silicon Valley and tech more broadly are perfect meritocracies,” says
Kapor Klein. “The implication of that is that there’s something wrong
with African Americans, Latinos, and women from all backgrounds, as
opposed to there being something deeply biased about tech.”
The
data suggest she’s right. There are plenty of qualified candidates of
color, despite assumptions that hiring them would mean “lowering the
bar.” Eighteen percent of all computer-science graduates in 2012 were
black or Latino, according to the National Center for Education
Statistics. Further, 11 percent of all recipients of bachelor’s degrees
in computer science or computer engineering from prestigious research
universities are black or Latino, according to data from the Computing
Research Association. Still, those groups constitute, on average, just 5
percent of technology workers in Silicon Valley.
Kapor Klein, for one, says she’s cautiously optimistic that big tech companies like Twitter will make much-needed changes, but believes that ultimately most of the progress in the industry will come from start-ups and smaller, scrappier companies.
One company that has taken an
aggressive approach to diversity is Pandora Media, the folks behind the
music streaming service. The Oakland-based company valued at $4 billion
puts up slightly more representative racial diversity numbers than
Twitter, but leads the tech industry in gender diversity with a near
50-50 split between male and female staff.
“My approach to
diversity is about cultivating mindsets within the company wherein
diversity can be seen as an opportunity to be a much better business,”
says Lisa Lee, Pandora’s senior diversity manager. “We are working for
diversity in the company, not just because it’s a nice-to-have thing,
but because it’s a part of what we have to do as a business if we want
our product to actually reach everyone.”
Without some drastic
intervention, it seems diversity will remain just a buzzword at
companies like Twitter. When it comes down to brass tacks, the reality
is that in order to make any significant strides in increasing the
racial diversity of its workforce, Twitter would have to spend money to
grow the staff, with a focus on hiring people of color, or let some of
its white employees go. Neither of those options seems likely at this
point.
At the end of the year, Twitter parted ways with Janet Van
Huysse, its VP of diversity, after six years with the company.* She’s
been replaced by Jeffrey Siminoff, a white man.
Correction: A
previous version of this story stated incorrectly that Janet Van Huysee
had been VP of diversity for six years. Rather, that is the term she had
been at Twitter.
Donovan X. Ramsey is a multimedia journalist whose work puts an emphasis on race and class. Donovan has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic and GQ, among other outlets. He's currently a Demos Emerging Voices Fellow.
