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Uber’s diversity report shows little to no diversity at all

Add 'lack of representation' to the company's growing list of problems.

 

Samantha Grasso

Tech

Posted on Mar 29, 2017   Updated on May 24, 2021, 7:14 pm CDT

Two months into a laundry list of company scandals, including multiple accusations of workplace sexism and a CEO caught on tape belittling an employee, Uber has finally released a long-called for diversity report, and the results aren’t so glowing, either.

Echoing diversity figures of other Silicon Valley tech companies, Uber‘s report reveals the ride-hailing startup is overwhelmingly white and male, with significant albeit less-pronounced Asian representation.

Women at Uber account for slightly more than 36 percent of its workforce, yet comprise only 15.4 percent of its employees in tech. According to SFGate, that’s more than Twitter‘s 13 percent, but less than Apple‘s 23 percent, Facebook‘s 17 percent, and LinkedIn‘s 20 percent of female tech employees.

Women in leadership account for 22 percent overall, but only 11.3 percent within tech.

Aside from Asian workers, Uber isn’t doing much better when it comes to race representation. Nearly half of Uber worldwide is white, with 31 percent Asian, less than 9 percent black, 5.6 percent Hispanic, 4.3 percent mixed, and 0.8 percent other.

On the tech front, Asian and white workers have nearly equal representation (at 47.9 and 46.2 percent, respectively), but after that, minority representation takes a nosedive. 2.4 percent of mixed people work in tech, followed by Hispanics at 2.1 percent, black people at 1 percent, and other races at 0.4 percent. SFGate reports that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yahoo also only have 1 percent of black workers in tech.

Uber’s tech leadership is 75 percent white and 25 percent Asian.

Uber’s staff has doubled in the past year, with 41.2 of new hires being women. However, 46 percent of hires in the past 12 months have been white, with 28.2 percent Asian, 12.3 percent black, 7.8 percent Hispanic, and 5.1 percent mixed.

The company’s lack of diversity also shows in the report itself. Under “See who moves Uber,” an initiative that “promotes Black diversity, culture, and inclusion for all employees at Uber” is called “UberHUE.” Then there is “Los Ubers” for Hispanic employees, and under a “Shalom” heading, there is coinage of the term “Jewbers.”

According to Bay Area diversity advocate Freada Kapor Klein, Uber isn’t far behind other tech companies when it comes to diversity improvement.

“The numbers in the technical jobs aren’t great, but nobody in tech is getting this right,” Klein said in a statement according to SFGate. “Companies who have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve diversity, and hiring (diversity and inclusion) staff, are honestly not doing much better than Uber.”

Read Uber’s full diversity report here.

H/T SFGate

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*First Published: Mar 29, 2017, 11:47 am CDT