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While the gender split amongst BuzzFeed's employees overall remains relatively even, the company's staff remains predominantly white. In a diversity report released today, the company revealed that 69 percent of its employees are white.
BuzzFeed isn't just a news and entertainment company after all—it's also a tech company. And like many Silicon Valley tech giants, it touts its diversity by periodically releasing its latest diversity numbers in reports like the one it released today.
For the second year in a row, Buzzfeed emphasized to its employees and the world at large that improving diversity is an "ongoing priority." Founder and chief executive Jonah Peretti says the company is sharing its numbers "in an effort to track our progress and hold ourselves accountable to each other and the public."
But while BuzzFeed has been able to seemingly close the gender divide unlike some tech companies, it has room to improve when it comes to diversity. Google, for example, said this year that 60 percent of its overall staff is white. At Facebook, only 55 percent of the overall staff is white. Microsoft says 59.5 percent of its overall staff is white.
However, in newsrooms across the US, it's a somewhat different story. A recent survey from the American Society of News Editors found that the "percentage of minority journalists in daily-newspaper newsrooms" was around 12.76 percent. Earlier this year The New York Times' public editor Margaret Sullivan noted that "there certainly are areas of The Times that could use more diversity, including its culture critics, where on a staff of 20, there are no black critics."
"We care about diversity for moral reasons," explains Peretti in a public note, "but we also know a diverse staff is a competitive advantage that allows us to recruit from the broadest possible pool of talent and have team members with a wide range of experiences and perspectives."
To show its commitment to diversity, the company shared several graphs today that highlight its effort to continue building a more diverse staff. In addition to having more women than men at the company, one notable revelation is that BuzzFeed has more women global managers than male ones. When it comes to gender, its tech division, however, remains the starkest uneven split.
Unlike last year, the company did not share today any specific targets for continuing to improve diversity in the next year nor did it offer any plans for how it will continue to improve diversity amongst its employees.
