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Microsoft’s workforce diversity revealed, and it’s (still) a man’s world

Microsoft releases its employment diversity numbers, and the results are what you'd expect.

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After numerous half-met requests, tech giant Microsoft has finally released a detailed report about the diversity breakdown of their employees. The results reflect what most people already knew or suspected about the tech industry as a whole: low numbers of women and people of color.

Requests for more employment transparency came after heated backlash from critics in November 2013 regarding Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s brazen comment that women shouldn’t ask for raises, but rather have “faith in the system.” Nadella quickly redacted his remarks after numerous fingers pointed to the fact that, in the United States, this “system” is the same one that pays women an average of 78 cents to every man’s dollar -- as low as 66 cents to the dollar in some states.

While Microsoft had previously released a bar-graph breakdown of their workforce, in addition to launching a diversity-hyping website, persistent requests pushed them to make public the federally-mandated Equal Opportunity form (EEO-1), which they did just after the New Year.

The EEO-1 report breaks down a company’s employees by gender, race, and job category. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft employees clock in largely white and male.

71 percent of the overall workforce is men, 29 percent women. Even among Latino employees (3,035 in total, roughly 5 percent of the company’s 60,961 employees), men outnumber women almost three to one. Among those who fill the company’s 144 executive positions, 100 are white male, 18 Asian male, 5 Latino male, and 2 black male. In contrast, 16 white and 2 Asian females hold the same rank.

It should be noted that these numbers show an increase in diversity from last year’s EEO-1 report, albeit a nominal one. Latino employees grew by half a percent, and Black and Asian employees grew by similar figures as well.

The common response to allegations of limited diversity in the tech world is that there simply aren’t the same number of female and minority candidates to fill the positions. After a big media call-out last summer, big tech players agreed to publish more numbers about diversity in their offices. Google was one of the first and most eager to acquiesce. Numbers were shown, and tech leaders showed humility and openness to address to issue. But as The Atlantic reported at the time, these numbers have been available for years, and it will take more than tallying the totals to make the figures budge.

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