White, Asian guys rule at Twitter

Twitter acknowledged Wednesday that it has been hiring too many white and Asian men to fill high-paying technology jobs, like several other major companies in Silicon Valley.

The lack of diversity in Twitter’s workforce of roughly 3,000 people was spelled out in data released by the San Francisco company behind the popular short messaging service.

The breakdown revealed that 70 percent of Twitter’s worldwide workforce is composed of men. In the U.S., nearly 90 percent of Twitter’s workers are either white or Asian. Racial data wasn’t provided for the global workforce.

Things lookrf even worse for computer programming positions and other technology jobs that tend to pay the highest salaries. Just 10 percent of those jobs are held by women worldwide. More than 90 percent of Twitter’s technology jobs in the U.S. are being handled by whites and Asians.

Twitter Inc. vowed to change its ways.

``We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity,’’ Janet Van Huysse, the company’s vice president of diversity and inclusion, wrote in a blog post.

Like some other technology companies, Twitter is supporting programs that teach women how to program computers and introducing internal training programs aiming to eliminate biases.

AP