During one of the largest technology events of the year, the House Judiciary Committee’s Wednesday hearing on antitrust in Big Tech, Snapchat released its highly anticipated diversity report detailing what many critics have already expected: Snapchat has a diversity problem.
The report showed that Snap is trailing behind many of its Silicon Valley cohorts when it comes to employing women and people of color: Women only make up 7% of the company’s leadership team, and Black people only represent 4.1% of Snapchat’s entire workforce.
The report comes nine years after Snap initially said it would look into its own diversity statistics. In a report from Business Insider published in June, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel delayed the release of the diversity report because he thought it reinforced the stereotype that Silicon Valley is not diverse — something Wednesday’s report clearly shows.
White people still make up the largest proportion of those who hold executive and vice president titles at the company (74.2%), while Asian and Black employees hold less than 3% of those roles, respectively. Snapchat said that the overall representation of Black and Hispanic employees of the company has grown 0.5% since 2019, and said it is committed to reaching new diversity goals within the next three years. Snapchat plans to double the number of women on its workforce by 2023, as well as double the number of its underrepresented groups by 2025.
The release of the report was timed to coincide with the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on antitrust issues within Big Tech, where four of the biggest tech CEOs from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple were set to testify.
