Facebook’s diversity statistics haven’t changed significantly since 2018, according to the firm’s 2019 Diversity Report, released Tuesday. The number of its global women employees went up 0.6 per cent, while the number of Black and Hispanic workers in the U.S. went up 0.6 per cent. In a blog post, Maxine Williams, global chief diversity officer, wrote that in the next five years, the firm wants at least half its workforce to be “women, people who are Black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islanders, people with two or more ethnicities, people with disabilities, and veterans.” Currently, around 43 per cent of its U.S. employees are from underrepresented groups. (The Logic, Bloomberg)

Talking point: Facebook fell just behind the tech industry median in employing Black and Latino executives, managers and professionals, according to a 2018 Reveal investigation. This year, though it’s diversifying its overall workforce, diversity in its technical jobs (which require specialized STEM skills, like engineering) is still lacking—Black and Hispanic people have just five per cent of jobs in the U.S. division, up one per cent from 2014. That lack of racial diversity has had negative effects on the company’s work culture—in November 2018, former employee Mark Luckie published a blog post saying Facebook was “failing its black employees and its black users.” It’s also affected its platform. In December 2018, a report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russian hackers disproportionately targeted Black users on Facebook, causing the NAACP to call for a week-long boycott of the platform and its subsidiary, Instagram.