Groupon Is The Latest To Release Diversity Numbers

It's been a slow several weeks, but on Friday Groupon emerged as the latest in this Summer's flurry of Tech companies to release their diversity statistics. With ~10,000 employees nationwide, that's a healthy chunk of a workforce to receive numbers on.

12% of Groupon's leadership are women, and 18% of their Tech workforce is women. Those numbers I admittedly find to be shockingly bad. Even though the claimed percentages of women tech workers were also 17% for LinkedIn (~3,300 employees) and 10% for Twitter (~3,000 employees). Facebook, Salesforce and Yahoo! were all tied at 15%. Each has ~4,300, ~3,500, and ~6,200 employees, respectively. Groupon having ~10,000 employees though, I'd expect to have better numbers. Well, the only way to go from here is up!

Reporting Round-Up

Google was the first to lead this Summer's pack of diversity releases with their May 28th blog post. Google employs ~27,000 in the US, and their numbers are kind of all in the above described range, too. Salesforce was a quick second to follow, and their numbers were near identical.

Leadership is where statistics continue to remain the fuzziest to me, because almost none of these businesses have given concise (or any) parameters for the three classification buckets everyone seems to have universally adopted in reporting on job types & hierarchies—Tech, Non-Tech, and Leadership. Facebook claims 23% of their “Senior Level" folks are women, Twitter claims 21% of their leadership to be women—Pinterest reported 19% of their leadership to be women (in a ~500 employees company), LinkedIn reported 25% (~3,300 employees), and Yahoo! reported 23% (~6138 employees). 

Dropbox issues its first Transparency Report

This is an excellent and exciting step in the right direction, for a major business to establish within its corporate governance a regularly scheduled public report on an area of public accountability interest. For Dropbox, that issue is of course data privacy/security. The report itself has lots of folks on my Twitterstream up in arms with fury, over its released statistics. It's also generating some media buzz along the same lines. But, guess what? We're not guessing. We know the real numbers. That's a big risk for Dropbox to be taking. We need to support and applaud that effort. 

The commitment to hold itself accountable to its customers—regardless of probable press responses and/or customer retaliation—is un-orthodox, carries with it a lot of risk for Dropbox, but is also a risk the Tech community is ready for. Parallel to their Transparency Report, Dropbox also has posted a plain-English, short-read page that outlines its Government Data Request Principles. Upon doing further research, I also uncovered their Privacy Policy and was very surprised to find it formatted... not in all-caps, not packed with legalese, and not a gazillion pages long. Its sections are broken-up into tabs, and it's—like—usable! What can I say: warm fuzzies abound for this UX'er, upon seeing just that.