eBay becomes a little more diverse

eBay’s efforts to diversify its workforce improved the company’s gender and ethnic makeup by 1 percentage point since figures were last reported in July 2014.

The online marketplace’s global employee roster remains largely white (60%, down from 61% last summer) and male (57%, from 58%).

Similarly, women in leadership positions grew a point to 29%, although the number of women in tech and non-tech roles remained the same at 24% and 49%, respectively.

The overall makeup of the company in the USA also changed slightly: Asians, blacks and Hispanics make up 25% (up 1 point), 8% (up 1 point) and 5% (unchanged). Asians gained 1 point in leadership positions to 24% (blacks and Hispanics stayed level at 2% each). In tech roles, Asians were up 1 point to 56% of eBay jobs.

Among minorities in non-tech roles, blacks lead with 11%, Asians are at 10% (last summer, Asians led the category). Hispanic non-tech employees remain unchanged at 7%.

eBay has 33,000 employees worldwide. This year, the peer-to-peer e-commerce giant will break into two companies, eBay and its payments division, PayPal.

“As eBay and PayPal separate into two independent companies during 2015, both plan to provide data updates for 2016 to give each of them a full year to collect diversity data,” spokesperson Abby Smith says. “It’s important though that each company has a full year of data.

“We will give each company some time to chart its course, so the next time we’ll report (diversity) findings is for 2016,” Smith says.

Ever since Google was first among the major tech companies to release a full slate of employment data, many others have followed suit as pressure has increased from a range of groups — most notably Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition — that contend it is morally and financially sound for tech firms to look more like their customers. According to the U.S. Census, the country is roughly 77% white, 17% Hispanic and 13% African American.

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• Tags:
• Diversity in Technology
• eBay
• Silicon Valley

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