Slack releases diversity report, records an increase since last report

In its latest diversity report, Slack, the team collaboration app, reveals stats on its own efforts towards a diverse company structure. The company’s efforts are commendable and it is thanks to people like Erica Baker, an Engineer at Slack, who has been championing the company’s efforts at addressing diversity in the company.

The report comes less than six months after its previous report as it has gotten “a lot bigger very quickly” marking a vast change in its figures. Slack has grown from 170 employees in mid year in 2015, to 290 by December and currently has 370 employees worldwide.

“All in all, our takeaway from this is that talking about diversity and inclusion keeps the issue front of mind for ourselves and our people. So we are going to keep talking about it. Of course, talk is not enough. We will continue to regularly report on our status so that we can be held accountable, and we will continue to look for ways in which we can improve,” the company said.

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The company says that it has also changed its survey methodology to allow for a wider inclusion. To obtain the data Slack conducts anonymous surveys and are voluntary. In both last year’s and this current report, the company had a 90% participation rate.

The report not only covers race and gender but how employees identify themselves as opposed to the normative prescribed identities of being a man or a woman. Since its last report, Slack has seen a drop in the number of employees who identify as women. About 43% of Slack managers identify as women and 40% of people are managed by women.

Furthermore, the number of people who work at Slack and identify as a women has increased in its global engineering team to 24% from 18%. In the US, it is 26%. The overall number of women at the company, across all departments globally, women are currently 43% of the workforce, up from 39% from the last report in September. Slack has its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Vancouver, Canada, Dublin, Ireland, and Australia.

“We are working to ensure that diversity and inclusion are fundamental components of our organization. We are trying to change the culture that can make Silicon Valley feel like an unwelcome place for many people. Part of transforming that culture includes accountability and transparency,” the company clarified in a blog post.

Slack’s black engineers has grown to 8.9% and and over 7.8% globally compared to just under 7% globally in our last report.

Other insights include that Slack has 6.9% of US technical employees and 4.4% of its total US employee population identifies as black. And these employees have roles that are self-reported but include product, design, engineering, QA and technical account managers.

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“Often not reported among tech companies is the intersection of race and gender. Looking at women within underrepresented people of color (Native, Black, Hispanic/Latina, also frequently referred to as underrepresented minorities or “URMs”) we found that 9% of our engineering organization in the US report in these categories,” the company revealed.

The other interesting data in the report are the stats on Slack’s LGBTQ population. The company reports that its global workforce that identifies as being belonging to the LGBTQ population has increased from 10% in June to 13% in December.

You can have a look at the full report here.