Facebook Struggles with Gaining a Diverse Employee Base, Remains Predominately White

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has voiced a desire to transform the demographics of Facebook's employee base to better echo the company's billion-plus international users.

However, Facebook's most recent diversity report revealed that white men continue to have a claim on positions at Facebook.

The online social networking service claims that diversity is central to the company's mission, observing "genders, races, ages, sexual orientations, characteristics and points of view." Additionally, they've insisted that a diverse workforce "is not only the right thing to do -- it's the smart thing to do for our business." With that said, numbers show that Facebook has not been action-oriented with diversifying its staff.

The report did show a decrease in white staff, with a minor dip of 2 percent, from 57 percent to 55 percent since last year's report. However, impressively, the number of Asian employees climbed from 2 percent to 36 percent. Yet, the Latino, black and mixed-race percentages remains astonishingly low at 4, 2 and 3 percent. In 2013, Facebook only hired seven black people, and only one hire was female.

Additionally, 73 percent of senior leadership positions continue to be held exclusively by whites. Globally, female employment has increased from 1 percent to 32 percent.

"Our work is producing some positive but modest change and our new hire numbers are trending up," said Maxine Williams, Global Director of Diversity at Facebook, in a published letter. "In addition to best practice programs we have been running in recruitment and retention, we are always trying creative approaches that tailor solutions to the challenge of increasing the diversity of our population."

According to Williams, Facebook actively looks to seize greater diversity by searching for more diversity in the talent pool to ensure that hiring managers are exposed to a range of different candidates. Apparently, they are testing the number of efforts that provide opportunities to individuals early in their college careers; they're looking to enroll underrepresented groups who demonstrate exceptional talent and interest in computer science into the Facebook University training program; and they host an inclusive culture via their revamped Managing Bias training course.

"While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it's clear to all of us that we still aren't where we want to be. There's more work to do," said Williams. We remain deeply committed to building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics. It's a big task, one that will take time to achieve, but our whole company continues to embrace this challenge."