Silicon Valley companies are being pressured to add some diversity to their mostly white, male workforces -- and this time, it's coming from a grassroots hashtag campaign on Twitter.

Twitter users have coalesced around the hashtag #RealDiversityNumbers to encourage technology companies to expand the makeup of their workforces -- and as a way simply to express their frustrations and commiserate over the lack of quantifiable change in Silicon Valley, as USA Today reported.

Where are the #RealDiversityNumbers?

Just a year after a wave of workforce diversity reports across the industry laid bare how homogenous and exclusive major technology firms' employee bases are, the latest numbers recently released by companies like Google and Facebook have little bottom-line progress to show.

For example, Google's report last year revealed that 70 percent of its workforce was male, with only 9 percent employment of underrepresented ethnic minorities (61 percent of its staff was white and 30 percent Asian). The numbers for women and minorities only decline further when looking at technical or leadership roles in the company.

This year, Google's transparency report revealed no statistical change in gender or ethnicity across the company's over 50,000 employee base, despite launching several initiatives and investing over $100 million towards a more diverse "pipeline" of talent in the past year.

In particular, Google, Facebook and others have yet to show notable increases in the single-digit employment rates for Latinos, blacks and workers with a mixed-race background.

A Diverse, Grassroots Exchange

For Silicon Valley, an industry based on and driven by hard data, the lack of quantifiable, bottom-line progress in diversifying the workforce is the implied theme behind #RealDiversityNumbers. Former Google employee Erica Baker, who is now an engineer at Slack (and is also known on some platforms as Erica Joy), invented the hashtag.

What's particularly interesting about the hashtag is it has people talking, suggesting ideas and sometimes just venting in a forum that is more diverse than the usual public conversation on the subject. That exchange normally takes place only between media, official Silicon Valley diversity executives and (oftentimes) the Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Those rallying around #RealDiversityNumbers include activists, interested onlookers and, especially interesting, some of the few people with underrepresented backgrounds working inside the industry:

Besides seeing it as an expression of discontent with Silicon Valley, technology companies could benefit from treating #RealDiversityNumbers as a public brainstorming session to better their efforts, as rhetorical (but sometimes practical) questions have become the format most have gravitated to for their #RealDiversityNumbers tweets: