Amazon has released its diversity report, and not surprisingly it reveals the vast majority of employees are white males.
The company released a report on Oct. 31 entitled "Diversity at Amazon" showing 63 percent of its workforce is male and that 75 percent of managers are male.
"Our diverse perspectives come from many sources including gender, race, age, national origin, culture, education, as well as professional and life experience," said the company on its website. "We are working to develop leaders and shape future talent pools to help us meet the needs of our customers around the world."
Amazon is made up of a workforce that is 60 percent white, 15 percent black, 13 percent Asian and 9 percent Hispanic. Managers, however, are 75 percent white and 18 percent Asian. The company has a total of 150,000 employees, which is up by 36 percent from last year.
Many suggest Amazon's workforce is even less diverse then it appears and that the company failed to show the diversity of different levels within the company.
"Their general work force data released by Amazon seems intentionally deceptive, as the company did not include the race or gender breakout of their technical work force," said a statement by Rainbow PUSH Coalition, led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses."
Amazon is just the latest of several Silicon Valley tech companies that have released diversity statements in the past few months, highlighting a big lack of diversity in the tech industry. Those in similar diversity stats are Google, Twitter and Microsoft.
Microsoft released diversity data on Oct. 3 showing 71 percent of its overall workforce is male and 60.7 percent is white. Among its tech workers, 82.9 percent are male and 56.7 percent are white.
The report comes after a push from Jackson and his coalition for the company to release its diversity figures. Amazon is one of the companies that has been holding out on doing so the longest, which led to Jackson publicly calling on the company to release those figures in September.
"The numbers are embarrassing to them," said Jackson. "Their marketplace is very American. But their workplace is not."
Amazon itself suggests the lack of diversity in technology is largely because of a lack of encouragement for women and minorities to get involved in technology while growing up and attending secondary schools.
"We want to change this. We want all students to know the possibilities that await them at a company like Amazon," continued the company on its website.
