This document analyzes diversity patterns in 10 companies and 5 universities. It finds that tech companies like Twitter, Amazon and GoPro have low diversity in top management and minimal diversity initiatives. Whole Foods and Costco also have low top management diversity but high workforce diversity. The document then proposes a 3-part diversity program for Twitter to improve its inclusive culture, strengthen current diversity efforts, and increase diversity in hiring and top management. It recommends more structure, ongoing training, leadership programs for women and minorities, and objective hiring criteria. The goal is for Twitter to better represent its diverse user base and see financial benefits of diversity.

1. Katherine Cotter, Anthony Chirban, Julie Vaccaro, Teresa Wickstrom, Sarah Wright
Patterns of Diversity and Twitter
I. Patterns of diversity in companies
In order to determine what kinds of organizations tend manage diversity well and
promote it in their workplace, we evaluated ten businesses, Twitter, Whole Foods, H&M, Xerox,
Urban Outfitters, Starbucks, Amazon, General Motors, Costco, and GoPro, and five universities,
Florida International University, UCSB, UC Berkeley, IONS, and Northeastern University. We
uncovered patterns in top management and overall diversity, diversity initiatives the organization
has taken, and potential problems they have faced in managing diversity.
The tech companies we evaluated, Twitter, Amazon, and GoPro all have low levels of
diversity in top management and have made minimal progress, if any, in implementing diversity
initiatives. Twitter’s top management, the Board of Directors, has a single woman board member
and no minority members (Twitter, Inc., 2015). The company has taken a few meager diversity
initiatives in their informal networks, which will be discussed in more detail later. Twitter has
had one public discrimination lawsuit in which an older man accused Twitter of firing him based
on age (Montgomery, 2014). Amazon and GoPro have similar deficits in their top management
diversity, but have not made any known diversity initiatives or faced any discrimination lawsuits.
Amazon has two women, but no minorities on their Board of Directors (Amazon.com, Inc.,
2015), and GoPro has no women or minorities at all (GoPro, 2015).
The grocery and convenience store companies we evaluated, Whole Foods and Costco,
have similarly low levels of diversity in their top management, but high levels of diversity in
their workforce. Whole Foods has a ⅚white, male board, but they also made Fortune’s Most
Diverse list in 2013 with their workforce that consists of 43% minorities and 44% women

2. (Whole Foods Market, 2015). Similarly, Costco has only one minority group member and one
woman in top management, but they have a highly diverse workforce that is only about ⅓ white
males; the other ⅔ consists of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander
men and women (Callans, 2014). Both companies also include diversity policy statements in
their published core company policies (Whole Foods Market, 2015) (Costco Wholesale
Corporation, 2015). Although these companies appear to incorporate diversity well in their
workforces, they have both faced some difficulty managing the diversity. In 2011 Whole Foods
was accused of discrimination based on religion by a Muslim man (Ng, 2011), and in 2013 some
Hispanic employees of Whole Foods angrily alleged the company banned Spanish-speaking on
the job (Horovitz, 2013). Also in 2013 Costco was faced with problems of gender discrimination
in their promotion process (Cox, 2013) as well as accusations of age discrimination (Jordan,
2013).
The clothing stores we evaluated, H&M and Urban Outfitters, have low levels of
diversity in top management, which appears common in these types of distributors (Mandell,
2011). H&M has no minority group members in their top management, but a fairly even gender
ratio. They also have a company policy on diversity and creating equal opportunity for all of
their employees (H&M, 2015). H&M has however, faced a public lawsuit of discrimination
based on religion (Goldstein, 2009). Urban Outfitters has no minorities and only one woman on
their board, who also happens to be the CEO’s wife, which is highly controversial. Interestingly,
Urban Outfitters attempted to implement a policy that would promote the upward mobility of
women and minorities into top management, but it was rejected by 72% of their shareholders
(Wilkie, 2013). Urban Outfitters has also faced charges of sexual harassment in the workplace
that the company reportedly ignored (Renya, 2014).

3. Finally, the other miscellaneous companies we evaluated, Starbucks, GM, and Xerox,
have average to above average levels of diversity. Starbucks’ top management includes a
moderate amount of women and minorities in top management, as well as an above average
rating as a Fortune 500 company for women and minorities to work (Forsythe, 2005). However,
Starbucks has also been sued by an African American employee for allowing racial
discrimination in the workplace (Allison, 2009). GM has a fair representation of women in top
management, including a female CEO, but lacks minorities. However, GM’s diversity
achievements are evident through their outstanding diversity ratings and company-wide networks
supporting Asian, African American, disabled, LGBT, Hispanic, veteran, and women employees
(GM, 2015). Similar to GM, Xerox also has a female CEO. She is also African American, which
attests to the high level of upward mobility in Xerox for both women and minorities. The rest of
Xerox’s board of directors includes an equal gender ratio and a fair representation of minorities.
Xerox’s numerous diversity initiatives include a strict anti-discrimination and inclusion company
policy, an Executive Diversity Council, and scholarships and recruitments aimed toward
minorities. (Xerox, 2015). Xerox has faced charges of racial and gender discrimination in the
past (Mandell, 2011)(Singer, 2007), which may be responsible for inspiring their current success
with diversity.
The universities we evaluated are overall much higher in diversity than the companies.
Four of the five schools have moderately to highly diverse student populations (IONS does not),
and four of the five schools have a moderate to high level of diversity in their University Board
of Directors (Northeastern does not). Something the school who lacked a diverse student body,
IONS, and the school who lacked a diverse Board of Directors, Northeastern, have in common is
that they are both private schools. Public schools, such as Florida International University,

4. UCSB, and UC Berkeley, tend to be generally better at promoting diversity in their top
management and study body. Additionally, these schools all have campus diversity departments
and school policies expressing the tremendous value they place on diversity (Florida
International University, 2015) (Institute of Noetic Sciences, 2015) (Northeastern University,
2015) (University of California Berkeley, 2015) (University of California Santa Barbara, 2015)
II. A diversity program for Twitter: a tech company in need of diversity
In July 2014 Twitter followed the lead of similar tech companies like Google and
Facebook and made their diversity statistics public. These statistics include that Twitter’s tech
department is 90% male, their overall workforce is 59% White, and their leadership is 72%
White. Their glaring lack of diversity has generated a tremendous amount of public scrutiny, and
Twitter has vowed to create “a Twitter we can be proud of” (Van Huysse, 2014). In addition to
an improved public opinion, Twitter has the potential to immensely increase their profits if they
hire people who better reflect and understand their users. 77% of all Twitter accounts are outside
of the U.S., which means Twitter users represent a plethora of countries and cultures. However,
there is a major discrepancy between the percentage of users from a certain race and the
percentage of the Twitter workforce from that race. For example, while 22% of all African
American Internet users are on Twitter (compared to the 16% of all White Internet users), only
2% of Twitter’s workforce is African American (Harkinson, 2014). Our diversity program will
help Twitter to bridge this gap by strengthening Twitter’s reputation for managing diversity,
which will increase their ability to recruit a more diverse workforce that better represents their
users.
Making Twitter’s office culture more inclusive

5. Many Silicon Valley tech companies, including Twitter, have traded buttoned-up office
norms and suits for “laid-back” workspaces and T-shirts. A few professional people who
interviewed for jobs at Twitter have testified to this casual culture. One woman reported that
after expressing her frustration with the chaotic and unstructured engineering department at her
current workplace, the Twitter interviewer replied, “Twitter isn’t that different because we’re just
starting up and there isn’t much or anything like structure.” Another hiring candidate commented
on the apparent unstructured design of Twitter as well: “The whole company was disorganized
and my impression was that the culture was like the wild wild west” (Glassdoor, 2014). While
this shift to casual is certainly an interesting and fresh take on a professional environment, it may
not be beneficial to all employees. As we learned in class during the Healing exercise, this
“casual attitude” about business is one that is unique to the younger generation of Western
culture, and may not be comfortable or familiar to those from other cultures or other generations.
In order to make the workplace culture at Twitter more inclusive and beneficial to all, we
recommend that Twitter adopt more structure in the organization of the departments. The roles of
each employee should be clearly defined so everyone has a high level of task identity (the degree
to which they can identify the piece of work they are responsible for) that will allow them to
develop the skill variety they need in order to excel at their job and therefore increase their
feeling of task significance (the degree to which their job has a visible impact on the company or
the world). According to research done in industrial-organizational psychology on job
enrichment, this will ensure an increase in every employee’s experienced meaningfulness at
work (Hackman, 2014). This will also allow Twitter to have more specific criteria to use for pay,
promotions, vacation time, etc. Additionally, this will surely be beneficial to running a more
effective and a more efficient company. That being said, Twitter can certainly retain their “laid-

6. back” workplace if they wish by maintaining open and non-conventional workspaces (rather than
the traditional cubicle) and allowing things like casual dress in the office and flextime work
scheduling.
Improving Twitter’s current diversity efforts in informal networks: creating structural
integration
Twitter has already shown some initiatives toward enhancing diversity in the informal
networks of the company. In charge of these initiatives is Janet Van Huysse, Twitter’s current
Head of Leadership Development and Inclusion, who is in the gender minority as a female at
Twitter. For Huysse, the first step in creating a more diverse climate at Twitter was the creation
of employee-led groups concerning minority groups like WomEng (women in engineering),
SWAT (super women at Twitter), TwUX (Twitter women in design), Blackbird (Tweeps of
color), TwitterOpen (LGBTQ folks) and Alas (Latino and Latina employees). According to
Huysse, she feels these inclusive groups have helped the environment of the company
tremendously to “make Twitter a more awesome place to work.” They have also teamed up with
various organizations, hosted events like Girl Geek Dinners, and supported organizations like
Girls Who Code (Van Huysse, 2014).
While these efforts are useful and certainly help Twitter to foster diversity in their
workplace, they may be ghettoizing diversity rather than integrating and promoting it throughout
the entire company. In order to ensure that is not the case, we recommend that Twitter develop
company-wide diversity training to educate all employees on diversity. This training should be
ongoing, it should be lead by a specific diversity committee and leader, it should be supported by
the top management of the company, and it should include a follow-up to gage the effectiveness.
When diversity awareness becomes a primary company goal, the existing employee-led groups

7. will serve more as an additional support system for minority employees. Additionally, offering
employees flextime work scheduling and childcare benefits will help every employee to feel
valued (Cox, 1993).
Creating a more diverse Twitter top management
The current top management at Twitter, the Board of Directors, is almost entirely White
males. The only exception is Majorie Scardino, the first female Board member who was added
only in late 2013. Beyond the Board of Directors in the Executive Team, there is also only one
female, Vijaya Gadde, an Indian woman who was promoted to the position in 2013. Gadde
seems to be part of a general trend at Twitter when it comes to filling managerial and executive
positions: the women are promoted from lower positions in Twitter while the men are actively
sought out and brought in from other companies. She also happens to be the only non-White
member of Twitter’s Executive Team (Twitter, Inc., 2015).
Twitter can learn from other major companies who have successfully increased the
upward mobility in their company to allow people to be promoted to executive and managerial
positions regardless of age, gender, or race. One such company is Accenture, who has developed
and trained “client-centric women” to help them compete for top management positions. This
generated a net revenue of 30 billion dollars in 2014, which means there is a clear financial
incentive for diversity (Mandell, 2011). Helping women to thrive as leaders may be as simple as
recognizing that leadership skills don’t all conform to the stereotypical male ones; they can
include skills like developing strong client relationships. This requires a company to recognize
the existence of second-generation gender bias, which creates a context in which women fail to
reach their full potential because only male leadership qualities are used as criteria for promotion
evaluations, women are denied honest feedback because managers are afraid to hurt their

8. feelings, women are advised to take lower jobs to better accommodate their families, and women
are not socialized to successfully compete in the world of men (Ibarra, 2013). Another company
who has taken action to support women and minority leadership is PwC, whose Diamond
Program is designed to specifically mentor high ranking minority employees (Mandell, 2011). If
Twitter took similar actions to these companies and helped women and minorities to develop
leadership skills that may differ from the status quo, we believe there will not only be more
women and minorities in top management positions, but they will identify more with their
leadership roles.
Modifying Twitter’s hiring process to welcome diversity
Hiring is something that Twitter claims is vitally important to them. Former Director of
Recruiting Oliver Ryan said, “It’s one of the most important things we’re doing.” In fact, Twitter
is one of the few Silicon Valley tech companies with an in-house recruitment team. Interestingly,
Twitter is in a constant state of hiring people, and the entire company is involved in this process.
Twitter encourages its current employees to take part in recruiting new potential employees,
which could be exacerbating Twitter’s diversity problem. Current employees follow and retweet
job postings to all their friends from Twitter’s job recruitment accounts @jointheflock,
@TwitterU, and @TwitterEng, and because Twitter’s current employees are mostly young,
White males, these postings are being sent to their young, White males friends. This may explain
why Twitter seems to always be hiring “more of the same.” Additionally, the nonspecific hiring
qualifications may be problematic because they do not ensure that all potential candidates are
receiving an equal opportunity for hiring. The Former Director of Recruiting says that Twitter is
mostly “looking for passion” (Hale, 2010). According to research on managing diversity and
eliminating discrimination in the workplace, using such ambiguous employee qualifications may

9. lead to a conscious or unconscious bias toward only a certain kind of employee (Brief, 1997).
We recommend that Twitter use more specific hiring criteria that reflects the current needs of the
company, as well as using hiring efforts that will penetrate the limited friend circle of current
Twitter employees.
It may be appropriate for Twitter to consider using monetary goals to encourage hiring
diversity because there are real financial benefits in a diverse workforce, especially for them as
they try to adequately cater to the needs and interests of their diverse userbase. An example of a
company who does this well is Sodexo, who increases incentive for management to hire diversity
through bonuses. These bonuses are given whether or not they meet any business goals (Mandell,
2011).
We believe that through creating a culture that benefits all employees equally, integrating
diversity into the company through diversity training, promoting the upward mobility of women
and minority group members, and adopting unbiased hiring criteria and strategies, Twitter will
develop a more positive reputation for managing diversity, which will increase their ability to
recruit a more diverse workforce.
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