Twitter VP Apologizes For Diversity 'Blind Spot'

Twitter recently saw an engineer publicly step down from his post due to dissatisfaction with the way the tech giant treats minority employees and the effort to increase diversity. Since then, a top representative of the company has responded, apologizing for its shortcomings and promising to do better.

Early this week, former Twitter engineering manager Leslie Miley wrote a post on Medium diving into the diversity problem at the tech giant.

He had suggested to the Senior VP of Engineering Alex Roetter that he focus on diversity in engineering, to which Roetter counter-suggested that Miley create a tool to figure out what candidates they were receiving based on their last names. Miley wrote:

His rationale was to track candidates thru the pipeline to understand where they were falling out. He made the argument that the last name Nguyen, for example, has an extremely high likelihood of being Vietnamese. As an engineer, I understand this suggestion and why it may seem logical. However, classifying ethnicity’s [sic] by name is problematic as evidenced by my name (Leslie Miley). What I also found disconcerting is this otherwise highly sophisticated thinker could posit that an issue this complex could be addressed by name analysis. (For reference, here is a tool that attempts to do that. With Jewish or African/African Americans, this classifier scored 0% on identifying these groups in Twitter engineering). While not intentional, his idea underscored the unconscious tendency to ignore the complex forces of history, colonization, slavery and identity.

Miley quit shortly after that meeting, asking how, in good conscience, he could continue to work at an organization that so profoundly misunderstood diversity.

Roetter has since responded to Miley’s post with his own, also on Medium.

“I realize that we have blind spots, myself included. One of mine is that I have a tendency to default to engineering-driven, quantitative solutions,” he wrote.

“I want Twitter to be a place where all employees feel comfortable raising questions about diversity. That hasn’t always been the case, which is unacceptable,” Roetter continues, noting that some of the comments attributed to him are inaccurate.

In August, Twitter set a number of diversity-related goals, which demonstrate the current homogeneity of the staff. The goals include increasing women in the company to 35 percent (and women in tech and leadership to 16 and 25 percent respectively), and increasing “underrepresented minorities” overall to 11 percent (and in tech and leadership to 9 and 6 percent).

“Twitter and our industry must make faster progress on the issue of diversity,” Roetter continued, outlining a number of specific steps the company would be taking.