Advertisement

Twitter diversity executive to leave after making the company less white and male

Jeffrey Siminoff, Twitter’s diversity and inclusion vice president, is set to depart after the company released its 2016 diversity report.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
CREDIT: AP Photo/Richard Drew, File

Twitter’s vice president for diversity and inclusion, Jeffrey Siminoff, will step down from his post at the end of February, TechCrunch reported.

Siminoff tweeted following news of his resignation that he loved working for Twitter, but was taking a “pause for future change and loved ones.”

Siminoff’s departure is the second one this year and part of a string of executive exits in the past year. TechCrunch reported that Twitter’s head of human resources Renee Atwood left the company for “personal reasons.”

Advertisement

Late last year, Twitter lost its chief operations officer, Adam Bain, and chief technology officer Adam Messinger. The company also lost four executives in one fell swoop at the start of 2016, with many of them citing similar reasons as Siminoff for leaving: to spend more time with family.

Twitter’s high-profile departures bookend a rough year for the company, namely the failure to get acquired — partly due to its harassment problem that was exacerbated by the prevalence of white nationalists on the platform ahead of the election.

But the timing of Siminoff’s exit seems a bit odd as the company wrestles with its ongoing harassment and diversity problems. Siminoff, a former Apple executive who was criticized for being a white man in charge of diversity, released Twitter’s 2016 diversity report in January. While the company is still overwhelmingly white and male, the report showed Twitter made some small gains in hiring women and underrepresented minorities.

The most significant jump was in hiring women for leadership positions, from 22 percent in 2015 to 30 percent in 2016. Percentages for underrepresented minorities largely stayed, up two points to 7 percent in technical jobs and a 1 percent increase overall, except in the leadership category. Minority representation spiked from 0 percent to 6 percent in 2016, which seems largely influenced by Twitter adding BET CEO Debra Lee to its board of directors.

For Twitter and much of tech culture, issues of harassment or discrimination are directly related to diversity and inclusion problems. And Siminoff’s departure leaves a void when Twitter is finally finding its footing on these type of harassment issues.