Roger Fingas
Twitter has officially appointed a new VP of Diversity & Inclusion, Jeffrey Siminoff, hiring him away from an identical role he held at Apple.
Siminoff was Apple's director of worldwide inclusion and diversity from Sept. 2013 until this week, according to his LinkedIn profile. The changeover was announced on Twitter by the social network's human resources lead, Brian Schipper.
TechCrunch noted that he previously served similar functions at Morgan Stanley, and was one of the founders of the LGBT organization Out Leadership.
In 2015 Twitter dealt with serious problems with the way it was managing diversity — particularly with Leslie Miley, who was the company's only black engineer in a lead role until he was laid off during October's round of job cuts, even after already planning to leave on his own at the end of the month. Miley said that he clashed on how to handle diversity issues with Twitter's senior VP of Engineering, Alex Roetter, and also observed that with his departure there were "no longer has any managers, directors, or VP's of color in engineering or product management."
Indeed, in an official report released in August, just 1 percent of Twitter's U.S. workforce was listed as African-American, while 3 percent were identified as Hispanic. Worldwide only 13 percent of its workers were women.
By comparison, Apple data released around the same time counted blacks and Hispanics as representing 8 and 11 percent of the company's U.S. workforce, respectively. Women accounted for 30 percent of Apple's global labor.
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
Andrew O'Hara
21 Comments
That's a position Tim doesn't need to fill.
Good. It should be 100% about someone's qualifications, not their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, hair color or anything else. If you have to hire someone to run 'diversity & inclusion' at your company you're doing it wrong.
It doesn't look too good for the head of diversity being a white-bread male. I'm sure out there somewhere is a half-black, half Native American, handicapped transgender lesbian woman veteran that needs a job doing what Jeffrey Siminoff was doing.