Twitter appoints a VP of People Experience and Head of Diversity and Inclusion, says its current workforce is now 40.2% female, 4.5% black, and 3.9% Latinx
Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This appointment closes a two-year leadership gap. Twitter hired Apple's Jeffrey Siminoff as its first dedicated diversity VP in late 2015, then lost both him and chief HR officer Renee Atwood within weeks of each other in early 2017 — right after the company claimed it had beaten many internal diversity targets for its 2016 report. The new structure pairs a VP of People Experience with a Head of Diversity and Inclusion, splitting what was previously one person's remit across two roles.
The disclosed numbers — 40.2% female, 4.5% Black, 3.9% Latinx — mark the baseline this new team inherits. They sit well below where Twitter later reported itself: by 2021, remote work had pushed US Black representation to 9.4% and women to 44.7% globally per the company's work-from-anywhere-era figures.
First-order effects
- Two newly appointed executives now jointly own a workforce that is 40.2% female, 4.5% Black, and 3.9% Latinx — with the People Experience VP absorbing HR responsibilities that previously reported to the departed chief HR officer.
Second-order effects
- Peer companies face the same disclosure treadmill: Uber's first diversity report showed how publishing raw numbers invites year-over-year comparison, so Twitter's 4.5% Black figure becomes a benchmark rivals are measured against in their next reports.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a hire, a target claim, a departure, a re-hire — diversity leadership at major platforms becomes a structurally high-turnover role, pushing companies toward distributed ownership (People Experience plus D&I) rather than a single accountable executive.
The trend: Tech companies are institutionalizing annual workforce-diversity disclosure and dedicated executive ownership of it, even as the roles themselves prove hard to retain.