Microsoft releases workforce demographics report

Last year, Satya Nadella drew a lot of criticism, when he made a controversial statement while answering a question on the diversity in the technology industry.  His comments that “women shouldn’t be asking for raises and must rather wait for good “karma” to reward them”, raised eyebrows on the lack of diversity not only in Microsoft but the whole Technology industry.

Nadella apologized for his comments and further promised to release diversity stats of Microsoft employees. Nadella said that the diversity stats would be released through company’s federal Equal Employment Opportunity form or EEO-1 which breaks down race, ethnicity and gender of employees by job classification.

Microsoft released their EEO-1 last month on 18^th December; however the announcement went almost uncovered due to the holiday season.  Also, since the stats weren’t sent out in any press release the data wasn’t really traced on the company website as well.

So, let’s take a look at the demographics report released by Microsoft for US. The report shows a detailed breakup of Microsoft’s US workforce based on race, color and gender.

Below are some of the highlights from the report.

Compared with the last year numbers disclosed by Microsoft, following are major conclusion worth mentioning.

1. Microsoft increased its workforce by 3.6%, going from 58838 to 60961. The female employment grew by 0.4 percent. Females which accounted for 23.90% of the total workforce in 2013 grew to 24.31% in the year 2014.
2. Microsoft’s female workforce is found more in non-tech jobs where they occupy 44.5% of the total workforce. In other categories, like core tech and leadership, females occupy just 17.1 and 17.3 percent respectively.
3. While Microsoft is doing its bit to increase diversity in its workforce the real numbers reveal that it needs to do much more before the numbers look comparable.

Click here to see the download the report.