Airbnb recently released its 2016 diversity report, showing a 57% white workforce (last year, Airbnb was 63% white) and 43% female workforce — a 3% decline from last year. Although Airbnb lost some female employees, the company noted that it has doubled the number of women in senior leadership roles and increased the number of women in technical roles.
Regarding underrepresented minorities, Airbnb’s workforce is 6.5% Hispanic and 2.9% black. Next year, Airbnb’s goal is to increase its overall percentage of employees from underrepresented employees from 10% to 11%.
In order to get there, Airbnb says it has expanded its efforts to recruit people from historically black colleges and universities, as well as from schools with large Latino populations. Airbnb also recently started working with diversity recruiting startup Jopwell to source candidates from underrepresented groups. Lastly, Airbnb is implementing a new policy to require that women and people of color are included in the candidate pools for all of Airbnb’s senior level positions.
This report comes at a time when Airbnb is in the process of addressing issues of racism and discrimination on the home-sharing platform. In September, Airbnb unveiled its plan to tackle those issues, which entailed guaranteeing short-term bookings for people who have been discriminated against, deemphasizing the use of user photos, blocking out availability if a host claims a space is taken when it really isn’t and working to increase the number of Instant Book listings, which don’t require hosts to approve specific guests, to one million by the beginning of 2017.
Airbnb also released a new non-discrimination policy, developed under the guidance of former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Meanwhile, Airbnb is suing several cities including New York, San Francisco, Anaheim and Santa Monica.