Sheryl Sandberg: We Are Not On The Path To Fix Tech's Diversity Problem

In the past few months Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Twitter, and more recently Apple among other companies have released diversity statistics - revealing that the tech space is predominantly male and white.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, wants this to change.

But the tech industry isn't even close to making that happen, she said in a recent interview with USA Today.

The main problem isn't that tech companies don't want to hire women - it's that there aren't enough women studying computer science.

Here's what she told USA Today:

I also want to be clear that we are not on the path to get there. In tech, if women are 18% of the graduates, we are not getting to 50% of the jobs. We have got to change that.

At Facebook, women make up 31% of the entire workforce while men account for 69%. This ratio isn't unique to Facebook. Yahoo reported that 37% of its employees are female while 62% are male. At Google, 30% of workers are female and 70% are male.

Facebook, like many of the companies that unveiled their diversity stats recently, has made an effort to get more girls into coding at a younger age. The social media giant says it's partnered with Girls Who Code, a platform dedicated to teaching computer skills to girls, among other organizations.

Google recently kicked off its Made With Code initiative to help women and minorities get involved in the tech space.

According to Sandberg, the state of the industry won't change until there's a shift in education, as she said to USA Today:

At the broadest level, we are not going to fix the numbers for under-representation in technology or any industry until we fix our education system and until we fix the stereotypes about women and minorities in math and science.

You can read the full interview with Sandberg here >>