UPDATE, April 30, 2018: PayPal responded to the story by noting that the company added two women and an African American director to its board of directors in 2017.
PayPal publicly released its government-mandated diversity reports for the first time Friday, showing small gains for women and people of color in its executive ranks in the past year but still an overwhelmingly white and male top management.
Whites made up 75 percent of PayPal’s executives in 2017, down from 79 percent in 2016. That’s still slightly less diverse than the average for large Silicon Valley tech firms. The average for white executives across 177 major San Francisco Bay Area-based tech companies was 73 percent in 2016, according to Reveal’s analysis.
For African Americans, PayPal counted four black women and one black man among 84 executives last year. Although that’s only 6 percent of PayPal’s executive ranks, it’s more than what a lot of the company’s peers can claim: The average for black executives in 2016 was 1.4 percent.
A delegation from the Congressional Black Caucus is visiting Silicon Valley this week – including PayPal’s headquarters – to push for equity in the tech sector. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., is part of the delegation and has urged companies to disclose their official diversity reports.
“If you’re not transparent, you’re hiding something,” she told Reveal in an interview last year.
The company also dropped some men and added some female executives, lowering its percentage of male executives from 76 percent to 69 percent last year. That’s better than average, which was 79 percent male for large Silicon Valley tech companies in 2016.
Asian women formed 16 percent of PayPal’s professional workforce last year, but they were rare at the executive level. The company had three Asian female executives in 2017 – less than 4 percent – up from one in 2016.
For PayPal’s overall U.S. workforce, the percentage of women stayed at about 42 percent. That’s higher than the 30 percent average for Silicon Valley tech firms in Reveal’s analysis.
Last year, Reveal asked 211 large tech companies headquartered in the Bay Area to release their EEO-1 forms, which show the race and gender breakdown of their workforce and are the only standardized way to compare companies. Several companies, including Pinterest and Square, released their numbers for the first time. But PayPal declined to disclose its numbers.
Reveal then filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the EEO-1 diversity reports the company had filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.
In January, PayPal initially told Reveal that it would release the numbers, but then asked the government to keep them confidential, saying disclosure “would cause substantial competitive harm.” Reveal contacted PayPal on Thursday for comment on a story about its reversal; the next day, the company posted its EEO-1 reports for the past three years.
Other major tech companies – including Oracle, Palantir Technologies and Pandora Media – continue to block disclosure of their diversity figures by calling them trade secrets. Reveal filed a federal lawsuit against the Labor Department this month for inappropriately withholding the records.
A total of 27 large Silicon Valley tech companies have released their EEO-1 reports so far. The messaging company Slack refused to make public its 2016 form but published its 2017 report earlier this month. Of the 211 companies that Reveal surveyed, 184 still have not disclosed their reports.
Will Evans can be reached at wevans@revealnews.org, and Sinduja Rangarajan can be reached at srangarajan@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @willCIR and @cynduja.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.