For the first time in the history of the company, Facebook released its diversity report to the public. The results reveal a huge race and gender gap in terms of employment. 

From Recode:

For comparison’s sake, both Google and Yahoo recently said that whites and Asians make up around 90 percent of their employee bases. Google is 30 percent female, while Yahoo is 37 percent.

The publication of these reports come in the wake of pressure from Jesse Jackson on a recent Silicon Valley tour to push the industry’s largest companies to be more transparent on the lack of diversity inside their companies.

“As these numbers show, we have more work to do — a lot more,” Facebook’s Global Head of Diversity Maxine Williams said in a blog post. “But the good news is that we’ve begun to make progress…Since our strategic diversity team launched last year, we’re already seeing improved new hire figures and lower attrition rates for underrepresented groups.”

Read more at Recode

Facebook didn’t provide any details on new hiring figures or lower attrition rates. It also did not break down the age of its workforce.

The company did say that it is exploring a number of new initiatives to attempt to add more “underrepresented” groups of people to its company.

The lack of diversity is even more apparent on the tech side of the business, with both Facebook and Yahoo’s global technical staff only being 15 percent female. 17 percent of Google’s technical staff is female.

In the United States, whites and Asians combined make up 94 percent of Facebook’s technical staff.

It is imperative that people of color be equally represented in major corporations but where do we start?

Are the reports released by Facebook, Google and Yahoo a strong argument for the importance of Affirmative action?

Sound off below!