Twitter appoints its first black board member
Debra Lee, chief executive officer of BET Networks, becomes the third woman on Twitter's board of directors.
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Your support makes all the difference.Debra Lee, the chief executive officer of BET Networks, has been appointed to Twitter’s board of directors, becoming the social network’s first black board member.
Twitter announced the decision on Tuesday, making Lee the third woman on the company’s board of directors. The 61-year-old media executive also sits on the board of Marriott International and WGL Holdings.
"Twitter has been and continues to be a transformative service for the media landscape and the world,” Lee said in a statement. "I'm excited to help Jack, Omid, and the rest of the Board continue and further that impact in the years to come."
The social network has been widely criticized for its lack of diversity, as only 2 percent of its employees are black, a flaw that Twitter has modestly promised to fix by increasing the number minorities on staff from 10 percent to 11 percent. Interestingly enough, Twitter is fueled by its black community of users, 40 percent of African-Americans aged 18 to 29-years-old who are online use Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to 28 percent of white users who tweet.
"Debra's addition strengthens our Board immensely," Omid Kordestani, Twitter's executive chairman, said in a statement. "She's a highly respected leader in the media industry with decades of experience, and has a clear passion for Twitter as a service and a company.”
In 2015, Leslie Miley, one of the only senior employees of color at the company, was laid off during planned downsizing. Miley passed on his severance package to speak publicly on the company’s overwhelmingly white workforce.
“Twitter’s issues with growth and engagement and the issues with internal diversity are somewhat related,” Miley wrote on Medium. “The over-reliance on a limited number of schools and workplaces for talent has caused a type of group think to dominate. Any change would be approved by people who all think alike. There was very little diversity in thought and almost no diversity in action.”
Only four percent of Twitter’s engineering and product team are black, Hispanic or Latino while 13 percent are women, according to 2015 data released on the company's blog.
Lee joins media mogul Martha Lane Fox and former Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino, who will become Twitter’s lead independent director later this month. Scardino was appointed by Twitter in 2013 following public outcry over the company’s mall-only board of directors.