Twitter is among Silicon Valley tech firms that have pledged to make their male-dominated workforce more diverse, but a recent frat-themed party at the company s headquarters sent a different message.
A photo of the party, which included a beer pong table, keg and a sign that read Twitter Frat House, surfaced on social media Tuesday and a group called Global Tech Women then tweeted out the picture.
Silicon Valley US: is having a party for employees. .
— Global Tech Women (@GlobalTechWomen)
Twitter apologized for the event.
This social event organized by one team was in poor taste at best, and not reflective of the culture we are building here at Twitter. We ve had discussions internally with the organizing team, and they recognize that this theme was ill-chosen, a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to SiliconBeat.
The company along with others in Silicon Valley including Facebook is facing a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by one of their ex-employees. In March, Tina Huang, who worked for Twitter as a software engineer between 2009 and 2014, alleges in a lawsuit that the company s promotion process favored men.
About 70 percent of Twitter s workforce are men and about 30 percent are women, according to the company s diversity numbers in 2014. The company hasn t released its diversity numbers for this year yet.
Photo Credit: A sign is posted on the exterior of the Twitter headquarters on February 5, 2014 in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
