Jeffrey Siminoff, Apple s director of worldwide inclusion and diversity, is leaving the company for a similar job at Twitter, the San Francisco tech firm announced on Monday.
Super excited to join next month as VP Diversity & Inclusion, joining an incredible team to make .
— Jeffrey Siminoff (@jmsSanFran)
Siminoff had been working on Apple s diversity efforts since September 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile, after jobs at Morgan Stanley and the law firm Riker Danzig Scherer Hyland & Perretti.
He takes over for Janet Van Huysse, who led Twitter s diversity efforts, but is leaving the tech firm after six years.
I ll always believe Twitter is a force for good in the world. After 6 incredible years, it s time for my next chapter. It s been an honor.
In August, Twitter announced its diversity goals for 2016, which included increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the company by certain percentage points.
Overall, the percentage of women at the company worldwide increased this year from 30 to 34 percent, though the percentage of female leaders barely budged. In the United States, the percentage of white employees remained at 59 percent. Asian employees slightly increased, from 29 percent of the overall workforce in 2014 to 31 percent this year. The percentage of black, Hispanic, Native American and other races were relatively the same.
But Twitter also landed in some hot water this summer after throwing a frat-themed party, which included a beer pong table and a pyramid of red cups, at the company s headquarters in San Francisco.
Some former Twitter employees, who left after the company announced hundreds of layoffs, have expressed doubt that the tech firm will be able to hit its diversity goals this year.
Leslie Miley, a black engineering manager at Twitter who was reportedly laid off but also said he planned to leave, wrote a Medium post in November about some of the challenges the company faces around diversity.
Photo Credit: Screenshot of Siminoff s Twitter profile.
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