Spotify has published its latest Diversity Data Report, revealing the gender balance in senior roles and ethnicity representation across its employees.
The report – based on the firm’s June 2018 statistics – shows that, globally, women occupy 31.9% of leadership roles, down 1.6% from the last time statistics were collected two years ago.
Females make up 38.7% of employees — a rise of 3.8% on 2016.
The Spotify board has 33% female representation, which is up 33% from the previous report.
Spotify says it has some “serious work to do” to improve its diversity stats.
In the US, employee ethnicity is 50% white, which is down 15% on 2016, and 14.8% Asian — a rise of 2.5%.
The number of Spotify’s black employees in the US is up 3.6% to count for 6.1% overall, while Hispanic stands at 5.5% (up 2.5%) and mixed race 2.7% (up 2.2%).
A similar ethnicity report for the UK will be published in the company’s next annual update.
In Americas and APAC, 3% of Spotify employees have a disability (up 2%) and 11% identify as LGBTQ (up 1%). (In keeping with GDPR, these numbers don’t include Europe.)
The data has been gathered through self-identification via Spotify’s HR data tool, and anonymous self-identification via an annual survey. Some categories have up to 20% blank or missing data.
Earlier this year, companies with over 250 employees in the UK were legally required to publish their gender pay gap figures as of April 2017, which also shed light on gender disparity in leadership positions.
For the UK only, 70% of employees in the top-earning quartile of Universal Music UK’s business were male and 30% are female.
At Sony, that stood at 63.3% male and 36.7% female. Over at Warner, 74% of top-earning employees were male, with 26% female.
Abiding by the general rule that the more senior you are, the bigger your pay packet, together, that represented an average 30.9% of female representation at senior level within the offices of the UK major labels — just under Spotify’s global figure of 31.9%.
A Spotify blog post reads: While we are very happy to finally have published our data, this is really just the beginning. Our grand plan for the future is to step up as a leader in this space.
We want our band members’ diversity to reflect that of the world around us, on all levels. And we want our employees to report a strong sense of belonging, regardless of which group they belong to.
We want a climate in our organization and offices where everyone can feel welcome and valued; employees, guests, partners and creators alike.
Yet, for now, we have some serious work to do specifically around increasing the share of senior female leaders and focus on female representation in our technology organization, diversifying our racial landscape in the US, investing in the intersectional experiences of our employees, and ensuring our service is welcoming to all.Music Business Worldwide
