After being in the headlines for a slew of diversity woes in past years, Twitter wises up and hires Candi Castleberry-Singleton as its new vice president of inclusion and diversity. The new hire is an attempt by the social media platform to reflect the user demographics in its workforce.

In February of this year, the former VP of Inclusion and Diversity Jeffrey Siminoff stepped down after holding the position for roughly a year and in 2015, Janet Van Huysse held the position. For the last two years, the company hired white people to fill this vital role as critics accused the company of being soft on protecting minorities from harassment. Most notably, the harassment comedienne and actress Leslie Jones endured from far-right trolls drove her off the platform for a while.

Castleberry-Singleton has worked in similar positions before at Motorola where she was vice president of global inclusion and diversity. As well as at Sun Microsystems where she led the Global Inclusion Center of Expertise, per USA Today.  

"I'm so excited to join the team at Twitter to lead inclusion and diversity efforts for employees and the Twitter community," Castleberry-Singleton said in a statement. "I look forward to bringing what I’ve learned to Twitter."

At this point, it is common knowledge that black people make Twitter what it is. We constantly produce brilliant commentary that fuels and brings much-needed traffic to websites across the Internet. And the numbers back it up.

The Pew Research Center released figures showing 28% of Internet users who are African American use Twitter. That is eight percent more than white users accounted for. But black employees only make up three percent of Twitter's workforce which was pointed out by a former engineer, Leslie Miley, years prior. 

Here's hoping she brings much-needed change to the popular meeting place of the web's most interesting figures.

Photo: Giphy

 

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