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MPWMost Powerful Women

Microsoft Cuts Women’s Jobs and Ends Up More Male Than Last Year

By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
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By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
Down Arrow Button Icon
November 24, 2015, 11:27 AM ET
SKOREA-US-IT-MICROSOFT
A woman walks past a billboard for Windows 10, the latest operating system from US software giant Microsoft, during a launch event in Seoul on July 29, 2015. Microsoft is aiming to build lasting relationships with the operating system Windows 10 seen as critical to reviving the fortunes of the once-dominant tech giant. AFP PHOTO / JUNG YEON-JE (Photo credit should read JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images)Photograph by Jung Yeon Je—AFP/Getty Images

Microsoft’s latest diversity report, released on Monday, shows mixed progress on gender diversity within the technology giant. First, the good news: Microsoft’s (MSFT) senior leadership team has a higher percentage of women than ever before (27.2%), and the company has just nominated two high-profile female executives to its board, bringing the total number of women on the board to three (out of 11). Now, the bad: The overall percentage of women at the company has shrunk from 29% last year to 26.8% this year.

That decline was caused by the company’s decision to shrink its international factory workforce, wrote Microsoft’s global diversity and inclusion general manager Gwen Houston in a blog post. “The workforce reductions resulting from the restructure of our phone hardware business impacted factory and production facilities outside the U.S. that produce handsets and hardware, and a higher percentage of those jobs were held by women,” she wrote, adding that it was a “strategic business decision” that lead to fewer female employees.

Yet women didn’t lose ground only in Microsoft’s factories. The company’s representation of women in tech jobs declined from 17.1% to 16.9%; non-tech from 44.5% to 41.7%; retail from 37.3% to 34.9%; and direct production factories from 60.8% to 57.9%.

However, Microsoft is making an effort to hire more women, which “is encouraging as we think about [the company’s] future,” as Houston puts it. Globally, 30.6% of university hires were women, up from 27.7% last year. Also within university hires, the number of women in technical/engineering roles increased from 23.7% to 26.1% this year.

Microsoft was of the least gender diverse of nine major players in Silicon Valley, according to Fortune‘s analysis of 2014 EEO-1 data—the standardized report filed with the U.S. government; the only company with a lower percentage of women in the workforce was Intel.

In racial and ethnic diversity, Microsoft is making slow, but noticeable progress: the company is now 59.2% white, compared to 60.5% last year. Within leadership, the company is 70.% white, compared to 72% last year. Blacks and latinos now make up 8.9% of the company, compared to 8.5% last year.

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By Valentina Zarya
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