Tesla’s report shows minorities make up 60% of US workforce

Tesla Inc. said minorities and others from underrepresented communities make up more than half of its employees in the US and a third of its directors and vice presidents, according to its first-ever report on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Black, African-American, Hispanic, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native communities collectively represent 60% of the company’s US workforce and 33% of its senior managers, the company said via a blog post late Friday night. In the US, Tesla operates an auto plant in Fremont, California, a battery plant near Reno, Nevada and a solar facility in Buffalo, New York.

“We are proud to be a majority-minority company, and we are proud to report that our business reflects the underrepresented communities that have struggled to break through the roadblocks to equal opportunity,” according to the report. Black and African American employees make up a 10th of its US workforce and “many of our programs in 2021 will focus on increasing Black and African American representation, especially in leadership, while continuing the upward trend in new hires and promotions,” it added.

As part of that work, Tesla says it will recruit at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, and has a relationship with Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas as it prepares to launch Gigafactory Texas.

The Palo Alto, California-based maker of electric cars and energy products is hiring for numerous positions as it expands its global footprint and builds factories in Austin and Berlin. Tesla has over 60,000 employees globally but has never publicly disclosed its U.S. diversity statistics until now, making it a bit of an outlier in Silicon Valley.

Tesla said that Asian employees account for 21% of the US workforce, and Hispanic and Latinx employees are 2%. Women make up just more than one in five of its US employees, a group that’s typically underrepresented in the tech and automotive industries.

“We recognize we have work to do in this area,” according to the report. “We are taking active steps to increase our outreach to women and build an inclusive culture that supports their development and retention. Increasing women’s representation at all levels, especially in leadership, is a top priority in 2021.”