LinkedIn: We're (a little) better at hiring women & minorities than Google is

Taking a cue from fellow Silicon Valley tech giant Google, LinkedIn today disclosed statistics on gender and race for its employee base. And at least for now, it gets points for having a higher share of women and minorities than Google.

Of the more than 5,400 people that the social network for business employs, 39 percent are women, compared with 30 percent at Google, according to the data in a blog post from Pat Wadors, the vice president of global talent at LinkedIn.

Bottom line: Men outnumber women at both companies — just as they do at Hewlett-Packard (see page 65 of this PDF for the latest figures), one of just a handful of tech companies that have revealed figures like this in the past.

LinkedIn also broke out race for its employees in the U.S. — 53 percent white, compared with 61 percent among Googlers.

Like Google, LinkedIn doesn’t provide global stats on race. “That’s because legal complexities prohibit us from asking about the ethnicity of employees in many countries outside of the U.S., so accurately reporting that data is not currently possible,” Wadors wrote.

LinkedIn wants to do more to improve diversity, and Wadors highlighted several ways in which the company has been trying to do that, including an annual hacking day for women.

Even so, the numbers validate something Google pointed out when it released its numbers last month.

“Minority groups are underrepresented in tech and in the U.S. education system,” the search giant said at the time.