Twitter is joining the growing ranks of major tech companies that are publishing data on diversity within their workforce. It released the gender and ethnicity breakdown of its employees today, and, unsurprisingly, they're predominantly white and male. Overall, men make up 70 percent of roles at the company; 59 percent of Twitter's employees are white, and the bulk of the others (29 percent) are Asian. "Like our peers," Twitter notes, "we have a lot of work to do."

"We have a lot of work to do."

Both the ethnicity and gender figures at Twitter are all quite similar to those that we've seen from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. Once again, black and Hispanic employees only make up a small percentage of the overall workforce, at 2 and 3 percent respectively. And in leadership roles, white employees represent an even larger bulk of the roles — 72 percent of them. The gender differential is even greater for leadership as well, with women only holding 21 percent of those positions. And the gender difference is even more striking when it comes to the division in tech-related jobs, which women hold just 10 percent of. Silicon Valley has increasingly been trying to address these imbalances, with Google shedding new light on them when it became the first to release its diversity statistics back in May.

Aside from striving for a workforce that it can be "proud of," Twitter says that promoting diversity makes good business sense too. "Research shows that more diverse teams make better decisions, and companies with women in leadership roles produce better financial results," Janet Van Huysse, a human resources lead at Twitter, writes in a blog post. Van Huysse notes that Twitter has a number of internal efforts to promote inclusiveness and that it's partnered with several organizations to the same end. "We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity," she writes, "and we are no exception."