Uber’s Diversity Report Leaves Out the Most Important Thing

After weeks of scandal, Uber released its first report Tuesday detailing the gender breakdown and racial makeup of its employees. Though welcomed by diversity advocates, the revelations weren’t that surprising: Within engineering, only 15 percent are women and 6 percent are black, Latino or multiracial, which makes Uber not that different from other tech companies, where those groups make up a tiny fraction of the technical workforce.

In fact, the more illuminating piece of data about diversity at Uber isn’t in its report at all. Retention -- the percentage of each demographic group that stays at the company each year -- reveals more about the hospitality of the workplace culture than the percentage of white and Asian men there overall. Most companies, including Uber and its peers in Silicon Valley, track it. They just don’t make it public.