The layoffs came months after an engineer at the company raised concerns in an email to colleagues about what she said was a sexist culture, an assessment that Chief Executive Evan Spiegel later described as a “wake-up call.”
Snap, the parent company of the Snapchat messaging app, more recently has launched a range of initiatives designed to support and promote female employees.
The job cuts were part of a companywide culling that began in March 2018. Within the firm’s growth and design teams, which work closely with Mr. Spiegel and his top lieutenants, all six of the employees who were eliminated in one round were women, according to a number of people familiar with the company’s structure and the layoffs.
When some of the affected employees wrote letters asking why so many targeted on those high-profile teams were women, Snap agreed to pay at least three of them extra shares of stock and cash in addition to normal severance packages, the people said.
A spokeswoman for Snap said roughly 70% of the 218 layoffs were men, and said the company defines the growth and design teams more broadly. Under those definitions, there were nine total layoffs on those teams: six women and three men. The company also said it negotiated additional severance benefits for some male employees.
“The companywide restructuring we implemented in the first half of 2018 impacted both men and women,” said a spokeswoman for Snap. “The decisions we made when determining the people impacted had absolutely nothing to do with gender.”
The tech industry broadly has struggled to boost the number of women employees, and to shed the perception that it fosters a so-called bro-ish culture fueled by alcohol. Across the industry, women make up about 30% of employees at Silicon Valley tech firms, according to a report by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Unlike many of its tech peers, Snap hasn’t produced an annual diversity report describing the numbers of women and minority employees.
After a rocky 2018, in which Snap’s share price dropped more than 60% and user growth slowed, Snap’s business has improved of late, with the company making long-awaited strides toward profitability. Snap, based in Santa Monica, Calif., has continued to grapple with personnel issues, including the departure of more than a dozen senior executives over the past year.
Mr. Spiegel said the company is more aggressively enforcing its values of being kind, honest and creative.
“Rather than just having values, we started saying things like: ‘Hey, if you’re a top performer, but you’re not living our values, you’re not kind, then this really isn’t the right fit for you,’ ” Mr. Spiegel said at a conference in San Francisco in February.
Some women who used to work for Snap said they felt they were passed over for leadership roles and that managers instead groomed male colleagues with less experience for advancement. Some of the women who were laid off didn’t receive annual performance reviews in their years at the company, said people familiar with the matter.
In November 2017, a software engineer at Snap wrote an email to colleagues on her last day at the company saying that an engineer can be a person of color, or a woman, or a person who isn’t straight.
“I’m just done fighting for it when very few other people seem to care,” the engineer wrote in the note. Business news site Cheddar earlier reported the email. Mr. Spiegel later said the email helped him conclude the company “needed to do more and needed to do it faster.”
Snap has instituted standardized performance reviews since the layoffs, which include a way for employees to evaluate their managers, according to the spokeswoman. Snap also now requires all employees to participate in so-called unconscious bias training, which aims to teach people how to recognize their own prejudices.
Snap in the past few months has added four senior women to its executive leadership team, which is now comprised of four women and six men, according to the spokeswoman. Snap last spring held the company’s first leadership summit for women, and out of that meeting, the company launched a mentoring program for all female employees.
On Snap’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February, two of the three executives who spoke for Snap were women.
Snap also in January replaced its head of human resources, Jason Halbert, who had no previous experience in the field.
Mr. Spiegel asked Mr. Halbert to leave for his connection to a former security head who engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an outside contractor. Some Snap employees said Mr. Halbert remained a visible presence around the office after that.
A spokeswoman for Snap said that when the company announced Mr. Halbert’s departure, it said he would stay on for a period to help with the transition. His last day with the company was March 1.
Mr. Halbert didn’t reply to a request for comment.