On Wednesday, Amazon announced a commitment to consistently release data about how many women and people of color it hires. In response to a question from Reverend Jesse Jackson at the company's annual shareholder meeting, the ever-bb-faced Jay Carney (remember him from the White House?) told investors that Amazon would update the information for the public every year.

This is a big deal.

Getting tech companies to reveal how many women and people of color they've hired used to be a very difficult thing to do. Every organization with more than 100 employees is required to file detailed records about that sort of thing to the federal government (in something called an EEO-1 form), but they're not required to make the information easily accessible to the public. So, for a long time, especially while the industry was increasingly being criticized for its lopsidedly white, male power dynamics, tech companies kept that data private.

In 2011, CNN both filed public records requests with the Department of Labor and tried to get top tech companies to release that data voluntarily. The FOIA results came back with lots of holes, and tech companies overwhelmingly hid from the glare. Last year, Mother Jones received the results of a successful FOIA on Silicon Valley's top 10 tech companies. The data from 2012 highlighted a real problem, there for anyone to see in the numbers: 83 percent of those companies' leadership positions were filled by white people and men, and black and Hispanic people only occupied one percent and three percent of leadership positions respectively. Zooming out, tech companies' overall workforces were 70 percent male and 63 percent white. The general California workforce, on the other hand, was 55 percent male and 44 percent white.

Last year, Jackson also ramped up a campaign of his own to try and get tech companies to share their data and develop more inclusive policies. Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition reached out to 25 tech companies in 2014 to try and get them to release their data, and 24 of them eventually did. Among the 24, Amazon released its diversity data for the first time, too.

Some tech companies have been more aggressive than others about creating more diverse workforces. Intel, according to a spokesperson from the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, has made diversity data transparent for a decade. The same spokesperson said that Intel has tied executives' compensation packages to diversity goals and aims for full representation among their employees by 2020. Amazon's first-ever data release last year, on the other hand, followed a pack of other big tech companies making similar moves.

Now it's diversity data update season.

"Publishing it the first time, you're sort of breaking the seal. It's a huge step," explained Leigh Honeywell, a developer and founder of the Open Diversity Data project, a website that tracks tech companies' transparency on racial and social diversity. "Publishing it year over year, that's going to allow people to track data, change over time, which companies are making progress. I think one of the issues that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the ratio of women in leadership and management roles. Is that changing over time?"

With Amazon, it's also important to compare who's occupying leadership positions versus who makes up their warehouse workforce, Honeywell added. According to Amazon's 2014 data, 71 percent of the company's mangers are white and 75 percent are male. Within the company's overall workforce, 60 percent are white and 63 percent are male.

"For all we've complained about the pipeline, about workplace promotion issues for women and people of color in tech, we have so much privilege compared to slinging boxes in a sweltering warehouse," she said. "I think that's the biggest thing for tech workers to reflect on."

Labor practices in warehouses and along Amazon's supply chain remain a serious concern for workers, consumers, and shareholders. But Amazon appears less willing to make those transparent.

Amazon shareholders proposed a motion on Wednesday that would have had the company publish a report on its human rights risks, including warehouse conditions and suppliers' labor practices. "Amazon's focus on ever increasing targets and efficiency in its fulfillment centers has reportedly caused significant medical problems for its employees including heat stroke and heat exhaustion," the proposal read. But Amazon recommended shareholders vote against the motion, according to EcommerceBytes.com, and it didn't pass. (Nor did three other proposals on "shareholder proxy access; disclosure about Amazon's political contributions; and publication of a sustainability report and a human rights risk assessment," reports EcommerceBytes' Ina Steiner.)

Both Honeywell and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition said that getting companies to actively develop local talent for more highly paid positions—instead of spending money on H-1B visas to bring in already-trained workers from other countries—would also constitute one meaningful step toward diversity beyond basic transparency. But hopefully more companies keep publishing their data, too.

This post has been updated.