Google admits, we?re not all that diverse

Yesterday, Google released demographic makeup of its celebrated workforce. On its own website, at Making Google a Workplace for Everyone, the search engine giant admitted that women made up only 30 percent of workers. Moreover, workers were 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian, three percent Hispanic and two percent black – plus 4 percent mixed race and one percent “other.”

However, even these numbers are somewhat skewed. As the PBS Newshour said, “In a new internal report released tonight exclusively to the NewsHour, the company reveals, although 30 percent of Google’s total global work force is comprised of women, only 17 percent of the workers who hold tech jobs are female.” And, “Latinos make up just 2 percent of the tech work force, African-Americans 1 percent.”

Google is aware these are somewhat depressing statistics. As they contritely admit:

“We’re not where we want to be when it comes to diversity. And it is hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.

“All of our efforts, including going public with these numbers, are designed to help us recruit and develop the world’s most talented and diverse people.”

The admission is somewhat surprising. As Speed Matters reported over a year ago, most Silicon Valley firms had refused to release any race and gender data. In fact, many tech companies – including Google – “claimed to the U.S. Department of Labor that airing their diversity data would weaken their competitive standing.” To which a California law professor responded, “Knowing how many white male sales workers a company has is a trade secret? Absurd.”

But Google changed its mind, although Senior VP, People Operations, Laszlo Bock, did offer some rationale for these numbers:

“There are lots of reasons why technology companies like Google struggle to recruit and retain women and minorities. For example, women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics make up under 10 percent of U.S. college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in CS majors, respectively.”

Granted, it’s extremely difficult to change these numbers, and it requires much more than just a few targeted outreach programs. Google has invested, for instance, “$40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls.” But for a company with total assets of some $110 billion and growing, that’s not much.

Maybe Google will shame the other secretive Silicon Valley companies into releasing their racial and gender data. In any case, the industry must turn some of their vaunted creative power – and dollars – to working on this imbalance.

Making Google a workplace for everyone (Google report, May, 2014)

Google’s diversity record shows women and minorities left behind (PBS Newshour, May 28, 2014)

Silicon Valley’s diversity secret (Speed Matters, Mar. 23, 2013)

Getting to work on diversity at Google (Google official blog, May 28, 2014)

Why Silicon Valley’s Diversity Matters to All of US (Benton Foundation, May 30, 2014)