Google Lacks Diversity in Its Workforce

Google’s first diversity report shows the lack of diversity among the company’s workforce. For instance, only 30% of its staff are female. 61% are white people, 30% are Asian staff, 3% – Hispanic people, and only 2% are black.

As you can see, tech companies lack the representation of women and ethnic groups, as opposed to a much more diverse customer base for mainstream technology production. Google admits that it is not where it wants to be in terms of diversity, and that it’s a kind of hard to address these challenges.

Aside from the pronounced lack of women in the company, when narrowed by job type and seniority, the gender split in Google is even more extreme: women hold only 21% of leadership positions and 17% of technology-specific jobs. Google is not alone in this regard: at Amazon, for example, only 18 out of its 120 senior managers are female. In the whole industry, the number of female chief technology officers has remained 14% for the past decade.

The experts explain that many companies recruit men and women 50/50, but lose women within a few years because of company ethos clashes and women understanding that less qualified men are being promoted above them.

However, the search giant explains that recruiting qualified women and ethnic minorities is very difficult today. The problem is that women earn roughly 18% of all computer science degrees in the US. As for black and Hispanic people, they make up less than 10% and 5% of degrees in computer science majors, respectively.

Google has decided to release its first diversity report due to beliefs that an open dialogue about diversity problems can be the only way to solve them. The company reckons that tackling diversity in education is one of the ways. So, Google has donated more than $40 million to organizations aiming to help increase the percentage of female in computer education. In addition, many groups from all over the world have been set up to encourage girls into this kind of education, while the governments are working to remove barriers to them in science.

The observers point out that the problems facing workforce diversity are not insurmountable, but admit that no company can do it alone. Thus, Google’s release of its information is considered a good step forward in addressing the problems as an industry.

I think the solution is much simpler. Find smart women and train them. Of course, Google's definition of smart is somewhat erratic. They're the guys who came up with asking interviewees questions like, "How many toothpicks would it take to build a life size replica of the Eiffel tower?"