Google Acknowledges Diversity Problem (PCMagazine)

Google's workforce consists of 70 percent men and 30 percent women, but only 5 percent black and Hispanic.

• BY STEPHANIE MLOT
• MAY 29, 2014

Silicon Valley continues taking baby steps toward a more diverse tech industry—see Marissa Mayerand Satya Nadella, both recent additions to the CEO club. But many high-profile organizations still fall short of a true melting pot of employees.

Chief among them is Google, which this week formally addressed its shortcomings by publishing employee gender and ethnicity stats.

"Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity," Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations, said in a blog post. "And it's hard to address these kinds of challenges if you're not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts."

And the facts are these: The search giant's workforce consists of 70 percent men and 30 percent women. About 61 percent of those workers are white, while Asians make up another 30 percent. But the African-American and Hispanic communities are poorly represented, making up only 2 and 3 percent of the company's population, respectively.

But it's not easy filling out the ranks with women and minorities, Bock said. He blamed the low rate of women earning computer science degrees (18 percent) and the modest number of blacks and Hispanics graduating college (10 percent)—let alone with a CS degree (fewer than 5 percent).

"So, we've invested a lot of time and energy in education," as well as money, Bock said. Since 2010, Google has contributed more than $40 million to organizations focused on women and computer science.

The tech giant also works with historically black universities to boost attendance and coursework in the computer science department.

"But we're the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be," Bock said. "And that being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of its solution."

Though not a real selling point for future employees, Google does offer employee resource groups, built to educate and support. Among them are the Asian, Black, and Filipino Google Networks, the Gayglers, the Greyglers (for workers "of a certain age"), Google Women in Engineering, and the Special Needs Network.

Along the way to a more diverse field of computer science, we often forget that one of the earliest CS pioneers was, in fact, a woman. Grace Hopper, American computer scientist and Navy Rear Admiral, was honored by Google in December, on what would have been her 107th birthday. Ada Lovelace, the world's first programmer, also got a homepage doodle in Dec. 2012.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania