Google has released its workforce diversity report and the numbers reflect rather a less diverse community at the world’s biggest search engine.
According to the report a whopping 70 percent workers at Google are men and 61 percent of the US workforce is white. Google admitted that it is not the company where one would find diversity, but it does note that admitting the extent of the problem is an important part of the solution.
Diving deep into the other stats, only 2 percent of the entire Google workforce is black; Hispanics account for 3 percent; and Asians accounted for 30 percent of the workforce.
“We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google”, notes Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President, People Operations at Google.
“We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.”
Citing some of the primary reasons why there is a lack of diversity within the company’s workforce, Bock notes that Google, like any other technology company, struggles to recruit and retain women and minorities for the fact that women only earn about 18 percent of computer science degrees in the US. Further Blacks and Hispanics only account for 10 percent of US college graduates.
Bock noted that Google has been actively investing a lot of time and energy in education. “…since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls” added Bock.
