In a rare move Google published numbers about the diversity of its workforce and it’s not pretty. The numbers reveal that 70 percent of Google’s employees are men, 61 percent of its workforce is white, 30 percent are Asian, with Hispanics and African Americans representing 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively.
The numbers look even worse when broken down by tech jobs. About 17 percent of workers in technology positions are female; only 2 percent are Latino and just 1 percent are African American. By contrast, Asian American make up 34 percent of Google’s tech employees.
“There are lots of reasons why technology companies like Google struggle to recruit and retain women and minorities,” Google’s senior vice president of “people operation,” Laszlo Bock, who revealed the graphic, stated in a blog entry. “For example, women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics each make up under 10 percent of U.S. college grads and each collect fewer than 10 percent of degrees in CS majors. So we’ve invested a lot of time and energy in education.”
Google also admitted that it is “miles from where we want to be–and that being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution.”
