Google’s stunning lack of diversity in two pie charts

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      This week, Google decided it was "wrong" not to disclose stats about the diversity, or lack thereof, of its workforce.

      So, the Internet behemoth revealed that its staff is 70 percent male and 61 percent white.

      Google's explanation?

      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.

      The company says that "being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution".

      Comments

      5 Comments

      HellSlayerAndy

      May 29, 2014 at 6:12pm

      Well if '#SausagePartyBehemoths' is the worst you say about White Males, I'll suffer the slings and arrows.

      (No mention of our amazing ability to trivialize and co-opt important social issues, eh!?!!?)

      germs

      May 29, 2014 at 9:34pm

      Im sorry, are we supposed to hate an internet behemoth for stating facts? Should they hire unqualified women and minorities to appease the masses? Theyre a successful company.

      Bruce

      May 30, 2014 at 9:39am

      The breakdown by job role provides more detail:

      http://newshour-tc.pbs.org/newshour/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/google-nu...

      Now look at the breakdown of Comp Sci & IT graduates, the rightmost column has totals:

      http://www.exploringcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Screen-shot-2013-0...

      Now, Comp Sci degrees by gender and year:

      http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files/u28/women2.jpg

      So focus on Google's engineers first. How does it compare to the breakdown for graduates?

      * Google's gender ratio for engineers is representative vs the graduate ratio.
      * The % for "whites" is a little low.
      * The % for "Asian" is over twice what you would expect.
      * The %'s for black and hispanic are much lower than you would expect.

      Now look at non-tech. The gender balance is very close to equal (52/48). The % for white is roughly representative.

      But blacks and hispanics are far under-represented, and Asians over-represented by more than a factor of 2.

      For "leadership", they don't give the breakdown of tech vs non-tech but it's a tech company, so my guess is it simply reflects the other two categories.

      So google's diversity problem vs women simply reflects the % of women who choose to pursue a comp sci degree. The right response there is to for google to reach out to female high school students.

      But otherwise, it seems they have an unfair bias in favour of asians and against blacks and hispanics.

      David Brett

      May 30, 2014 at 3:28pm

      Speaking of gender issues, there is an important international conference in Vancouver next week (http://igala8.com/)focusing on some of the root causes of gender bias in the workplace. The key to understanding gender bias is in the words we use, the linguistics, and experts from the world over will converge on SFU Harbour Centre next week to discuss starting June 5.

      Scott Campbell

      Jun 7, 2014 at 3:15pm

      You want to see a lack of diversity? Check out the hiring stats of the NBA. Turns out most teams are 70% tall, black men.