SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — In a groundbreaking disclosure,
Google revealed Wednesday how very white and male its workforce is —
just 2 percent of its Google employees are black, 3 percent are
Hispanic, and 30 percent are women. About a third of the company’s
workforce is Asian.
The search giant said the transparency about its workforce is an important step toward change.
"Simply
put, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,"
Google Inc. senior vice president Laszlo Bock wrote in a blog.
The
numbers were compiled as part of a report that major U.S. employers
must file with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Companies
are not required to make the information public.
The gender divide
is based on the roughly 44,000 people Google employed throughout the
world at the start of this year. The company didn’t factor about 4,000
workers at its Motorola Mobility division, which is being sold to
China’s Lenovo Group for $2.9 billion. The racial data is limited to
Google’s roughly 26,600 workers in the U.S as of August 2013.
Facebook
chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg recently said the social
networking company is headed toward disclosure as well, but it was
important to share the data internally first.
Apple Inc., Twitter and Microsoft Corp. did not respond immediately to queries about possible plans to
disclose data.
Hewlett-Packard
spokesman Michael Thacker said the firm, with 331,800 worldwide
employees, has been publishing this data going back to 2001 as part of a
Global Citizenship Report. In their most recent report, almost 7
percent of their U.S. workforce was black, 6 percent Hispanic and 33
percent were women.
Bock said Google has been working to
diversify, not just its offices but in the broader tech sector. Since
2010, the firm has given more than $40 million to organizations working
to bring computer science education to women and girls, he said.
The
company also is working with historically black colleges and
universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science,
he said.
"But we’re the first to admit that Google 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," he said.
Gender
and ethnic disparities are reflected throughout the tech industry.
About 7 percent of tech workers are black or Latino in Silicon Valley
and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of
the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census
data.
In the coming months, Google said, it will work with the
Kapor Center for Social Impact, a group that uses information technology
to close gender and ethnic gaps in the Silicon Valley workforce. The
center will be organizing a Google-backed conference in California
focusing on issues of technology and diversity.
Co-founder Freada
Kapor Klein, who started the Level Playing Field Institute 13 years ago
to teach and mentor black and Latino students in science and math, said
Google is showing leadership "which has been sorely needed for a long
time."
"Google is the company known for the moonshot, and applying
that part of Google DNA to this problem is a breath of fresh air," she
said.
Earlier this year, the Rev. Jesse Jackson launched a
campaign to diversify Silicon Valley, asking to meet with leaders of
several iconic technology companies about bringing black and Hispanics
into their workforce and leadership.
Since then, he’s been leading
delegations to annual shareholder’s meetings at firms including Google,
Facebook, eBay Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.
On Wednesday Jackson said Google is to be commended.
"It’s
a bold step in the right direction. We urge other companies to follow
Google’s lead," he said. "Silicon Valley and the tech industry have
demonstrated an ability to solve the most challenging and complex
problems in the world. Inclusion is a complex problem — if we put our
collective minds together, we can solve that too."
Iris Gardner, a
manager at nonprofit Code2040, which places high performing black and
Latino software engineering students in internships with top tech
companies, said Google’s disclosure could mark a pivotal moment in the
push to diversify Silicon Valley.
"It is a big deal for them to be
transparent about something that most companies haven’t in the past
been willing to share," she said.
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