Google's workforce is nowhere near as diverse as the company would want

May 29, 2014 09:23 GMT  ·  By

Google has a tendency to hire white men, new data shows after the company has finally released its report detailing the ethnic and gender makeup of its employees.

The Internet giant has revealed a few days ago that it was going to release a diversity report, something that tech companies such as itself have been avoiding for years. Seeing the numbers makes it pretty obvious why they’ve been reluctant to share the data.

“We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce 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,” Google’s Laszlo Bock, senior VP for people operations, wrote in a blog post.

Google’s workforce is made up from 70 percent men and 30 percent women. When it comes to ethnicity, things are even more misbalanced. 61 percent of all employees working for Google are white, 30 percent are Asian, 3 percent are Hispanic, 2 percent are black and 4 percent pertain to two or more races. The company has about 50,000 employees.

Bock explains that it’s difficult to recruit and retain women and minorities, not only for Google, but for all tech companies, because only about 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States go to women. “Blacks and Hispanics make up under 10 percent of US college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in CS majors, respectively.

This is one of the reasons why Google has been investing in education. Over the past four years, Google has given more than $40 million to organizations looking to bring computer science education to women and girls, while also working with “historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science.”

Even so, Google admits that it’s miles away from what it aspires to be. Nevertheless, the response to the report has been largely positive as people commend Google for increasing its transparency and addressing the problem, even if it doesn’t exactly put the company in the best of lights.

One thing is clear, however, and that is the fact that things won’t change overnight just because Google wants them to. The company acknowledged this through its efforts to invest in education, in the formation of the next generation of employees.