The company wants to diversify its workforce

May 4, 2015 07:32 GMT  ·  By

The fact that Google has very few African-American engineers is no surprise to anyone, but a recently launched project shows that the company is intent on changing the figures.

Google has previously admitted to its lack of diversity in a report showing that African-Americans make up only 2 percent of its workforce. However, it is not a question of racism as some were quick to point out, given that the company decided to come clean about the issue and even expressed their desire to amend the fact that this segment of the population is currently underrepresented in the tech area.

And they seem to have found the appropriate method to do so: sending some of its engineers to teach computer science classes to African-American college students.

Sabrina Williams is one of Google’s employees, and besides her titles of software engineer and Google in Residence, she now has one more to add to her portfolio, namely that of Professor. She has recently had a course on Impostor Syndrome at Howard University in Washington, one of the historically black universities that Google has its eyes on.

The initiative is meant to fix the issue that Google has about diversity. Professor Sabrina is also African American, and she is expected to help students feel more confident about themselves and realize that they have a shot to be among the select few if they try hard enough.

Studies revealed that a great majority of black students didn't apply for jobs at some of the big tech companies simply because they lacked the courage to do it and because they believed they were ill-prepared.

Facebook did it too

But Google is not the first tech company to resort to this kind of method in order to diversify its workforce.

Facebook also has its own University for Engineering, which, although not necessarily addressed to African-American people, is meant to help students who are particularly interested in science and technology take advantage of the opportunity to work with some of the greatest engineers out there, and if they are fit, maybe even work alongside their mentors.

The Google teachers also instruct students on how to successfully wrap up a job interview for an engineering position or how to write a professional email, ABQ Journal reports.

Sabrina Williams, who has a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford, is confident about the newly launched program, and although she cannot guarantee that it will change things, she expressed her desire for her talented students to one day become her colleagues.

And she seems to be on the right track as students are lining up to take her classes and receive advice and mentorship from some of Google’s renowned engineers.