After much wrangling, Google has finally released its workplace diversity report and worryingly for the company, shows a considerable lack of diversity both in terms of gender and race.
Released on their blog page, the brief release shows figures which many who have argued about the major diversity imbalances in Silicon Valley will be little surprised by, but is shocking all the same.
The call to release the report came after a protest occurred just outside Google’s HQ in Silicon Valley, led by Rev Jesse Jackson, calling for openness on the lack of representation of minorities not just in Google, but the tech industry as a whole.
Across the company’s entire global workforce, only 30pc of its employees are women, the majority of which comprise of non-technology roles (48pc). When this is broken down further into two different job categories of ‘tech’ and ‘leadership’, women’s role in Google is even less with 30pc of its employees involved in tech while female leadership roles only account for 21pc.
Meanwhile, Google’s research into ethnicity only had figures for the United States, but still showed that the combination of white and Asian ethnicities in all roles dominates Google’s workforce.
In ‘leadership’ for example, the breakdown of ethnicities shows that 72pc of Google’s management are white, 23pc are Asian, black at 2pc and other ethnicities make up about 1pc each.
Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations at Goolge admits the company were “reluctant to publish the numbers” about their employee diversity.
However, he went on to say in the blog post that they are “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.”
Diversity image via Shutterstock
