Google remains mostly white, male

Company report: Black women make up only 1.2% of its U.S. workforce.

Google released its annual workforce diversity report Thursday, marking only modest changes from last year. The company remains mostly white and male. But the report offers a better view of what the workforce looks like as the company revealed its gender breakdown across ethnicities for the first time.

Overall, Google’s global workforce is 69.1 percent male and 30.9 percent female, virtually unchanged from 2017.

In its breakdown on race and ethnicity, which only covers U.S. employees, 2.5 percent of Googlers are Black/African American, up from 2.4 percent in 2017. Figures for Latinx workers also showed a modest improvement. Google reported that 3.6 percent of its workforce is Latinx, compared with last year’s 3.5 percent. Asian representation at Google has increased modestly from 34.7 percent in 2017 to 36.3 percent.

The diversity report arrived after a recent shareholder meeting in which employees and investors called for improvements to workplace culture and better enforcement of policies against harassment. An investor’s proposal that failed to pass would have tied the pay of Google executives to meeting goals for diversity and inclusion.

The debate around the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in Silicon Valley grew louder last year after an engineer at Google wrote an internal memo claiming that “genetic differences” might explain “why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

The memo spread quickly online, and its author, James Damore, was fired from the company for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.”

Responses to Damore’s writing caused further turmoil at Google. Some employees who criticized the memo became targets of online harassment after their names were leaked to conservative websites and commentators.

In its latest diversity report, Google for the first time included new information tied to its hiring and attrition.

The company reported that attrition rates were highest for black and Latinx employees, indicating that keeping underrepresented groups fulfilled at work is another challenge for the company. Google reported narrow improvements in hiring for technical positions, with hires for women up 1 percent, Latinx staff up 0.4 percent and black employees up 0.1 percent.

“The data in this report shows that despite significant effort, and some pockets of success, we need to do more to achieve our desired diversity and inclusion outcomes,” Google said in the report.