Exec hired to boost diversity at Google
Tech giant slow to hire, promote women, minorities
Google has said it needs to make its workforce better reflect the panoply of people it serves around the globe.
Yet in the three years since the Internet giant first pledged to close the race and gender gap, not much has changed. The Silicon Valley company is overwhelmingly male and employs very few African Americans and Hispanics, according to numbers released Thursday.
Google said it’s counting on its new diversity chief from Intel, Danielle Brown, to move the needle.
Brown is a relative newcomer to diversity and inclusion work. According to her bio, she became chief diversity and inclusion officer for Intel in 2015. She was replaced by Barbara Whye in April and was tapped as Intel’s group chief human resources officer, which means she ran business human resources for about 40% of Intel’s employees.
Eileen Naughton, vice president of people operations, said in a blog post, “There are areas of improvement across the board” in hiring, promotion and retention, work environment and more. “Danielle will look at our efforts in all these areas afresh.”
At Google, seven out of 10 employees are men, 56% of the U.S. workforce is white and most of the technology jobs and leadership positions are held by men and whites.
Google made some modest increases since its last diversity report. Women in tech roles rose 1 percentage point to 20% and in leadership positions rose 1 percentage point to 25%. Google increased the percentage of Hispanics to 4% from 3% and African Americans in non-technical roles increased to 5% from 4%. All other numbers were flat.
For tech companies with tens of thousands of employees, making substantial demographic shifts in three years is not easy, consultant Joelle Emerson said.
“Moving by percentage points in a company of Google’s size is actually meaningful, though of course, I always wish change would happen faster,” said Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a strategy firm that consults with technology companies on diversity and inclusion. “Still, I think the lack of progress in some areas, and the slow progress overall, highlights just how much of a commitment companies need to make to see progress.”
Google’s diversity efforts come as it faces charges from the Labor Department that it discriminates against its female employees. The government said it found evidence of “systemic compensation disparities” across the Google workforce. Google denied this.
Thursday’s report marks the fourth time Google has released its demographics. For years, it and most other major technology companies resisted divulging the racial and gender breakdown of their workforces before bowing to pressure from civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
Google has incentive to make progress. Whites are likely to become a minority in the USA by 2044, Latino and African-American buying power is on the rise and Silicon Valley has ambitions that lap the globe.
Having women and underrepresented minorities brainstorming and building, not just using, the products dreamed up by Google is quickly becoming a necessity. In 2015, a Google photo app began tagging images of black people as gorillas.
News of Brown’s hire came the same week Twitter hired Candi Castleberry-Singleton as its new vice president of inclusion and diversity. Castleberry-Singleton has worked both inside and outside the tech industry for years.
“I would love to see more companies do what Twitter is doing, instead of recycling the same old faces and ideas,” said Erica Baker, co-founder of diversity advocacy group Project Include. “We need new talent and new ideas to bring real change to the tech industry.”
“I would love to see more companies do what Twitter is doing, instead of recycling the same old faces and ideas.”
Erica Baker, co-founder of advocacy group Project Include