According to a recent annual diversity report, Google Inc. failed to improve gender and diversity issues in the company. The report included data on hiring, attrition, and statistics regarding the accumulated number of employees of a certain race or gender. Although Google has historically had issues with gender and racial diversity, recent efforts to resolve these problems seem to have been undermined once again.
According to Google’s Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Danielle Brown, the fastest way to improve diversity issues through evident statistics is to focus on an area that is particularly lacking. In Google’s case, it has become apparent that women of color are the most underrepresented demographic in the company. Unfortunately, although the company has attempted to acknowledge this issue, they failed to address the issue collectively.
According to a report by Wired, Google’s workforce is 53.1% white and 36.3% Asian, but only 2.5% black, 3.6% Hispanic and Latinx, and 4.2% multiracial. These numbers have shown little change from 2014, where the workforce was 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian, 2 percent black, 3 percent Latinx and 4 percent multiracial.
Google Inc. haven’t ignored their recent failure shown in the annual diversity report; Danielle Brown has acknowledged that imminent changes need to be made in order to change the work culture at the company. Brown provided the following statement regarding the recent statistics in the data report and Google’s future plan to improve their diversity crisis:
“Google’s workforce data demonstrates that if we want a better outcome, we need to evolve our approach. That’s why from now on ownership for diversity and inclusion will be shared between Google’s leadership team, People Operations and Googlers. Our strategy doesn’t provide all the answers, but we believe it will help us find them.”
It’s evident that Google Inc. has a wide discrepancy in their employee make-up, but it’s worrisome to observe how they haven’t made any true progress on the issue. With their new initiatives within the past few years, they’ve still achieved little success in creating a diverse workplace that has a somewhat equal distribution of races and genders. All eyes will be centered on the company and what they plan to do in order to resolve this continuous problem.
