HR Chief: Google Sexual, Racial Diversity "Not Where We Want to Be"

theodp (442580) writes "In 2007, Congress asked Google, "How many [Google employees] are African-American?" "I don't actually have that data at my fingertips," replied Google HR Chief Laszlo Bock. Seven years later, Google finally disclosed diversity data for the first time ever, revealing that 17% of its tech workforce is female, and only 1% is Black. "Put simply," wrote Google's Bock, "Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity." To put things in perspective, it looks like the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers — commemorated in last year's Google Doodle of Jackie Robinson — put up better Black diversity numbers than Google was able to muster 67 years later. Things could have been worse, but the EEOC doesn't ask for and Google chose not to disclose anything about the age makeup of its workforce, aside from a mention of the existence of Greyglers, a group "for Googlers 'of a certain age.'""

Comments

racism matters

[globaljustin]

Backwards urban cultures (where sadly most self-identified blacks and latinos live), are anti-intellectual and actively discourage those who try to make it out through education by shaming them as not being "real".

this one of the stupidest things I've ever read on slashdot

everything about this statement is bigoted nonsense

by this logic, white people are the craziest most fsked up "culture" in history...look at the 20th century;s worst...all white men

but this logic is wrong...every statement is a falsehood...

it's people who think like hsthompson who are the enemy here

It's not Google's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the thing. There are about three million Indian-Americans in the United States. There are about 40 million African-Americans in the US, over ten times as many as Asian Indians. Yet, you will find more Indians in Silicon Valley, in physics, in medicine then blacks. Even if it's ten times harder for black people to enter those fields, it still doesn't account for the disparity.

At some point, we have to admit, for the most part blacks just don't want to go into intellectual fields, because we don't want to do all that boring study. We don't mind working hard on things that are fun, hoops, rap, singing, but things that are tedious and unglamorous don't appeal to us. This is a problem for Americans in general, which is why our country is falling behind, but as for blacks, we got complacent and entitled long before we secured our place in this Balkanized ethnic mix we call a melting pot. We didn't do the homework, yet now we want to get skipped to the head of the class. It ain't gonna happen.

And for that, we might have the past to blame, but the responsibility for turning things around falls to ourselves, in the present. No amount of Affirmative Action, or "reparations," or other freebies will cure what ails us. Google hiring unprepared token minorities will just doom them to sub-par performance and engender further resentment on both sides. And the truly excellent black employees, the ones who got there the hard way, will get screwed because nobody will want to team up with blacks at all, lest they get stuck with the duds.

Wanna solve this problem, black parents? Throw away the basketballs and start buying pre-calc, linear algebra, biochemistry, etc. texts. Sure, when there's injustice in the world, I have no issue with calling attention to it. But that's not the solution. You can sue the driver who ran you over -- for ten thousand dollars, or a million, or ten million. That extra money might make buy you a really sweet motorized gem-encrusted wheelchair. But if want to walk again on your own two feet as good as before, you have to go to those long painful hours of physical therapy. There's no Affirmative Action shortcut for that.

Posted as anonymous because this is mildly heretical. I imagine many if not most of us (blacks) know this deep down, but we're frankly too chicken-shit to stand up to the vocal minority who are politically wedded to victimization.