Diversity At Google Hasn't Changed Much Over the Last Year (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Not much changed at Google over the last year when it came to the diversity of the tech giant's workforce. Google released its annual diversity report on Thursday detailing the composition of its workforce. The percentage of female employees rose by .1 percent to 30.9 percent. The percentage of Asian employees grew by 1.6 percent to 36.3 percent. The number of black and Latino employees grew by .1 percent to 2.5 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively.

"Google's workforce data demonstrates that if we want a better outcome, we need to evolve our approach," said Danielle Brown, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google, in the report. "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."

Comments

Who Cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the purpose of this article supposed to be?

Re:Who Cares?

[blindseer]

The story is that white employment at google fell over 8 percent in only 4 years!

I agree, that is amazing. To do that they'd have to do some serious "diversity" hiring. I assume that Google will be reluctant to fire productive workers, that is unless they expose their racism in a document that was leaked outside the company. Therefore the shift in demographics must come from natural attrition (people die, take different jobs, retire, etc.) and new hires. Unless a company is growing rapidly, and there's a pool of untapped "diversity" to draw from, they can shift only so fast.

I suspect that this pool of diverse employees must be very thin because graduates in fields like computer science is still dominated by white Christian males. There's a 2 to 1, or perhaps as high as 4 to 1, ratio of men to women graduating in these majors, depending on who you ask. I found out that women owned small businesses can get preferential treatment in Illinois. Unless your business is located where this kind of preferential treatment exists then your pool of hires will be less diverse.

That brings a saying I heard to mind, diversity is such a great idea that it takes the force of government to create.

Good job, Google! You are now well on the way to "diversify" yourself into oblivion. Keep this up and in maybe 4 or 8 more years you'll be begging for your "diversity" to move to Illinois where the government can pay for their reduced output at increased wages.

Re: Who Cares?

[ArmoredDragon]

It's not so much about feminism, it's social justice, and I'm not using that term pejoratively here or anywhere in this post, and I'm being sincere about this. The complaint about Google is that they aren't meeting enough diversity quotas that social justice warriors say they should. For example, they don't have enough black engineers. This used to annoy me, and normally I'd say what's wrong with merit based hiring? But no more. Google is obviously trying to push social justice with the way they delete and demonetize YouTube videos that have otherwise benign content, including two transexuals that committed the crime of not being left leaning, and two black ladies that were guilty of the same crime. That, and the way Google instills a culture of fear against employees don't de-diversify and join the echo chamber. I think it's time Google ate its own shit.

Silicon Valley is progressive, and California is as well, right? So why doesn't progressive California together, with progressive San Francisco (and its surrounding progressive cities) force progressive Google to start hiring on more diverse talent? Would it not be the progressive thing to do? I'm being serious here. Would that not promote social justice? In fact, why not force them to replace their Chief Diversity Officer with a notable civil rights leader? Obviously their existing CDO isn't doing her job. Really, how can it be argued that she is? Google's diversity numbers are even worse now than they were last year.

Google is mostly white males, which means it is in need of a re-balancing. Not enough black people? Fire enough white guys to make room. Don't worry, they're progressive, they'll understand that this is for the better good, because they also support equality. Not enough latino guys? Fire more white guys. Not enough native americans? Pacific islanders? You know what to do. Asians are over-represented? Don't worry about it, they're minorities, just don't hire any more until their numbers go down to meet the ratio. When dismissing white guys, make sure that the cisexual ones are the first to go. Once the ratios are representative of the population, you can hire white hetereosexual males again, just make sure the ratios remain intact. Again, they're progressives, in progressive California. They'll understand. The progressives know that white males got there from white privilege, and all of this is necessary. Having removed enough white males, this should help balance out the male to female ratio. If not, begin dismissing the minorities of most privilege, i.e. homosexual white males. Don't worry though as it won't come to that, the white population makes up quite a big percentage of the overall population.

I'm being serious about that. I'm a white male and I honestly couldn't care less. Do this with facebook too. Facebook and Google, more than all, should be the first movers, and fine them hard if they don't do this. So be honest, whom among the social justice warriors (again, not being pejorative here) and progressives would not want this? It sets out to accomplish one of your biggest goals. If not, why not?
.

Re: Who Cares?

[bingoUV]

Obviously their existing CDO isn't doing her job

He / she is a diversity hire. To fire him / her and appoint a more efficient one would go against the whole existence of this particular office in the first place.

What James said

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google's workforce data demonstrates that if we want a better outcome, we need to evolve our approach," said Danielle Brown, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google

If you had listened to James Damore instead of doing the same illegal things over and over again, you might get a better result.

What is the goal?

[Jarwulf]

Is the goal to have a 50% female workforce even though there's almost no chance of that happening in terms of interest in the general population for the foreseeable future so they'll have to resort to lowering standards or upping hires for more diversity officers and other nontech positions basically defeating the supposed reason they're concerned? What happens if they overshoot the goal and men dip under 50%. Are they just going to not care and ignore it like for how women now earn significantly more college degrees and dominate middle bureaucratic management and nobody gives a crap?

Re:What is the goal?

[HornWumpus]

Who works there?

Repeat: 'I identify as a black women, now give me a promotion and a big fat raise...'

Problem solved.

Shocking...

[MikeRT]

Who wants to bet their next paycheck that Google's recruiters have never darkened the door at a career fair at a HBC? Where do they think they're likely to find a huge group of black Computer Science majors who aren't African or Caribbean immigrants outside of that?

Google's not stupid. They know where they could aggressively recruit young black people trying to get engineering degrees, but HBCs are too prole for a company that typically only recruits "from the best." And Google doesn't want proles because they might bring truly shocking perspectives like telling Mr. I Identify as a Dragon that he's a total whack job who needs to stop mixing crystal meth and D&D instead of nodding along. (Working and middle class black people tend to be refreshingly willing to call you on your bullshit compared to the upper class yuppies that dominate places like SV)

Re:Shocking...

[Citizen of Earth]

Google could still goose its numbers by opening product-development centers where the bulk of the employees are some shade of brown. Just give them meaningless work to do, discard it all, and highlight the numbers in their employment reports. But you don't want to mix the diversity hires with actual developers, since that would reduce productivity.

Re:Shocking...

[penandpaper]

The inertia of the insanely unfair and uncivilized treatment of blacks in USA is still underestimated.

That doesn't explain the historical trends. Before the civil rights era and during Jim Crow, most if not all measures of success for black people in the US were going up. Graduation rates, jobs, money, strong family, civic participation, etc. They were even trending better than whites in some regards. Something happened after the civil rights era and a victim culture took root in addition to the loss of family structure. A culture developed to resent white people, disregard strong family values, and be a victim that relies on the government handout.

You can't and shouldn't blame slavery for your lot in life. I think (god help me I am referencing this guy), Kanye West said it best to the effect: "If you think you have been a slave for 400 years when slavery ended ~200 years ago, that's a choice to be mentally enslaved. ". At some point, you have to be responsible for your own actions and not blame the past for your current situation. If you want a better future for your children you have to work for it.

Asians had a similar history in the US yet they are doing better than whites in almost all categories because of their culture of work and family values.

Are they discriminating against whites?

[Anonymous Coward]

62% of the population, but only 53% of Google employees... how would this come about except through strong discrimination in hiring practices?

I want Google to be very 'diverse'

[Anonymous Coward]

I want Google to be as 'diverse' as possible. That's because I'd personally like to see them fail as a business, because in my opinion they aren't good for the Internet, and for the software industry in general. And if there's one guaranteed way to make a company irrelevant, and eventually a total failure, it's to hire based on 'diversity' instead of skill and merit.

Re:I want Google to be very 'diverse'

[blindseer]

Interview with a manager that saw his company die from diversity hiring:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Scott Adams, the same guy that writes Dilbert, has a similar story. Scott Adams was driven to writing comics because he saw his career hit a dead end from diversity hiring policies where he worked. Ignoring the inherent unequal distributions of qualities among different genetic populations is dangerous. Reality always wins out.

Consider this... If women did the same work as men but for 75% of the wages then a company consisting completely of women would beat all the rest. I have seen small companies run entirely by women but they've been veterinary clinics, medical clinics, and schools, but that's because women naturally gravitate to occupations where a strong nurturing personality is beneficial.

Here's another thing, women don't really want equal distribution in all occupations. Women make up a small portion of prisoners. Should we lock up women to make up for that? Women make up a small portion of the people that die in war, should we send more women out to fight and die? There's a small ratio of women that dig ditches, clean out sewers, climb power transmission towers, hang siding and shingles, pour concrete, pick up trash, stack bricks, and on and on. We shouldn't have women doing these occupations just to keep things "fair". Just as we shouldn't demand more women engineers to keep things "fair". What's "fair" is allowing people to get the jobs they are suited to by personality and merit. When we do that we have many males in engineering and many females in medicine.

We can have a meritocracy and prosperity or we can artificially enforce "diversity" and see civilization fall apart. Google will have to learn this one way or the other.

Re:I want Google to be very 'diverse'

[cdsparrow]

Well said. Wish i had mod points today.

Diversity shouldn't be a metric that matters in 95% of occupations. The ability to do the job you are hired to do is all that matters.

Re:I want Google to be very 'diverse'

[Citizen of Earth]

97% of all combat deaths are male. We should send only women into combat zones until we achieve a 50-50 balance.

Re:I want Google to be very 'diverse'

[KiloByte]

That's the overall wage gap. You need the equal pay gap, so you can compare like-for-like.

Ok, let's go. First, menial tasks: recent Uber data (an extremely SJW company) had women choosing to work shorter hours, choosing less lucrative times of day, choosing less lucrative parts of the city, performing worse when on the same route at the same time of day. That's an unskilled task that requires reflexes. Uber's pay is calculated by a provably fair algorithm.

Then, skilled coding: biggest tech companies have currently extremely biased hiring, with about 25% workforce female. Yet that very same talent pool goes differently when you're not paid for your gender: top 1000 Linux kernel committers: 0.8% female, "key" package (as defined by testing migration) maintainers in Debian Stretch: 0.9%.

Women do have many upsides: much longer life, better ability to distinguish colours (both regular and mutated -- only women can be tetrachromats!), better sense of smell, better sociability. But none of those make you a better engineer. For that, you need more curiosity, higher intelligence, better work ethic (instead of putting kids first), etc.

For the causes, you need to look at hominids 200k years ago. When men were hunting a mammoth, women collected tubers with a kid in tow. Men were expendable, thus today they are still more willing to take risks, which lets them drive that Uber car a bit faster (and modern cars make safety good enough), visualize a 3d solid better, and so on. Women took safer jobs, and the qualities they then needed (ability to tell an edible root from a bad or poisonous one) are still there, except that there's very few jobs that pay well for that skill with colors or smells.

Re:I want Google to be very 'diverse'

[R3d M3rcury]

If women did the same work as men but for 75% of the wages then a company consisting completely of women would beat all the rest. I have seen small companies run entirely by women but they've been veterinary clinics, medical clinics, and schools, but that's because women naturally gravitate to occupations where a strong nurturing personality is beneficial.

Comments like this sort of stick in my craw.

I don't disagree that the idea that a company should hire a woman for every man hired in order to have some magic 50-50 ratio is ridiculous.

The question is whether or not a company is not hiring a woman for a position she could do because she's a woman.

There are plenty of examples of companies calling in John for an interview and not calling in Susan (or Enrique or Javon) even though they have duplicate resumes. And, to me, it's worthwhile to make certain that this isn't happening. "Oh, this is all low-level device driver stuff. Not something a woman would be good at, so I won't waste my time. Women developers are better at UI because women have an 'eye' for that sort of thing..."

That's the part that sticks in my craw: "Oh, women/men are better at..."

Heck, there are plenty of cases where courts have assigned child custody to women because, "women are more nurturing." Then they discover that Mom's a coke addict and the kids live in squalor. But, hey, that's better than living with Dad (y'know, the guy who left her because she was a coke addict).

Now the common response is, "Okay, but for the most part, women/men are better at..."

That may be true or it may not be. But you're potentially discounting a fantastic candidate because "most women wouldn't be good at that..." But what about the one who is?

I always hear people bringing up the paucity of male elementary school teachers. And they're right--imagine if you wanted to teach in elementary school but you couldn't even get an interview because you were male? And the reason is that, "most women are better with young children than men are." That's wrong--and I agree with that wholeheartedly. So why should it be different for women wanting to be developers?

Why not start at the top?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the top executives at Alphabet are black or hispanic, Larry and Sergei are both white males. For such an important issue, they should be willing to give up their positions to historically disadvantaged people.

Or is this the usual "diversity for thee, but not for me" situation?

I'm pretty sure there was a memo/manifesto on this

[king neckbeard]

I'm pretty sure there was a memo/manifesto on this that received a great deal of attention...

The funniest thing is that despite not being adept at office and internet politics, Damore was actually pretty empathetic. He pointed out that the job description and environment were optimized towards what white men want.

SJWs responded by assuming that the only rational way to interpret it was that women weren't fit for the job, ignoring the possibility that the job wasn't fit for women.

So, it looks like Damore was right and insightful, even if he's already been converted to full Nazi. I don't really blame him in that scenario, given that his views were rejected by SJWs, and embraced by racist and sexist assholes. People are often going to associate with people that don't treat them as shitty as other people do.

One step forwards, one step backwards?

[The Cynical Critic]

Considering the lengths to which they've recently gone to increase skin-level diversity, which includes literally suspending all application processes for lower level positions where the applicant is white or asian, I do have to say that I am somewhat surprised by how little they've been able to move the needle.

Kind of makes you wonder what could have nullified their efforts this heavily. I know they've had some well meaning changes that have made their minority hires feel genuinely uncomfortable, like how the traditional mentoring of new hires has been changed so that your mentor will always be of the same race, but I didn't imagine they'd be able to take as many steps backwards as forwards like this. Either that or then they've knocked some sense into their hiring practices, which should have come with such a big backlash it would be well known to people outside the organization, so I can't image anything could explain this except well meaning policies that have backfired strongly enough to make their diversity hires leave in the same numbers as they're able to shepherd them in.

I guess that's good for them as nobody deserves to work in a place that makes you feel uncomfortable enough to make you want to quit your job. However I am somewhat worried about their remaining staff because if I know these diversity types, a setback will only cause them to double their efforts rather than take a moment to think about what they're actually doing.

" grew by .1 percent to 2.5"

[greenwow]

That's a pretty big change in just one year since it's 4% greater. The article is misleading.

I did a series of interviews at Google in Kirkland, WA (between Seattle and Microsoft) because I had a free place to stay a couple of blocks away for a friend that's out of the country for two years working for Microsoft in Dublin that was looking for a house sitter. I also had two other friends that are also black that did the same. All three of us gave up before the end of the process. Despite being able to get rid of $1,500 a month and live somewhere nice and have a higher paying job, Google's interview process just made it not worth it. My two friends also gave up since both of them ran out of vacation time to take off from their current jobs to keep going back to Google.

The way I feel about the process is that if you screen resumes well, do a good phone screening, then in person interviews with three or four people, then another interview with someone more senior and you still can't make-up your mind then the problem is with your process, not the candidate. It shouldn't take six months of waffling to make a decision.

Re:" grew by .1 percent to 2.5"

[Anonymous Coward]

I interviewed at that office in 2005 the year after it opened (IIRC), and I got tired of them not making a decision so I started looking for another job. I found another job, worked there for seven months then it went out of business so I started looking again. Out of a blue I got a call from Google saying they were preparing an offer. They stalled for so long that I not only was able to find a job, but I was already looking for another one.

I'm used to working for start-ups where you interview with a couple of peers then maybe the founder then they indicate almost immediately if they want you. The idea that you should wait 8+ months for them to decide is just ridiculous.

I turned down the offer since it was for a team that was already late on a project so they warned the usual up to 20% (assuming I remember correctly) bonus would not happen. Plus, they said vacation time would be limited to almost none for at least the first two years.

Re: I'm pretty sure there was a memo/manifesto on

[king neckbeard]

Yeah, that's the mental gymnastics of having actually read the memo, instead of regurgitating a third-hand report of how someone on Jezebel was offended.

Re: Don't worry Trump traitor, Mueller has plenty

[ArmoredDragon]

Google's feelings of diversity are just like that of California universities:

Multiple skin colors, all 51 genders,* and all 187 sexual orientations.**

* Diversity of opinion is not permitted.
** Cisexual cismales with white skin must choose one of the other 50 genders and/or one of the 186 other sexualities. Your skin color will be decided by your diversity officer fairly using diversity standard skin tone swatches.

First, who cares? Second, just kill the company.

[Karmashock]

This is mindless SJWism and everyone knows it but the cultists.

But any company that takes this seriously should put their existential future where their stupid mouths are... and just kill their company.

Hire people that aren't qualified merely on the basis of who is more or less statistically represented.

Burn the company to the ground. And when there's nothing left but ashes and finger pointing... the industry can be rebuilt by people with the courage and integrity to stand their ground.

I'm sure there are devotees of the cult that are offended by the statement, I am not an adherent to your religion.

I find the suggestion that I should take it seriously as silly as you would take the suggestion that only Christians following christian doctrine should be hired. Its that absurd.

But obviously fundamentalists are not known for being sensible. So this is going to continue until they burn it down. We already are seeing companies leave not only the bay area but California entirely. And not merely for tax or real estate issues but literally because the culture has gone toxic.

I know I know... The great sage has prophesied that when the planets align your golden age will come to pass... which is why everyone else has to get on the right side of history... because these people on top of everything else think they have an accurate prophesy of the future. Literally. Otherwise how would they know what was the "right side of history"... they're saying that in the end they'll get what they want. And yet the industry is already very international and most of the international partners on top of the domestic companies that are leaving are not ascribing to this stuff.

Its not good for any industry in which it takes over. Its even f'ing up hollywood, journalism, and academia is lousy with it.

But these people are not open to correction. They were told the word of god at some point and anyone that disagrees is a dirty infidel. So this is just going to have to play out to the pain.

I'm enjoying the show.

Re:When Trump dies in prison, you'll know bitch lo

[Chas]

Tell us how you REALLY feel.

Seriously, you're going to let something as temporal as the POTUS drive you THIS fucking bug-nuts?

Do you ENJOY flagellating yourself this much?

You don't like him, you don't like his supporters.
FINE.
He's gone in 4 years IF YOU ACT LIKE SANE PEOPLE.
He's gone in 8 if you continue acting this way (and then gets replaced by someone just like him).

Don't you see how this sort of crazed, bitchy, vindictive behavior is simply pushing people in the near left and center ever further right, even as you and your compatriots dash ever further left?

"better outcome"?

[ooloorie]

The US population is 62% white. Google's employee population is 53.1% white and new hires are 45.2% white. That seems like a pretty serious bias to me, but it's a private business and they can do what they want. What I don't understand is what "better outcome" they actually want to achieve. Dose Google want to become a "majority minority" company?