http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/
That's an interesting URL considering that the title is "Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it's not good".
>url
HA! Good catch. So... NPR PBS is doing some fanboi seo.
a little better...
Google is too WHITE and MALE, admits white male HR boss.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/29/google_comes_clean_on_workforce_diversity_or_lack_thereof/
Bucky - "and," "it," "is" and "not" are probably all URL stop words.
I heard this on the radio yesterday. They did point out that last year Google hired 50% of all blacks who got PhDs in computer science. That was one person. Microsoft hired the other.
Another bias in Silicon Valley that is worse than the industry average and, once again, Google exhibits it more strongly than other tech giants, is the age bias. These firms are incredibly young. I didn't see it in the article, but they were attributing some of the gender and racial bias to the age bias... some quote like "a lot of these managers are just too young to know yet what the advantage of diversity is."
As bad as this is for Google, if you were to compare it to companies that are small and new, I think you would see it even worse. My 29 year-old nephew left Cisco for a smaller company (not a startup, but one much closer to its startup years than Cicso) and one of the reasons is that the employees at the new company were more his age.
Meanwhile, my niece who just graduated as one of the extremely rare females in engineering ended up at a traditional company (GE) in Ohio, not in Silicon Valley. This was her choice, but why is it she was not attracted to the all-male nerd fraternity atmosphere of Silicon Valley? The question answers itself perhaps.
One of the things I find so strange is how persistent the gender bias is in career choice. When my sister graduated in engineering some years ahead of me, she was one of two women in her class. By the time I started taking computer science classes in college in 1982, the rooms were full of women. It looked like we were only a couple of years away from gender parity. But then I went and sat in on a CS class abut 10 years ago and there were almost no women in the room.
When I look at the stats in Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#Statistics_in_education - I see that in fact female enrollment in CS programs peaked the year before my graduating class in 1984 at 37%. The most recent stats were 12%!!!!
In other words, there are only 1/3 as many female CS majors today as there were when I was in college. I bet if you look at the more hardcore disciplines like electrical engineering it's even worse (and I think my nephew once told me that there was not a single woman in his computer engineering class).
So with Google's age bias toward younger workers, they are looking at an applicant pool that only has 12% women.
As a side note, I've seen this in unexpected ways while in grad school. My roomate was in French and he said 3/4 of French majors were female while 3/4 of German majors were male. History ran about 70% male while Art History ran 90% female.
So yes, the Google numbers are pretty bad, but as a society we've really been failing not so much the women of Google but the girls of elementary, middle and high school. It's not like we didn't know how to get them into tech careers in numbers close to men in 1984. But somewhere along the way, we plastered pictures of Kim Kardashian all over the supermarket checkout aisle and convinced girls to major in makeup, hairstyle and French.
To be clear, I'm just having some fun at G's expense. Diversified hiring goals are almost impossible to meet in some technical fields ...even some not-quite-so-technical. Seen many female plumbers or electricians, for example? No. How about black or hispanic female plumbers or electricians? Uhhh, never.
>point out that last year Google hired 50% of all blacks who got PhDs in computer science. That was one person.
Das racist!