Google diversity figures show little change

Interesting that the huge overrepresentation of asians can be completely ignored and not seen as bad at all while a smaller overrepresentation of men is a huge problem.

41% of 2017 hires were asians [1] while being only 5% of the population [2].

1: https://diversity.google/annual-report/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

> In the US almost 90% were white or Asian, 2.5% were black and 3.6% Latin American.

I've always found it curious how asians are treated as honorary whites when it comes to talking about diversity in American companies. This is the most egregious example.

If you go to Google's own diversity report the breakdown becomes 36.3% asian and 53.1% white. Considering white people maybe up like three quarters of the population in the US they're actually under represented at Google, ironically.

Report: https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_our-workforce

Sloppy reporting:

"Just over 25% of leaders were women in 2018, up nearly 5% since 2014."

Actually it's up 4.7 percentage points, or about 25% (not 5%).

People often write about how outreach efforts such as Google's are illegal. They are not. There's a very specific law that encourages it. I learned about it because Karen Sandler told me about it when she explained to me why Outreachy went from outreaching to women to also outreach to specific US minorities. It's the only change that this US law allowed.

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2017-title29-vol4/xml/CFR-...

Interesting to see for the first time attrition statistics.

It's higher across the board for men versus women (and the gap is wider for tech roles but no figures were given here). And for ethnicity in 2017, attrition was highest for Black Googlers followed by Latinx Googlers, and lowest for Asian Googlers.

Why was this flagged? This is the second story I've noticed this week on diversity in tech that was an early top 10 link and then got flagged.

I just had a look at the BBC's equivalent report ("BBC Equality Information Report 2016/17").

Interestingly:

- p38 says that 42.1% of 'Senior Leadership's staff are female

- p39 shows the real number (35.7%). It seems like on page 38 they define senior leadership as around 3000 people, rather than the smaller (and less diverse) group that has the actual senior management job grades (SM1 and SM2).

- The report has almost no historical information. The top level actuals are compared with targets, but the only numbers that are compared with, e.g. 2014, are things like # apprentices.

Is there evidence supporting Google denies diverse hires of the same skill levels at others in the position? Or is this just a byproduct of our countries failures and all the best computer scientist applying at Google are actually white males? Should Google attempt to diversity hire less skilled individuals for the sake of changing the status quo? Would that even change the status quo?

It's almost as if the guy who wrote that their approach isn't working had a point. Nah, crazy talk!

Recently the board voted against recommendations made by employees to increase diversity. It's pretty clear what priority the Google board gives to diversity, which is their right even if wrong.