2020 Google Diversity Report | Hacker News Reader

2020 Google Diversity Report

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26 pointslinkcr17 comments

Though the pictures and copy clearly tell a different story, the tables are quite clear that "White" and "Asian" are the by far largest groups at Google.

What I typically miss in these types of reports is a breakdown within the different areas of what a company does. Global overall numbers do not help much if, e.g., engineering would be exclusively this gender or group and HR exclusively some other gender or group.

Sure, but same everywhere in the Bay Area for that type of ratio. I think the growth trends in other areas and how many resources they devote towards it is what's most interesting. If they keep ticking upwards while retaining people eventually they'll get there

I have no doubt you are correct (I am not in the Bay Area so I'll take your word for it), but I would also point out that Google is far larger than just its Bay Area presence.

If hiring looks the same in other corners of the world where the underlying demographics are bound to be different, then these numbers could indicate more of a systemic problem.

Growing up cosmopolitan in three Canadian cities, I just can't understand the obsession people have with numbers like this. Why would you expect the numbers to be regular with the general population?

You all know in your personal lives that the people they look to hire for these reports (and the ideologies these reports represent) simply don't exist, and you can probably think of lots of good reasons why that's the case: none of which are Google's doing or in their control.

So why concern yourself with these numbers? Is it a good sign when Google hoovers up the short supply of "diverse" people? Is it a sign of anything?

Racial discrimination is not allowed in hiring, but we can't read minds. So statistics are what we fall back on to test the question, "Assuming they don't care about race, are the racial demographics of their employees an unlikely scenario?"

If it's out of line with some standard (this is the hard part to decide), that's a flag for further investigation.

>Is it a sign of anything?

Progress, it's doubleplusgood.

So they're hiring 910% more Asians than census data would dictate they should?

27% less Native Americans than expected? 40% less Whites. 56% less Blacks. 59% less Latinx.

So... Are you going to stop paying for your free Gmail account? That'll hurt them!

Personally I couldn't care less about their ethnic diversity. Are their products and services good or not? In my opinion some are excellent, but their privacy and censorship practices greatly diminish them. They suck at diversity that matters to me, that's for sure.

For anyone else who was out of the loop on "Black+", this is from their 2018 report:

>Black+ includes all Googlers who identify as Black, plus those who identify as Black and any other race.

Good note, thanks for clarifying that

If only they'd achieved this level of diversity back when they released circles I'm sure it would have taken off.

Is the goal to have the distribution of ethnicities of google employees match California, or the US in general or the whole world? California is less than 6% black and the US is around 12% black.

Why would those be the only reasonable goals to have?

It would be more reasonable to look at the racial breakdown of the average 4 year college graduating class.

Showcases Asian Privilege.

I like the notion of "culture add" vs culture fit. That characterization recognizes that team culture is not prescriptive but a reflection of the idiosyncratic contributions of the team's members. Someone from an underrepresented background has a unique potential to add, even challenge, the status quo.

Did the concept of "culture add" originate at Google? I'm curious to learn more about it and how to introduce it to an organization.

After a quick read through the data it looks like they're making progress on becoming a more diverse workforce. It seems like it's going pretty slowly but from what I recall most tech co's aren't any better and it seems like they are trying to eliminate a lot of bias in the recruiting process too. Anyone from Google care to comment on whether this seems to be something the company takes seriously or is it PR fluff?

Diversity KPI Report

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