Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dwolb | Hacker News Reader

It's great to be open and all, but they never mention what their goal is. Do Google believe diversity is good for workplace cohesion, their own social mobility goals, good corporate moral policy, etc.?

The data is interesting in it's own right but I don't better understand where Google is going with diversity; I only understand where Google currently stands.

View on HN

As a Google employee, the reasons I hear is that we'd like the diversity of our workforce to more accurately reflect the diversity of our users, so we can serve them better.

I think this is a very interesting response. If it's true, then their diversity goal will be reached when the makeup of Google workforce is representative of the world population (assuming world population correlates well with Google user population). Therefore, focusing on bringing more women in to tech is a very good goal since women may make up 50% of Google users. Secondary and third goals would be to hire more representatives from Asia and Africa

So that's way Google exited China, right? ...

As a Google employee, the reason I'd like to improve the diversity of my work place is so I can work with more than just a bunch of white dudes. I mean, white dudes are great and all, but I really value diversity of opinion and experience in my life.

Of all the places to force new perspective onto yourself the workplace just seems like an odd choice to me. If I want to experience different cultures a corporate office is probably the absolute worst place I can think of to do so.

Uhhh I don't want to "experience different cultures". People of other races and genders are not weird aliens that are going to challenge me. It's not like I'm asking to import some Ugandan field workers as colleagues. I just want to engage with more, different kinds of people from my own society. There are a lot of them out there.

I didn't mean "experience different cultures" in such a literal sense, but it's probably my own fault for wording it like I did.

Like you, I enjoy engaging with a lot of different sorts of people. I was mostly just commenting that I've found a lot more success doing so outside the workplace in my own personal life. Maybe it's the places I've worked? Hard to say.

I have plenty of success interacting with different sorts of people outside the workplace. But I spend 40-50 hours a week at my workplace, so...

This is the feeling I'm scared of:

According to Google's numbers, whites are underrepresented at Google compared to the US at large.

What? What did I say?

Yes, european whites make up roughly 72% of the US, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat..., and 61% of Googlers.

If anything, you should be wanting to see less Asian faces overall (insanely, dramatically overrepresented, 30% of Googlers compared to 4.7% of Americans), and want to see more black faces and more white female faces.

That's more of an ideal, not really an achievable goal. How does Google measure the diversity of its users? How does Google measure the quality of their service to each people group? Does this mean Google's ideal workforce would be a near 1:1 mapping of employees to the general user population?

Does there have to be a business goal? Making society more fair is a good goal. Reducing the white male preference in the job market should be a social responsibility for a company that greatly impacts our daily lives.

There could be business goals though: it improves people's public opinion of you and in this case may help protect them from lawsuits.

This link at the bottom of the page has some more info... http://www.google.com/diversity/

DiggityDug7, if only 5% of the country was black, say, would having under 10% of your workforce be black be considered unfair?

Likewise, if the number of comp sci graduates in the country is 5%, the same question can be asked. Who is the one being unfair?

Yes it takes the idea of a corporation strictly being beholden to shareholders and extends it to all stakeholders, which includes impacted society.

> Making society more fair is a good goal. Reducing the white male preference in the job market should be a social responsibility for a company that greatly impacts our daily lives.

The data Google just posted contradicts you. 61% of Google employees are white, while 80% of the total US workforce is, see e.g. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp...

That means white people are under-represented at Google.

The group whose representation is most diverging from the population as a whole are Asians, who are hugely over-represented.

Overall, the numbers show that Asians are over-represented, which may explain much of the under-representation by all other groups. So the story here is certainly not one of "white male preference in the job market". You might be right about male, but not about white.

OT: I had this in mind when the character on House of Cards complained that she'd feel like a token Asian minority if she worked at Google.

Writer research failure.

How is it unfair to hire what you perceive as the best candidate to work at your company? Something that's actually unfair would be disqualifying a better candidate purely because of his skin color/gender.

Also, just to emphasis what others have already replied to you; Whites are actually underrepresented at Google relative to the ratios seen in the rest of the workforce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com