Getting to work on diversity at Google

So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.

It&#x27;s {{current_year}} and people are still asking, &quot;why does diversity matter?&quot;<p>Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic diversity is strongly correlated with diversity in points of view. You want the people building your products to come from many walks of life. Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies. If the latter is your belief, that&#x27;s all the more reason to work to increase diversity as a corrective to those external social biases. Diversity also impacts the way that people see your company, which makes attracting a diverse pool of qualified candidates easier (few people want to be the only member of a certain demographic group) and is good for public relations.

Are these diversity numbers for the US or for Google as a whole?<p>If they are world-wide, I find it quite interesting how closely the location of the Google offices where software development occurs[1] matches the ethnicity numbers.<p>Notably, there is only one development office in Latin America (and none in Spain&#x2F;Portugal), and the only development office in the Middle East or Africa is Tel Aviv (not clear what ethnicity the workers there would class themselves as).<p>I&#x27;m not aware of any world-class Computer Science programs in Africa. There are some decent ones in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, but increasing the number would be a problem worth tackling.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.google.com.au/about/careers/teams/engineering/swe/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com.au&#x2F;about&#x2F;careers&#x2F;teams&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;sw...</a>

As a person who comes from a place where there has always been an unhealthy obsession with demographic classification (South Africa), I&#x27;m curious about the &quot;Asian&quot; classification, which seems even more worthless than the average racial classification. Does it encompass both South Asians and Chinese? Do they have a common &quot;Asian experience&quot; in the US? Does the average person whose ancestors came from Tehran have much in common with someone from Beijing?

Although it&#x27;s fairly straightforward to distinguish between gender and sexual orientation, I disagree with these traditional US categories of ethnicity.<p>Take a &#x27;White&#x27; person, for instance: is a White American the same as a White Englishman, or a White Australian? What about a White Frenchman? These are all classified as &#x27;White&#x27; but could potentially be vastly different in terms of diversity.<p>The same argument could be made with the other ethnicities. The &#x27;Asian&#x27; category -- are they Chinese, Japanese, Filipino..? Or an American Asian immigrant -- Chinese-American, etc.<p>If you&#x27;re aiming for diversity that&#x27;s representative of your customer base, then surely your measure of ethnicity has to be more granular.

It&#x27;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.?<p>The data is interesting in it&#x27;s own right but I don&#x27;t better understand where Google is going with diversity; I only understand where Google currently stands.

What a lovely attitude by Google to open up and show those statistics.<p>It&#x27;s especially praiseworthy due the fact it&#x27;s not a case of &quot;look how &#x27;diverse&#x27; we are&quot; but more of a &quot;let&#x27;s openly discuss these numbers&quot;.

I don&#x27;t understand why companies are obsessed with diversity just for the sake of it.<p>Edit: I am mexican, and I personally wouldn&#x27;t like to be hired for diversity reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.

It&#x27;s tiring always being first, always being different, always being the one who has to adapt, denying important parts of yourself just to get the chance to do your job. It’s like being a stranger in a strange land, where you speak the language but nobody learns yours. That&#x27;s why even women who do well in development end up leaving mid-career. <a href="http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008216/tracking/minding-gap-how-your-company-can-woo-female-coders" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcolabs.com&#x2F;3008216&#x2F;tracking&#x2F;minding-gap-how-y...</a> [You could swamp out woman with any other minority group and it would still be true. Its much harder to stick with something when the river flow is actively against you.]

Ah, the US, where blatantly racist categorization of humans is used to prove your not racist.<p>Seriously, how many other countries divide people in &quot;black&quot; and &quot;white&quot;? Or is it even legal to do so?

It&#x27;s nice for Google to publish this, but their commentary is misleading.<p>From 2000 to 2009, 10% (48,897 &#x2F; 471,318) of Computer Science undergraduate degrees were awarded to Blacks, according to NSF ([1][2]).<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsf.gov&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;seind12&#x2F;c2&#x2F;c2s2.htm</a> [2]: <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c2/at02-19.xls" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsf.gov&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;seind12&#x2F;append&#x2F;c2&#x2F;at02-19.xls</a>

I found data (from 2012) for some other companies: <a href="http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-data/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;technology&#x2F;tech-diversity-d...</a>

age diversity would be interesting as well

True diversity is diversity of thought.

I&#x27;m always confused by the vagueness of these diversity PR efforts.<p>When you consciously want to improve something, you set goals for yourself, and then figure out ways to meet those goals. Then people can hold you accountable.<p>Google doesn&#x27;t seem to have done any of that. They made a start in choosing what they&#x27;re going to measure, but I don&#x27;t understand it. For example, I don&#x27;t think &quot;Black&quot; is an ethnicity. The differences between a black South African and someone from Egypt is huge, let alone a third generation American.<p>Also, I notice Google didn&#x27;t include anything about gender in their diversity graphs, and I think everyone believes gender and sexual orientation contribute a valuable difference in perspective. I&#x27;m curious as to why they chose to exclude gay, transgendered, straight, and everyone in between and outside those labels from this push.<p>And then, even if they define all the categories of diversity they want, how the hell do they determine what their targets are for all the different demographics?

I really don&#x27;t get why gender or ethnicity should play any role at all. Especially for jobs based on technical skill it would make a lot of sense to select mainly for ability. It is then very likely that this would have the same skewed distribution of ethnicities that all the &#x27;elite&#x27; universities have, despite affirmative action. As a white priviledged male, I feel sort of disheartened reading that all things being equal, officially I won&#x27;t be hired, unofficially of course often it is the other way around. There are plenty of countries that are much less diverse than the US and still have highly successful companies, so apart from good PR I fail to see why &#x27;working on diversity&#x27; does have any meaningful impact.

Curious to see granularity by job type - ie engineers vs sales.

why is diversity good? forced diversity seems very contrived. why should the percentage of women hired be higher than the number that graduate from school with a CS degree?

Google needs to hire a few older people who know about the Mcarthy Era, and how Nazis used personal information against family members? And yes, Duckduckgo is getting better each month. My love affair with Google is long over. She taped everything I said, and will not stop stalking me.

When I worked there I thought they did a reasonably good job on gender, religion, and sexual orientation but there were not enough older engineers there. I wonder what the actual numbers are for that.

This is a near-dupe of the discussion of this PBS article, which has more data, including the tech vs non-tech breakdown:<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;newshour&#x2F;updates&#x2F;google-discloses-workfor...</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813310" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7813310</a>

It appears the prior story on this topic got blasted off the front page [1] for whatever reason. Here&#x27;s what I had to say over there [2].<p>1: <a href="http://hnrankings.info/7813310/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;7813310&#x2F;</a><p>2: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813811" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7813811</a>

I wonder how many of those minorities are working the low ends at Google...the details of course didn&#x27;t say. Also, they stopped short of saying it&#x27;s the perception and blame the facts on &#x27;statistics&#x27;. I&#x27;m sure they have no problems hiring cooks, janitors, etc who are minorities.

Hispanics mentioned 4 times in this thread as of 10:23pm MST. Asian&#x27;s mentioned 18 times...<p>Everyone talks Black (27 mentions) and White (82 mentions).... meanwhile Hispanic and Asian ethic groups race higher and higher in total number. [1] In raw numbers, Hispanics are growing far faster than any ethnic group in the US. Companies in this game for the long haul had better recognize that Hispanics will be the dominant ethnic group in relatively short order.[2]<p>But who are the Hispanics? Better figure it out. It matters now and will increasingly matter much more going forward.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/cb13-112.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;releases&#x2F;archives&#x2F;population...</a> [2]<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fast-growth-latino-population-blurs-traditional-u-s-racial-lines-article-1.1291138" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nydailynews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national&#x2F;fast-growth-latino-...</a>

I&#x27;d be really curious to see the gender&#x2F;ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it&#x27;s hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.

I think that the author doesn&#x27;t know the difference between race and ethnicity.

&quot;But we’re the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be&quot;<p>Who is &quot;we&quot;? And why do they want to be somewhere else?

If Google achieves a 51% Female 49% Male ratio, is this good? Supporters of forced diversity are implying it is, but why?<p>If there is something gained by having gender X, then you are saying that genders are not equal. If there is no difference, then why are we doing this? Why are we basing employment on gender anyway?<p>I&#x27;d like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful and those that are not. If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not okay too?