Google Diversity: Company Has Very few Latino and Black Employees
Google is a company consisting mostly of white and Asian males. The company has tried to diversify its workforce by hiring women for one out of every five computer programmers and other high paying jobs last year, The Grio reported.
That still leaves the Internet company with a very low amount of black and Latino employees.
Monday, the company released a demographics report proving that there are very few black and Hispanic employees.
The results of the demographics report show that companies like Google and other major technology companies have struggled to add women, blacks and Hispanic to their workforce. For years, these companies have relied on the technical skills and knowledge of white and Asian men.
"Early indications show promise, but we know that with an organization our size, year-on-year growth and meaningful change is going to take time," said Nancy Lee, Google's vice president of people operations.
Only 18 percent of Google's worldwide technology jobs were held by women entering 2015. That number is up just one percentage point from 2014. Whites held the majority of technology jobs in the U.S. with 59 percent, while Asians held 35 percent of the positions, the report detailed.
The small increase in jobs for women is part of Google's efforts to bring those numbers up.
Google said that 21 percent of the workers it hired for its technology jobs last year were women. The company said that it added 9,700 jobs last year, but did not elaborate on how many of those jobs were programming or other jobs that required technical knowledge.
The very low amount of black and Hispanic workers was detailed in the report. By the end of 2014, Google employed 53,600 people in the U.S. Of those, only 2 percent were black and only 3 percent were Hispanic. In all industries in the U.S., 12 percent of the workforce is black and 14 percent is Hispanic.
The updated diversity figures come about a year after Google first released the racial and gender makeup of its workforce for the first time. The lack of diversity at Google is part of a problem facing the whole technology industry. Tech giants Apple and Facebook also released similar figures that show a lack of diversity as well.
Google and other technology companies have put efforts into making changes to encourage more diversity. Google has put money into programs that are geared towards getting more women, blacks and Hispanics to focus on science and math in schools. They have also increased their recruiting efforts to minority students as they near graduation from college.
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson was pleased that Google released the workforce data. He says it will keep the pressure on the technology industry to start making changes to the workforce.
"Tech companies must move from the aspiration of 'doing better' to concrete actionable hiring to move the needle," Jackson said in a statement. "We aim to change the flow of the river."
To read the report from Google detailing its workforce, go to their official blog.
Subscribe to Latin Post!
Sign up for our free newsletter for the Latest coverage!
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of latinpost.com