Tech, Culture and Connection
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/05/29/317024113/googles-white-maleheavy-staff-underlines-techs-diversity-problem
Google's White Male-Heavy Staff Underlines
Tech's Diversity Problem
May 29, 201412:28 PM ET
Elise Hu
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A long line for a men's room at a 2009 tech conference in Omaha, Neb. Photos of this situation
have now inspired a Twitter feed.
SleepyJeanne/Flickr
When it finally published a demographic breakdown of its workforce this week, tech giant
Google admitted, "We've always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our
workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it's time to be candid about the
issues."
This is what the numbers showed: Google's staff is made up of 70 percent men, is 61 percent
white, 30 percent Asian, and all other races and ethnicities don't register above 5 percent.
As a point of comparison, Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show 47 percent of the total
workforce in the United States is made up of women, 80 percent of U.S. employees are white, 12
percent are black and 5 percent are Asian.
All the talk about meritocracy in tech is confounding when you hold it up against this data; if the
technology industry is truly a meritocracy, does it follow that the people with merit are
overwhelmingly white and male?
Google brings up the pipeline problem as a possible explanation for its whiteness: It has limited
hiring pools of people of color and women:
"Women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks
and Hispanics make up under 10 percent of U.S. college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent
of degrees in CS majors, respectively."
Education in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) is important, to be sure.
We've reported on the social science that shows stereotypes lead girls to quit science.
But there are other ways to think about the utter dominance of white males in tech: Technology
journalist Kara Swisher and tech mogul Vivek Wadhwa blame laziness in hiring. The Wall Street
Journal reports:
"Ms. Swisher and Mr. Wadhwa both cited laziness as the main culprit for what they described as
covert racism and sexism in the sector. People in positions of power, namely those funding
companies and appointing board members, too often get comfortable with their immediate
familiars and fail to take a wider view of talented people in the industry and world, they said."
Humans
How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science
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How The Meritocracy Myth Affects Women In Technology
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Why Aren't More Girls Attracted To Physics?
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Closing The Tech Industry's Gender Gap Requires Better Data
The data are helpful. As our guest blogger Catherine Bracy wrote for us last summer, closing the
gender gap in technology requires clearer and better data on the extent of the problem.
When pressed by journalists, major tech companies including Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, IBM
and Microsoft have simply not replied or refused to give up their workforce demographic
breakdowns. San Jose Mercury News reporter Mike Swift had to sue the Labor Department to
get some numbers. In 2010, after a two-year legal battle, the department ultimately gave him a
single set of aggregate race and gender stats for Silicon Valley's 10 largest companies. (Mother
Jones writes an excellent piece detailing those figures.)
Google has since reversed course on its refusal to share, and with data can come more
understanding and conversation about the issue. We have requests out to various tech companies
to see if they, too, are interested in a similar about-face. We'll follow up if they share.