Google is largely failing to diversify its workforce beyond white and Asian men even though it hired women to fill one in every five of its openings for computer programmers and other high-paying technology jobs last year.
The imbalanced picture emerged in a demographic breakdown that Google released on Monday. The report underscored the challenges that Google and most other major technology companies face as they try to add more women, black people and Hispanics to their payrolls after many years of primarily relying on the technical skills of white and Asian men.
“Early indications show promise but we know that with an organisation 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% of Google’s worldwide technology jobs were held by women at the beginning of 2015, but that was up a percentage point from 2014. White people held 59% of Google’s tech jobs in the US, and Asian people filled 35% of the positions, the report found.
The slight rise in women stemmed from a concerted effort to bring the numbers up. Google said 21% of the workers it hired for technology jobs last year were women. The Mountain View, California, company added 9,700 jobs last year, although it declined to specify how many were for programming and other openings requiring technical knowledge.
Overall, Google employed 53,600 people at the end of 2014. In the US, just 2% of Google’s workers were black people and 3% were Hispanic. Across all industries in the US, 12% of the workforce are black people and 14% are Hispanic.
The latest snapshot of Google’s workforce comes roughly a year after it publicly disclosed the gender and racial makeup of its payroll for the first time, casting a spotlight on a diversity problem vexing the entire technology industry. Other well-known technology trendsetters, including Apple and Facebook, subsequently released data revealing similar diversity problems.
Mortified by the disclosures, Google and most of its other technology peers have been pouring more money into programs steering more women, black people and Hispanics to focus on science and mathematics in schools and have stepped up recruiting minority students as they prepare to graduate from college.
The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who has been spearheading the drive to diversify the tech industry, applauded Google for releasing its workforce data again to help keep pressure on the technology industry to change the composition of its employees.
“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.”
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