Out of 49,829 U.S. Google employees, only 3 percent of them are Hispanic, and only 2 percent are Black.
How do we know this? Google announced it themselves. In a blog post titled "Getting to work on diversity at Google" that the company posted today, the world's most valuable company detailed the makeup of their workforce, complete with a graph showing how much more Whites are employed than any other ethnicity. To accompany that, the graph shows that women only make up 30 percent of Google's employees, which breathes new life into the reality that Silicon Valley is ruled by White men, and it's getting harder and harder to break in to an industry ruled by Zuckerbergs, Spiegels, and Cooks if you're a minority and/or not a man.
"We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google," the company said in the post. "We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.
"There are lots of reasons why technology companies like Google struggle to recruit and retain women and minorities. For example, 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," the company continued.
This is obviously something that needs to be worked on, and it's nice that Google is owning up to it, but it will likely take make many years before the makeup of Silicon Valley starts to significantly change—if companies get started, now.
