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To fix the problem, you need more minority and women CS students. I graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering 14 years ago from a major university. I don't recall a single woman, black, or hispanic student in my class.
To fix the problem of no CS graduates, you need to get those students interested in math and science early. But people have been saying that since I was in elementary school. I don't know how you do that.
So it's not surprising, nor is it Google's problem in my opinion. It's a societal issue. How do we motivate more woman and minorities to pursue careers in computer science?
I'm not sure that Google has "some sort of clear plan to fix this problem" as it's not necessarily a problem of their own creation. If this was a company with less specific skilled labor needs and the workforce wasn't a decent representation of the population then we should be appalled. But this is unfortunately a reflection of the top grads in the tech areas. Anecdotally from my own experience two of the three execs I worked with on a project were women, but that was marketing and not tech. The tech side looked like a typical engineering class…mostly guys.
My graduating class was almost half Asian/Indian.
The scary thing is that Google is much better compared to similar-scale companies in Silicon Valley (I would eat my hat if Oracle or Apple were even close to 17% female on the engineering side), and better still compared to the average valley/SF startup, which is pretty much exactly the white/asian sausage fest their rep suggests.
Google in particular is handicapped by the cultural biases of its recruiting arm, which prizes top-ten engineering school graduates over all else: it's not that they don't hire anybody without a Stanford or MIT degree (and they occasionally even hire weird autodidact liberal arts dropouts like me), but the scales are tilted strongly in that direction, which means that they're standing at the end of a pipeline that has already spent 20 years filtering out women and non-asian minorities. If they want to truly fight the good fight, it's going to require some serious effort at the primary school level, with no prospect of an immediate payoff.
A hundred years from now, "women can't be engineers" is going to look as quaintly stupid as "women can't be lawyers," but it's going to require a similar level of effort to fix it.
There are, however, several trans* women, enough that they likely contribute significantly to the statistics. This might be part of Google's plan to address the problem.
And we are close to abducting people off the street to improve our numbers.
Google may be better than many, but, given their power in the marketplace, they also get a larger share of the responsibility
I realize blog posts arent' supposed to be articles, but still some kind of information about hiring rates in the tech industry in general would be useful.
I know that in the film and television production world diversity figures like that would be a HUGE improvement.
Portland has a new feminist hacker space (Flux) in the Pearl District. It would be nice to see one organized here. If Google or Amazon or Microsoft or UW or start ups were serious about this cultural disaster they'd create or support feminist spaces for women in tech where women can work without personal or cultural aggressions -- they already support mostly misogynist spaces.
I used to enjoy reading this rag, but now it's just frustrating to see such childish, biased, bad writing. I don't expect this to be Mother Jones, but come on...how about a little journalistic balance?
But dammit! I would love to work for Google, its a laid back environment, which is how every place should be, and you can bring your dog to work, I believe. That sounds like a dream! If only I WASN'T using Google the night I was searching for exciting career paths to find for myself..because the answer was staring at me the entire time. GOOGLE! And I missed it.
~Zach Galifinakis: Sometimes when I'm bored, I just like to look up things online and see if there's something I can't find out. I like to stump Google. The other day, I Googled: "How many Mexicans live in North Korea?" Google didn't know! I also Googled: "How many candles does Dave Navarro own?" 14,000.~
Oh: So if it's ILLEGAL for companies to discriminate against you based on gender or age. Why haven't I SEEN a male clerk working inside a Victoria's Secrets store to ring up bras? Men do makeup around the corner at MAC, men ring bras up and sell you shoes at Nordstroms? So certainly men are capable of working retail at VS. Has no male resume ever been good enough? Or does VS secretly not trust men working in their stores? Or they know it could potentially creep the women right out of the store? Either way they are obviously discriminating.
So Google doesn't have a diversity problem, it's just that Constant and his fellow Bolshies have a problem with their designated Mascot demographic not being represented to their liking