US businesses have always soft-pedalled on the divisive issue of ethnic diversity within their workplaces. But Google has decided to break with convention and confront it head-on.
Last week, Google shared the diversity numbers for the organisation on its official blog. “We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google,” the blog said. “We now realise 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.”
It revealed that 70 per cent of its global workforce are men, while in the 61 per cent are white and 30 per cent Asian. The ranks of Hispanics and African-Americans correspond to 3 and 2 per cent respectively.
Since 2010, Google has invested more than $40 million on education programmes in computer science for girls and women and working with universities where African-Americans dominate the student rolls.
According to a survey by Mondo, 73 per cent of respondents currently contract out work for application services such as app development, web and mobile development, application hosting and application maintenance. “We are entering the era of the elastic workforce and businesses want to have access to experts, when they need it, without taking on new overhead,” said Michel Kirven, CEO of Mondo.