San Francisco - Google’s decision to lay bare its lack of diversity ramps up the pressure on other Silicon Valley companies to increase the number of women and minorities among technology workers.
Women make up 30 percent of employees and 91 percent of staff are either white or Asian, the Mountain View, California- based company disclosed in a blog post on May 28.
The dearth of female and minority engineers, startup founders and business leaders has long been a sore point for female executives including Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg as well as activists such as Jesse Jackson.
Google’s disclosure follows increasing calls from investors and activists for companies in the technology hub -- which prides itself on being liberal and culturally inclusive -- to embrace diversity.
“Silicon Valley has been confused on the idea of meritocracy.” Mitch Kapor, the former chief executive officer of Lotus Development, said in an interview yesterday.
He’s organising a conference on diversity with Google later this year.
“Aspirationally, it’s a meritocracy, but in practice it really isn’t.”
Apple, facing behind-the-scenes pressure from some shareholders to add more female directors and executives, included language to a board committee charter in November vowing to diversify the group, which has one female director.
Facebook and Twitter were criticised leading up to their initial public offerings for not having any female directors.
Sandberg and Susan Desmond-Hellmann are now on Facebook’s board, and the other six members are white males.
Twitter has one woman, Marjorie Scardino, on its board and the remaining seven are white males.
Of the 10 people on Google’s board, three are women and one is an India-born minority.
Diversity Challenge
Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, wrote in the post that the search provider was wrong to hold back on publishing numbers on the diversity of its workforce.
He highlighted the lack of qualified minority and female technology experts, citing a US Department of Education study that found women earn just 18 percent of computer-science degrees in the US, and that blacks and Hispanics collect fewer than 5 percent of computer-science degrees.
“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,” Bock wrote.
Under Pressure
The lack of diversity among Google’s 50,000 employees isn’t unusual.
Last year, 74 percent of US workers in computer and mathematical occupations were men, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In software development, a fifth of the jobs were held by women.
“This is a challenge to Silicon Valley,” said Irina Raicu, director of the Internet ethics program at Santa Clara University.
“While this was an important step forward, it doesn’t mean that Google should just sit back now.”
Jackson, representing his Rainbow PUSH Coalition, has been showing up at shareholder meetings at Google, Facebook and other technology companies to push for more diversity.
Jackson said he’s issuing letters to 25 top technology companies including Apple, Cisco Systems, Intel, Yahoo! and Microsoft to follow Google’s lead and disclose more employment figures.
“For so long they’ve been hiding that data, and it’s time it be made public,” Jackson said in an interview.
Corporate Culture
Claudia Chan, founder of the S.H.E. Summit, a conference that focuses on women’s leadership and empowerment issues, said that female representation in companies is at the forefront of diversity discussions again.
“There’s been a lot of mainstream conversation about women’s issues in the last few years,” Chan said.
“This is a new wave of feminism, and it’s not just women stepping up for women. Now it’s also the private sector.”
Intel provides a breakdown of its US workforce, showing that 24 percent of its employees are women.
That ratio is the same at Microsoft, which has a board with a black chairman, John Thompson, and two female directors.
“Diversity is an integral part of Intel’s competitive strategy and vision,” Patricia McDonald, Intel’s vice president of human resources, said.
“We have taken the initiative to follow a standard practice of reporting diversity data openly.”
Representatives from Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
John Earnhardt, a spokesman for Cisco, declined to comment.
Improving Equality
Apple, which doesn’t break out the composition of its workforce of 80,000, changed its board-committee charter following objections from shareholders Trillium Asset Management and the Sustainability Group.
The investors said they were disappointed that the iPhone maker has only one woman on its eight-member board, and few female members on the executive team that reports to chief executive Tim Cook.
Cook has also been outspoken about improving equality since succeeding Steve Jobs in 2011.
Cook and Apple have advocated legalising same-sex marriages in the US, and for legislation that prohibits companies from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
Cook gave a speech in December about his childhood in Alabama and how witnessing a cross burning left a lasting impression on him to fight for equality.
A incident this week underscored how Silicon Valley still retains a boys club atmosphere.
Evan Spiegel, chief executive of mobile-app startup Snapchat, apologised for profanity-laced e-mails he sent during his Stanford University fraternity days that celebrated getting drunk and convincing sorority women to perform sexual acts.
Inappropriate Remarks
In March 2013, Adria Richards received threats of violence and was fired from her software job at startup SendGrid after she posted online an image of male programmers she accused of making inappropriate innuendos at a programming event in Santa Clara, California.
Critics said Richards mishandled the offense and defenders said her dismissal will discourage standing up to misconduct.
Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sued the venture-capital firm last year alleging it treated female employees unfairly by promoting and compensating them less than men.
She said she faced retaliation after she complained about sexual harassment. - Bloomberg News