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Google says focusing on recruiting minority women

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Media giant Google says it will focus diversity efforts on Black and Hispanic women, reports USA Today. Google is pledging to focus diversity efforts on its least represented demographic: Black and Hispanic women. The announcement comes as the Internet giant’s annual diversity report shows that women of color significantly trail their male counterparts of the same ethnicity in Google’s U.S. workforce. Executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, plan to make women of color an “intentional focus” of the company’s diversity efforts. The sharpest deficits in Silicon Valley are African-American and Hispanic women, who make up 1 percent of workers. Women of color are represented across other industries at much higher rates consistent with their proportion of the overall U.S. population, suggesting the technology industry is having trouble reversing decades of hiring patterns. Four years after it published its first diversity report, Google is still struggling to hire and retain underrepresented minorities despite repeated promises to make its workforce reflect the billions of people it serves around the globe. Not only are Blacks, Hispanics and Latino being hired at lower rates, they are leaving at higher rates than other employees, according to the company’s diversity report released Thursday (June 14). Out of the nearly 56,000 people Google employed in the U.S. in 2017, 544 were Black women, up from 348 in 2016. During that same time period, Google employed 799 Black men, according to the most recent documents Google filed with the federal government. African Americans account for 2.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. Hispanic women and Latinas numbered 945 in 2017, up from 566 in 2016. That’s about half the number of Hispanic men and Latinos employed by Google in the U.S. during that time frame. Google says its employees are 3.6 percent Hispanic and Latino. Its U.S. workforce in 2017 was 53.1 percent white, 36.3 percent Asian and 30.9 percent female. While efforts to bring aboard more Black and Hispanic women have foundered, Google has made strides in hiring and retaining other women, reporting gains in diversifying its leadership ranks, with the percentage of women leaders at Google reaching 25.5 percent, up 4.7 percentage points since 2014. “We have seen gains for white and Asian women so we know the work that we need to center on and focus on is around women of color,” says Google’s diversity chief Danielle Brown in an interview.

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