Google Releases First Annual Diversity Report Since James Damore Incident

Almost a year after former Google employee James Damore’s infamous diversity manifesto that put diversity in the tech world under the spotlight once again, Google has released a full diversity report. The exhaustive document provided hard data on how Google’s workforce looks on axes of race and gender.

The full report can be found here, courtesy of Google. This is the fifth annual report from Google and the first since the Damore incident last August. According to Google's findings, things have not improved much in terms of demographic representation in its employment since last year.

Women only make up 30.9 percent of Google’s tech-focused workforce, meaning nearly 70 percent of Google employees are men. Just over 53 percent are white, while 36.3 percent are Asian. Most notably, only 2.5 percent of Google employees are black, and just 3.6 percent are latinx.

Some of the most marginalized of those groups saw only minimal increases from the last annual report. Google said women, black and latinx employment went up by 0.1 percent for each group.

The non-tech side of things is slightly more equitable, but not much. Women make up almost 48 percent of Google’s non-tech employment, with black employees coming in at 5 percent and latinx employees making up 5.8 percent of that part of Google’s business.

Predictably, things actually get worse in the realm of Google leadership. Only 25.5 percent of Google’s leaders are women, which Google spun as progress in its report. That number was at 20.8 percent four years ago. Black and latinx leadership numbers have increased marginally over the years; only 2 percent of Google’s leaders are black and the latinx number is lower at 1.8 percent.

What makes 2018’s report unique is the inclusion of data for employee attrition, according to TechCrunch. In other words, Google provided weighted data for which demographics exit the company the most in a given year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, black and latinx employees left Google at the highest rates since the last report.

Retention for minority employees in the tech industry has always been a concern. Recent studies have shown that those employees tend to leave after experiencing some kind of workplace discrimination or otherwise unfair treatment.