One Year In, Google's Diversity Push Has Barely Made Progress

One year into Google's big push to hire more minorities and more women, the company has hardly made any progress, according to updated diversity figures released by the Mountain View, California, tech giant Monday. Most notably, the company's gender breakdown (70 percent male, 30 percent female) and its percentage of Hispanic and black employees (3 percent and 2 percent, respectively) remained unchanged compared to 2014, when the company first released its workforce figures and started a trend that most other tech giants followed.

The only change was among white and Asian employees. The white demographic fell from 61 percent to 60 percent while Asians gained a percentage point and now represent 31 percent of Google's workforce.

No one expected Google's diversity figures to change overnight, but the lack of progress shows the search company still has a lot of work to do. "I think we are getting better, and we are hoping that ultimately we are able to accelerate the improvement," Google Vice President of People Operations Nancy Lee told USA Today.

Among the few highlights in Google's 2015 report are that women now make up 18 percent of tech jobs and 22 percent of Google's leadership roles, each up 1 percentage point from 2014. Unfortunately, black and Hispanic employees made no progress in either of these categories.

It's important for Google and other tech companies in Silicon Valley to add more female and minority employees to their ranks if the tech industry wants to help reverse the displacement of minorities in the Bay Area. In San Francisco specifically, the black population has dropped from 60,500 to 48,000 since 2000 and the city's historically Hispanic Mission District has lost 8,000 Latino residents during the same time frame.