Focusing on diversity

It’s been two years since we first shared our workforce demographics and helped spark a conversation about the need to improve diversity at Google and across the tech industry. Today we’re updating google.com/diversity with our 2015 demographics, and sharing some areas where we’ve seen progress in building a more diverse and inclusive Google.

More women in technical and leadership roles

Women now comprise 31 percent of all Googlers, and we’ve seen strong growth of women in technical and leadership roles. Similar to last year, one in five of our technical hires in 2015 were women, helping bring the total number of women in technical roles from 18 to 19 percent. Additionally, women now hold 24 percent of leadership roles across Google—up from 22 percent.

Overall hiring progress

For the first time this year, we’re sharing the percentage of our hires who are Black and Hispanic. In 2015, our hiring for Black, Hispanic, and female Googlers grew faster than our current demographic representation for each of these groups. And our Hispanic Googlers in technical roles increased from 2 to 3 percent.

Building an Inclusive Culture

Hiring is important, but it’s equally important to make workplaces inclusive, fair and supportive for all employees. We’re continuing to build a culture where Googlers can grow, thrive and want to stay. We want to build a place where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas and opinions—and empowered to grow their careers.

We check and recheck processes like promotion and performance reviews to make sure they’re producing equitable outcomes, and address any gaps we find. For example, Googlers in engineering or product management roles are able to nominate themselves for promotion, and in 2010 we discovered that women in technical roles were less likely than men to self-nominate. We found that with a small nudge—emailing these findings to all technical Googlers—the rate of women self-nominating went up and now the gap between men and women has closed.

Compensation is another example. We’ve long had gender pay equity in our workforce, and we recently shared our approach to compensation with the hope that other companies will adopt similar fair pay practices.

We also continue to invest in our unconscious bias trainings. Over 65 percent of Googlers have participated in our unbiasing workshops, and all new Googlers take the workshop as part of their orientation. We’ve shared these materials and research on our platform re:Work with Google so anyone from any industry can create unbiasing trainings for their team.

We saw encouraging signs of progress in 2015, but we’re still far from where we need to be. Watch this video to learn more about our diversity and inclusion efforts from leaders across Google.