Google hired Intel Corp.’s former head of diversity on Thursday to lead its own inclusion efforts.
Danielle Brown will serve as Google’s vice president of diversity, according to the company blog. Brown will assume the post in July.
“While we’ve made progress in recent years for both women and people of color, there are areas for improvement across the board — in terms of our hiring, our promotion and retention, our commitments, our working environment, and how we measure success or failure,” Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of people operations, wrote. “Danielle will look at our efforts in all these areas afresh.”
Brown left Santa Clara-based Intel earlier this month after ascending to the role of vice president of human resources. She came on board at Intel in 2009 as an associate within the company’s accelerated leadership program. The Google hire comes six months after Nancy Lee, Google’s former head of diversity and inclusion, stepped down from her role, per TechCrunch.
Women make up 31 percent of Google employees, according to Google’s most recent workforce data. Women in tech roles grew from 19 percent to 20 percent during the last year, while women in leadership roles has grown from 24 percent to 25 percent in the same time period.
The Mountain View-based company also has work to do when it come to people of color. Just 2 percent of the company is black and 4 percent are Hispanic.
Earlier this month, Google officially opened Howard West, a campus for the D.C.-based historically black college to address diversity in the tech industry. The central goal of Howard West, officials said, is to bolster the hiring of African-American software engineers, helping remedy the lack of racial diversity at the tech giant and other companies in Silicon Valley.
A lack of racial diversity has created problems for Google, including in 2015, when its photo aggregation service categorized some black people in photos as gorillas. A few analysts noted the issue could have been prevented if the company had more black engineers developing and testing its products.
Google and other Silicon Valley tech companies have attributed their low diversity numbers to a pipeline problem, saying not enough qualified minorities and women are pursuing computer science degrees from top engineering schools. But according to The New York Times, diversity advocates believe company culture creates greater barriers for people with diverse backgrounds, and studies have shown that the pipeline of diverse candidates is more plentiful than companies report.
Source: bizjournals
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