Google revealed the gender and racial makeup of its 50,000-strong workforce on Wednesday, disclosing a significantly below-average proportion of minorities and women employees that it said was "miles from where we want to be," according to The Associated Press.
Google's disclosure of its workforce demographics represented a rare move, even if the figures came as no surprise to those familiar with Silicon Valley, an industry long scrutinized for its lack of diversity, the AP reported.
Blacks and Hispanics made up just 2 and 3 percent of overall employees at Google, respectively, while women accounted for 30 percent, the company said in a detailed blogpost, compared with the U.S. workforce average of about 47 percent women in 2012, according to the Department of Labor, the AP reported.
"Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it's hard to address these kinds of challenges if you're not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts," Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations, said in the Wednesday blogpost, according to the AP.
The employment gaps for women and minorities in the tech sector may stem from education, Bock said, the AP reported.
Women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States; blacks and Hispanics make up less than 10 percent of U.S. college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in computer science majors, respectively, he argued, according to the AP.
Bock, who added that Google has donated more than $40 million to organizations promoting computer science education among women, said Google recognized the extent of the internal problem and was open to discussion about possible solutions, the AP reported.
"We've always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it's time to be candid about the issues," Bock wrote, according to the AP.
Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson attended shareholder meetings at both Google and Facebook earlier this month to raise the issue of racial diversity in the Valley, the AP reported.
