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What a surprise — most Googlers are white men

Image Credit: Marcin Wichary/Flickr

Technology giant Google serves billions of people around the world, but its employees don’t mirror the rest of the world very well.

Of the nearly 50,000 Google employees out there, 70 percent are men, and 61 percent are white, according to figures Google released today. Asians represent 30 percent of the company’s employment base, while Hispanics comprise 3 percent.

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Narrow things down to Google leaders, and you’ll find an even higher concentration of white men.

While Google has taken pains to back initiatives that could alter the makeup of people with technology skills, the company is “the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be,” Google senior vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock wrote in a blog post about the statistics.

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“[B]eing totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution,” Bock wrote.

Companies have sought to improve gender and race makeup of their employees and especially on their boards of directors lately. Box, Dropbox, New Relic, and Zendesk fall into this camp.

Perhaps Google will announce the appointment of more women and non-whites in leadership positions and seek to further diversify its workforce in the months to come.

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