Google today launched a new initiative to bring more inclusivity into mobile gaming. “Change the Game” conducted interesting research into how women play and the real-world effects that a gender gap has on games. In turn, Google is planning diversity programs, partnerships, and research throughout 2018, starting by highlighting games on the Play Store.
The latest fallout over the Googler-written anti-diversity document took place yesterday as a company-wide meeting was canceled over online harassment and doxxing fears. While Sundar Pichai did not get to express his thoughts at that event, later on in the evening he addressed a coding event for girls hosted at the Googleplex and reached out to reaffirm their place at Google.
Coinciding with Monday’s firing of the Googler behind the anti-diversity document, Sundar Pichai announced an all-hands meeting set for today. The Town Hall on gender, expression, and other issues was abruptly canceled this afternoon over fears of online harassment.
The author of the viral anti-diversity document has been fired from Google and comes after Sundar Pichai’s first address on the issue. Following statements over the weekend from the VP of Diversity and others at the company, Google CEO Sundar Pichai penned a memo to employees that surfaced today. It notes that portions of the anti-diversity document violate Google’s Code of Conduct, with the CEO returning from vacation to hold a town hall later this week.
In light of an employee-written document speaking out against equality and other similar initiatives at the company, Google has issued several responses. The first was made yesterday by their VP of Engineering and the second comes from the VP of Diversity, with both refuting the document.
In recent years, Silicon Valley has made strides towards improving gender and racial diversity, but it is still not the industry’s strong suit. Reflecting how issues are still present is a document circling within Google that decries and calls for an end to the company’s equality efforts. This manifesto of sorts has gone “internally viral,” with many employees now awaiting Google’s response.
Google has published its latest diversity report, saying that it is ‘making progress’ on a more diverse workforce but recognizes that there is ‘much more to do.’ It has announced a new hire to help it do so.
To push our work forward, we’re thrilled that Danielle Brown will be joining Google as our new Vice President of Diversity. She’ll start in July, and comes with the deep conviction that Google provides a platform where she and the team can make a real impact internally and across the tech industry.
Its latest numbers show that the company is still predominantly male and either white or Asian …
Google has partnered with Howard University to launch a new school campus called Howard West right within its own Mountain View campus. Google says undergraduate students from Howard’s computer science program will have the opportunity to attend the campus-within-a-campus for hands-on learning direct from both Howard staff and Google’s own engineers…
Following a proposal by Google earlier this year, the Unicode Technical Committee today approved a new set of emoji that aims to improve gender equality.
More than 90 percent of the world’s online population use emoji. But while there’s a huge range of emoji, there aren’t a lot that highlight the diversity of women’s careers, or empower young girls…. the emoji representing women aren’t exactly, well, representative. So we’ve been working to make things better.
If we want to understand why the percentage of women in working in the tech sector has dropped from 35% in 1990 to just 26% today, asking some women in tech for their thoughts on the issue seems like a smart thing to do. Re/code is doing just that, in a new video series entitled The 26%: Women Speak Out on Tech’s Diversity Crisis, and a Google X robotics expert was first in line …
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Update: Google has uploaded a video to its Android YouTube account, embedded at the bottom of this post, to formally announce the campaign, which it’s calling “And Proud,” with lots of people on Twitter using the #andproud hashtag to share their Android.
Androidify, the cutesy undercover app part of Google’s “Be together, not the same” campaign, has received a small update today — but only in terms of its download size. The update brings a lot of LGBT pride focused clothing and moves that you can add to your custom Android character. The update seems to align well with the annual San Francisco Pride Parade, held on June 28th, at which Google employees make a regular appearance. And if you create a Pride-themed character and share it to the Androidify.com website by June 27th, your character will be a part of Google’s “global online Pride parade,” being held on the same day.
Google is well known for its efforts to support diversity both inside and outside of the company through initiatives like covering the health benefits of LGBT couples and Made with Code, a program to get more young girls learning how to code. You can get the update via APKMirror right now, but if you aren’t quite familiar with manually updating and installing apps, the update to version 4.0 (from 3.0) should be rolling out via the Play Store to your device at some point over the next 24 hours.
Google traditionally participates in LGBT Pride month in a variety of ways, with one of the most notable being its redesigned search results page for several LGBT queries.
More than a year ago, Google became one of the first tech companies to share data on the diversity of its workforce, and now it has released an updated version of the data. In a post on Google+, the company revealed some of the changes that it has made to improve diversity and the results of those changes. Last month, Google revealed plans to spend more than $150 million on diversity initiatives over the next year.
Google is looking to continue its push to make its workforce and the tech industry as a whole more diverse, the company wrote in a blog post today. Google is looking to spend $150 million on a campaign to increase diversity. In 2014, the company spent $115 million on diversity initiatives.
The NY Times reports that Google is embedding engineers into Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) in a bid to increase diversity in its technical staff. Currently only around 1% of Google’s engineers are African American, and the company said last year that its workforce diversity was “miles” from where it wanted to be.
HBCUs are higher education institutions established before 1964 primarily to serve the black community, while accepting students of all ethnic backgrounds. There are more than 106 HSBUs in the USA, and Google is so far sending engineers to five of the biggest …
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Screenshot via Google I/O microsite
With Google I/O kicking off today at 9 am PST/12 pm EST, Google VP Megan Smith tells USA Today that the number of women attending Google’s developer conference has more than doubled since last year’s conference.
She says women will make up 20 percent of the 6,000 software developers. Last year just 8 percent of Google I/O goers were women, a statistic that Smith says is typical of most tech conferences.
“Twenty percent is not 50 percent, which is where we want to be,” she said. “But the trajectory is good.”
Google is also making efforts to increase the stage presence of women on stage and leading sessions, according to Smith, with 25 percent of Google representatives being women this year compared to 16 percent a year ago.
The company recently released data showing that only 30 percent of its employees are women as it expressed it is not where it wants to be in terms of diversity as a company.
In a post on its official company blog, Google, for the first time ever, broke down the diversity of its workforce. The company said that it was originally reluctant to share this type of information, but now realizes it was wrong and has decided to be more candid about the issue. Google says that it is not where it wants to be in terms of the diversity of its workforce.
