Google last week published its annual diversity report for 2018 that covered new hires across tech and leadership positions, as well as employee attrition rates. It emerged today that diversity head Danielle Brown has left Google.
Diversity is one area that the tech industry in particular has to improve on. One Google effort is focussed on reducing the number of employees — specifically people of color — that quit ever year. In 2018, the company managed slight, but not significant improvements following new initiatives like Retention Case Managers.
Google today published its 2018 annual report on diversity in a year that saw the hiring of new chief diversity & inclusion officer, as well as an “anti-diversity” document by a now ex-employee. In 2017, diveristy at Google only increased minimally compared to the year prior.
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.
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 …
Expand
Expanding
Close
