Google has released its annual Diversity Report for 2018, showing attrition rates for the first time in the company’s history and very little change in diversity. That’s not to say that there haven’t been gains nearly across the board. However, the attrition rate shows that change has been much slower than many would have liked and that those improvements to diversity are offset by further challenges to be overcome. That’s because attrition is a representation of employee turnover and, in Google’s case, it shows a disconnect between the company’s goals and real-world accomplishments. That’s particularly true when considering the disparity between attrition and general employee diversity. For example, in terms of overall diversity, the categories defined as Black and Latinx have only risen by a single percent year over year. Those numbers landed at 2.5-percent and 3.6-percent, respectively. Meanwhile, when compared to the national average attrition rate set at 100, those two groups have the highest turnover rate at Google – at 127 and 115, respectively.
Meanwhile, the Asian group gained nearly 2-percent, in terms of overall company composition, and the White group was reduced by the most. However, those are both still overrepresented in terms of overall Google employees. The first of those two groups claimed 36.3-percent while the latter fell to 53.1-percent. That’s a rise of 1.6-percent and a drop of 2.4-percent. Employees claiming two or more races rose 0.6-percent to land at 4.2-percent of employees overall, while the Native American group was static year-over-year with just 0.3-percent of employees representing that culture. With consideration for those numbers, it’s difficult at best for Google to call itself multicultural. The attrition rates don’t help there either. The only groups to fall under the national average were Native Americans and Asians, with scores of 90 and 83. The White and two or more races group each saw a score of 108.
Meanwhile, the diversity between genders doesn’t seem to have improved much either; women gained on men overall by only a single percentage point year-over-year. With regard to where those jobs are at, within the company, there’s still a huge disparity. The majority of those jobs are in “non-tech” and “non-leadership” positions. Overall, women make up 30.9-percent of the workforce but just 21.4-percent of all Google tech jobs are filled by them, as well as only 25.5-percent of leadership jobs. In the non-tech category, women make up 47.8-percent of the workforce. However, attrition shows that men are more likely to leave their jobs too, with numbers landing at 103 and 94 compared to a global average represented as a score of 100. So at least there seems to be some progress there. Adding all of those figures up shows that Google, as it admits in the report, hasn’t quite done enough and still has a long way to go.
