Google’s employee base consists mainly of white males

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is built on a gender divide. Various studies have found that, on average, tech companies employ just 12.3 percent female engineers and that only one quarter of all Americans in computer-related occupations are women. The percentage of women pursuing degrees in computer science has shrunk dramatically since the 1980s and an infinitesimal 0.4 percent of female college freshmen say they intend to major in this field. All this despite the fact that tech jobs are growing rapidly and the industry paid an average annual wage of $93,800 as of 2012—98 percent more than the average wage for the private sector.

“Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” the tech giant says, after revealing that their workforce is 70 percent male and 60 percent white. After years of resisting calls for more transparency about the diversity of its workforce, Google has released data revealing that the tech giant is mostly staffed by white males. According to the data, released Wednesday for the first time, 70 percent of the Google workforce is male and 61 percent of its workers are white. And while Asian-Americans make up 30 percent of the workforce, African-Americans and Hispanics make up two and three percent, respectively. In a statement on the company blog, Google said that it considers racial and gender imbalance to be a problem, and speculates about the underlying causes.