Google reports increased Black and Latinx representation in the US

Google has released its annual diversity report, and the company says it made some positive progress over the past year. The company saw its “largest increases in representation of Black and Latinx Googlers in the US ever” at 20 percent and 8 percent respectively year over year, according to chief diversity officer Melonie Parker. Google also reported improved leadership representation of Black, Latinx and Native American employees by 27 percent, Parker says.

But some data shows there is still more work to be done. The company’s US workforce is 33.5 percent women and 66.5 percent men, numbers that are only slightly different than the 32.2 percent women and 67.8 percent men reported in 2021. And in its 2022 report, Google said 48.3 percent of its US workers are white, while 43.2 percent are Asian, 6.9 percent are Latinx, 5.3 percent are Black, and 0.8 percent are Native American.

The company does provide a vast amount of information about its statistics, and you can dig into all of it on the 2022 Diversity Annual Report website and in the PDF version of the report. And Google appears to be committed to moving the needle, saying that “as we continue to build a more inclusive and representative Google, we’ll hold ourselves accountable in how we work to make our goals a reality.”

Google came under scrutiny for its diversity policies after it fired prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, who is Black, in December 2020. The company made changes to its diversity and research policies two months later.