News 2

28 May Google gives employees 20% time to work on diversity

One of the most famous perks at Google is 20% time — the free time the company's brightest and most determined employees are granted to tinker with promising side projects. That's how Google came up with some of its most popular products, including Gmail and Google News. Even the idea for Google shuttle buses that ferry employees to and from work was born from this off-the-official-clock ingenuity. Now Google has created a new version of 20% time to innovate in an area of growing importance for the Internet giant: Increasing the diversity of its workforce.

27 May People Can’t Be Trusted To Make Unbiased Hiring Decisions. So This Woman Created A Computer Program.

Laura Mather knows what hiring bias looks like. She’s a woman who has spent her career in technology, after all. Nearly a decade ago, she applied to work for Google’s risk management division. “I had the perfect experience for risk management,” she said, given that she had worked in that very department for eBay. But that didn’t necessarily cut it. “When the recruiter called to offer me the job, she said, ‘Hey, we’re offering you the job, but you need to know that [CEO] Larry Page…almost vetoed you because you didn’t go to an Ivy League school,” she recounted. “Yet I had graduated 12 years before.”

26 May Google, Other Tech Giants Step Up Workforce Diversity Efforts

Google's $150M pledge to invest in workforce diversity echoes other Silicon Valley efforts to recruit more women and minorities.

22 May Congressional Black Caucus seeks measures to improve tech diversity

he Congressional Black Caucus wants the tech industry to focus its innovative energy on building a more diverse workforce. The 46-member caucus' diversity task force hosts its CBC Tech 2020 event in Washington on Tuesday to let tech giants know that the influential group is looking for results. Over the next five years, about 1.4 million new tech industry jobs are expected to be created, according to estimates from the Level Playing Field Institute. "We want to work with our friends (in the tech industry) to try to ensure that a large segment of the new hires are African Americans," said Rep. G. K. Butterfield, D-N.C., the caucus chairman and task force member.

21 May Big Data Is Giving Businesses A Diversity Reality Check

Companies often face a severe reality check when they look at how white and male their workforce remains, in spite of their claims of proper efforts at diversity. The problem is so bad that one entrepreneur has developed a software tool directly aimed at giving them the lowdown on it, and an exact system for urgently and sustainably doing something about it. Katapult, a tool described as a ‘Salesforce meets LinkedIn LNKD +0.24%, meets diversity’, is the creation of businesswoman Andrea Hoffman, the founder of consultancy Culture Shift Labs. Asked which industries are struggling with employing a diverse workforce, Hoffman says “most” are. She cites the technology industry and banking as two of the most serious examples.