"Exposing Hidden Bias at Google" by nytimes.com exposes the gender and racial differences of Google's workforce. The article talks about Google's, along with other company's, history with hiring men over women and minorities. It even goes on to talk about some of Google's efforts to fix this problem.
I agree with the fact that women and minorities are underrepresented in the modern workforce. Males, specifically white males, are often choose over them. However, I don't think this is something that a big company like Google can just fix by themselves.
I believe big companies aren't hiring as many women and minorities simply because there aren't as much of them to choose from. Meaning, there is a larger amount of white male workers in the U.S., and therefore easier to select the perfect ones companies want to hire.
In the case of minorities, specifically Hispanics and Blacks, they only make up ~25% of the population of the U.S. How many of them are educated? How many of them are skilled in field relating to Google? How many of them live in an area that is of Google interest? When you consider that Google does have requirements for hiring that are necessary, you began to realize that a small percentage of minorities even have a chance of being hired. An even less chance that they are skilled enough to be an asset to Google.
In the case of women, they make up ~51% of the population. It's surprising that females make up more of the population than males, so why aren't they in these advanced jobs? The article explains it well, simply because of unconscious bias and an underlying sexism towards women. Their devised method of noticing this is actually pretty good, they just call out "Unconscious Bias!" every time they notice it.
So how do we solve this problem? Well for one, big companies can't do much other than revise how they hire employees. But that's unrealistic, since most companies don't care much so much about appearance but how good you are. That means this goes all the way back to uneven education. Whites have better access to education, and males even more so. If we want to fix the problems in the workplace, we have to go all the way back to schools. The root of the problem.
