Google aims to fix its diversity problem

Google, like many tech companies, is a man's world. Started by a pair of men, its executive team is overwhelmingly male, and its work force is dominated by men. Over all, seven out of 10 people who work at Google are male.

Google's leaders say they are unhappy about the firm's poor gender diversity, and about the severe underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics among its work force. And so they are undertaking a long-term effort to improve these numbers, the centerpiece of which is a series of workshops aimed at making Google's culture more accepting of diversity.

In some ways, Google's plan to fix its diversity issues resembles many of its most ambitious product ideas, from self-driving cars to wiring the country for superfast Internet. As in those efforts, it has set a high goal in this case: to fight deep-set cultural biases and an insidious frat-house attitude that pervades the tech business.

The diversity training workshops, which began last year and which more than half of Google's nearly 49,000 employees have attended, are based on an emerging field of research in social psychology known as unconscious bias. These are the hidden, reflexive preferences that shape most people's worldviews, and that can profoundly affect how welcoming and open a workplace is to different people.

Google offered several anecdotes that seem to indicate a less biased culture as a result of the training. Not long ago the company opened a new building, and someone spotted the fact that all the conference rooms were named after male scientists; in the past, that might have gone unmentioned, but this time the names were changed.

During one recent promotion meeting in which a group of male managers were deciding the fate of a female engineer, a senior manager who had been through the bias training cautioned his colleagues to remember that they were all men - and thus might not be able to fully appreciate the different roles women perform in engineering groups. Another time, during a presentation, an interviewer asked a male and female manager who had recently begun sharing an office, "Which one of you does the dishes?" The strange, sexist undertone of the question was immediately seized upon by a senior executive in the crowd, who yelled, "Unconscious bias!"

Whether this will lead to a long-term change at Google and, in turn, the rest of the tech industry, remains an open question.

©2014The New York Times