Mostly white men work at Google

Who works at Google? A lot of white men.

The search engine giant released workforce diversity numbers on its official blog Wednesday, revealing that 70 percent of its workforce is male, and 61 percent of its workforce is white.

Laszlo Bock, who authored the blog post and serves as Google’s senior vice president for people operations, admitted that the company had long been hesitant to release demographic data on its employees. Mr. Bock also stated that Google was “wrong” not to publish the numbers, and said they are ready to be “candid about the issues.”

“Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts,” Mr. Bock said.

Mr. Bock said technology companies like Google struggle to recruit, and retain, women and minorities, partially because they are less likely to earn computer science degrees that qualify them for the jobs. To combat this issue, Google is investing in education.

” … we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science,” Mr. Bock said.

As of January 2014, gender make up of Google is 70 percent male, 30 percent female. The racial make up is 61 percent white, 30 percent asian, 3 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, 4 percent two or more races and less than 1 percent “other.”