If there's one consistent complaint about Silicon Valley, it's that all the people working there tend to look remarkably similar. Those who try to change things, however, including Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, don't get very far.
Google, one of the largest employers in the value, is planning to change that. The company is committing to spend $150 million in 2015 to recruit more women and minorities, according to an interview Google's vice president of people operations gave to USA Today.
[seealso slug=http://sale-online.click/2015/01/07/tech-corporate-diversity/%5D%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3ENancy Lee, Google's vice president of people operations, told the paper that the money is part of a broader program aimed at changing the company to better reflect its consumers.
"Our strategy is extremely long term," she said. "Sure, we are doing things that can show an impact maybe this year, maybe next year. But we recognize that there is not enough talent entering into our industry and that we have a lot of work to do," she told USA Today.
The money won't hurt Google, one of the Valley's richest companies, which had revenues of $17.3 billion in the first quarter. The tech giant made $311 million just by hedging its bets on foreign currencies, a fairly negligible part of its business strategy. Even that gain is more than double the amount it will spend on diversity efforts. Lee also penned a blog post explaining Google's "diversity strategy."
Diversity reports have become something of a standard part of a tech company's public reporting since Google first released theirs about a year ago. Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and many others have joined in, and the results have shown that for all the talk about diversifying tech, it's still a white dude's club.
The $150 million builds on the $115 million Google spent on its diversity efforts in 2014 and joins other companies including Intel and Apple which have also publicly committed money to programs aimed at recruiting non-white dudes.
Those efforts will not only need to address ethnicity but also gender. Despite high profile leaders like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley still has a huge pay gap that gets even worse at higher levels.
The issue of diversity or lack thereof in Silicon Valley made headlines in the early part of 2015 when Ellen Pao, currently interim CEO of Reddit, sued her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, for gender discrimination. Pao lost the case, in which she sought $16 million in damages, but succeeded in bringing attention to discrimination in the insular world of venture capital.