Artist Hijacks Google Logo to Visualize Employee Diversity

By Jorge Rivas  |  June 13, 2014 | 4:32pm
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In an unprecedented move last month, Google became the first technology company to publicly disclose just how white and male its workforce is. According to the report, 70 percent of Google’s workforce is male and 61 percent of them are white. Roughly 30 percent of Googlers are Asian.

But those numbers didn’t come as a surprise to many people, considering industry-wide diversity data previously available proved the tech sector seriously lacks gender and ethnic diversity.

But data visualizer Matt Stempeck says putting Google’s diversity data on their corporate logo could force people to consider the ethnic makeup of the company.

“The Google Doodle is a common experience, everyone has seen them,” Stempeck said in a phone interview. “So I just thought it would be a fun highjacking of the Google Doodle concept visualize Google’s diversity numbers.”

Stempeck did just that.

In the “Google Doodle” below, Stempeck visualized Google’s ethnic makeup of the company’s 26,600 workers in the U.S. Roughly 61 percent of the workforce is white; 30 percent Asian; 4 percent two or more races; 3 percent Hispanic; 2 percent black and 1 percent “other.”

Below Stempeck visualizes gender statistics: Overall, men make up 70 percent of the 44,000 people Google employed throughout the world in January 2014.

“When billions of people interact with the product you might not always think about the fact that it’s designed by mostly white men,” said Stempeck, who’s made a career designing civic and media technology.

“It’s powerful to see the Google logo and have it be almost entirely white,” Stempeck said.

Google officials acknowledge the company is “not where we want to be when it comes to diversity.”

In a statement made when the diversity data was released, Google officials said going public with these numbers is part of their efforts to help the tech giant recruit and develop a more diverse workforce.

(All images published courtesy of Matt Stempeck. Stempeck has been a contractor with Google’s civic research team this year.)

 
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