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What Next | Daily News and Analysis

TBD | Does Google Actually Want to Hire Black Engineers?

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Slate Podcasts

Daily News, News, News Commentary

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Back in 2014, Google released in-depth diversity data for its workforce for the first time. 1.1 percent of its tech team identified as Black. Six years later, after millions of dollars spent and a much-hyped partnership program with historically Black colleges and universities across the country, that number is up to 2.4 percent.  How did such a promising effort yield such incremental change? Guest: Nitasha Tiku, tech culture reporter at the Washington Post Host Lizzie O’Leary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:26.0

Search TikTok Guardians Guide to learn more.

0:34.0

This past summer, right around the time there were protests in the streets after George Floyd's death,

0:39.0

and the country was talking fervently about race.

0:43.0

Natasha Tiku was calling up computer science professors at historically black colleges and universities.

0:50.0

Howard, Morehouse, Spellman, the schools that everybody knows were getting a lot of attention from tech companies.

0:57.0

Natasha is a reporter at the Washington Post, and she covers Big Tech.

1:01.0

She's the kind of deeply sourced journalist who can tell you about the culture inside a company.

1:07.0

One company she's covered a lot is Google.

1:10.0

And for years, Google has been saying it's working on increasing its diversity,

1:15.0

and that's meant a bunch of outreach programs to those historically black colleges and universities.

1:20.0

Yeah, it was really intriguing. I mean, a lot of the professors did give Google credit for being early in their engagement efforts

1:28.0

compared to other institutions, but they also told her something else about their students,

1:34.0

and their experiences at tech companies, despite all that outreach.

1:38.0

Very often, they were already finding themselves still maybe the only black person on their team,

1:43.0

maybe facing a hiring committee where there were no other black people.

1:47.0

When they went to Silicon Valley for internships or job interviews, things were tough.

1:52.0

I heard about one female student who raised issues about bias from one of the people she was working with during her internship,

...

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