1. Which of the following has contributed to the increased diversity in the labor force?
a. The minimum wage
b. Changing demographics
c. Age discrimination
2. An organization that seeks a competitive advantage will work to establish a workforce.
a. that is older on average than the population
b. with a variety of family structures, abilities, and ethnic backgrounds
c. in which most employees have had the same experiences
d. with about equal numbers of women and men but few other differences
Google’s chief diversity officer, Melonie Parker, reports that the company has made progress in hiring and retaining employees from historically underrepresented groups. For example, by using a bias removal tool on job postings, Google rewrote postings in a way that encouraged 11 percent more women to apply for jobs. In 2019, 40 percent of technical internships were held by women and 24 percent of US interns were Black or Latinx, an increase from 2014 when diversity efforts started in earnest. Perhaps most intriguingly, Google has shifted from looking for “culture fit” in new hires to looking for “culture add” — asking what applicants would add to the organizational culture if they were hired. Nonetheless, the data show that improvement is slight, with percentages of employees who are women and people of color remaining well below those in the population at large: between 2018 and 2019, the percentage of the US workforce that is Black or Latinx increased from 9.0 to 9.6 percent, and the percentage of women globally increased from 31.6 to 32 percent. One barrier cited in Google’s Diversity Annual Report is a lack of relevant course offerings in schools serving underrepresented communities: for example, “high-poverty and high-minority schools offer advanced placement computer science courses at a rate 12x lower than wealthier schools with predominantly white and Asian students.”
3. Based on the data in the scenario, which of the following statements is likely true of Google’s culture in its US operations?
a. It systematically excludes the participation of women and people of color.
b. It is reflective of the US population as a whole.
c. It is more reflective of female and other underrepresented viewpoints than it has been in the past.