The Business Case for Diversity in the Tech Industry; New York Times, 9/26/14

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; The Business Case for Diversity in the Tech Industry:

"This week I wrote about Google’s efforts to increase the number of women and minorities who work at the company. Among other programs, Google is running a series of workshops to help employees understand and combat their unconscious biases. Google hopes the plan will put people on alert to the many small ways that its culture may make outsiders uncomfortable.

But several readers have raised a more basic question: Why does Google want diversity? White and Asian men make up the bulk of American software engineering graduates, and Google, like other tech giants, has done extremely well hiring from that pool. If a lack of diversity hasn’t hurt Google so far, why alter how the company works, apparently for reasons of political correctness?

I asked Google’s executives and managers several versions of this question. They said Google’s efforts to increase diversity had little to do with political correctness. Instead, they said, they were directly related to the company’s bottom line: By increasing diversity, Google can improve its products. And it can back up this argument with both research and experience.

“If we have an employee base that reflects our user base, we are going to better understand the needs of people all over the world,” said Brian Welle, the researcher in charge of Google’s diversity training workshops. “Having people with a different worldview and different ways of solving problems gives you the raw materials to be more innovative and to be able to solve problems that nobody has asked before.”"