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Google has taken action to help promote diversity in Silicon Valley. The online giant has started embedding engineers at select Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) so they can teach, mentor, and advise on curriculum.
Last year, Google revealed, as did other tech companies, their diversity numbers after the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a movement to open up Silicon Valley. Like the others, Google’s diversity numbers were sorely lacking.
“Today 35 percent of African Americans receiving computer science degrees come from those schools, but they don’t make their way to Silicon Valley’s top tech firms. Google is typical — about 1 percent of its technical staffers are Black,” reports The Huffington Post.
Google is sending software engineers to teach at Howard, Virginia’s Hampton University, Fisk University in Nashville, and Spelman and Morehouse colleges in Atlanta to not only teach introductory courses but to train students on such things as how to compose a professional email and how to handle a software engineering job interview.
Thirty HBCU students intern at Google interns. One graduating Howard student has already landed a position at Google.
Legrand Burge, who chairs Howard University’s computer science department, says Google’s involvement is a plus.
“They’re not academics but they have domain expertise that students could definitely learn a lot from,” he said. “The word got out and it actually got a lot of students interested in computer science who didn’t initially plan to study it.”
Google isn’t alone in taking action. The Anita Borg Institute and the National Center for Women and Information Technology have teamed up with various companies to support female engineers. And Facebook now has “Facebook University,” an internship targeting low-income minority college freshmen wanting to enter computer science.
Meanwhile, Intel has committed $300 million over the next five years to go towards diversifying its own workforce. And Apple has a $50 million partnership with nonprofits to offer support to women and minority computer science majors.
