Group 3

OB Assignment
B23131 | Jayesh Yadav
B23153 | Rishita Agarwal
B23170 | C. Uthranarayan
B23132 | Kamal Garg
B23125 | Bihanga Som

Evaluate the effectiveness of Google’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, including its
unconscious bias training. What are some potential limitations of these programs and how
could they be improved?

The representation of women in tech has been underrepresented as opposed to the general
workforce. Despite being 47% of the USA's workforce, women contribute to only 25% of the
tech workforce. In Silicon Valley, the hub of the tech sector, women are a part of only 23% of
the tech workforce. A lack of proper representation in technology may lead to technology
becoming biased to one group due to the lack of diverse opinion and use cases when it is
being developed. In order to combat this, all tech companies should take up measures to
mitigate biases and move towards improving gender ratio at work.

Effectiveness of diversity and inclusion initiatives:

As part of this thought process Google started numerous initiatives to foster an inclusive and
diverse work culture. Google made a significant effort in the hiring category by collaborating
with Howard University to attract top computer science students, in order to enhance diversity
in their talent pool. Moreover, they launched the Building Opportunities for Leadership and
Development (BOLD) program, which focused on offering valuable opportunities to promising
interns of color, irrespective of their coding backgrounds. To expand their pool of applicants,
Google actively encouraged its employees to utilize their networks, thereby ensuring a wide
array of candidates with diverse backgrounds.
Because of these efforts, Google has been able to achieve higher numbers in diversity as
compared to its counterparts. They have been able to increase the proportion of female tech
employees in their workforce by 3% during the period from 2014 to 2017. Also women were
now occupying 25% of the leadership roles as compared to 21%, three years earlier. However,
despite its claim, the proportion of female employees still remains significantly low as
compared to their male counterparts. The number of global female hires dropped from 33.2%
in 2018 to 32.5% in 2019 and Google still needs to address some of the limitations associated
with its program.

Barriers for workplace diversity:

The most frequently quoted barriers by employers and employees for workplace diversity
programs are discrimination, prejudice, ethnocentrism, blaming the victim and stereotypes in
that order. The best strategy to counter this is by increasing employee morale, retention,
productivity and improving corporate culture by unleashing creativity and performance.

Limitations of diversity and inclusion initiatives:

1. Employees that are hired through diversity and inclusion practices are often subjected
to discrimination and are viewed as inferior as it is often believed that such employees
are hired only on the basis of their race or gender.
2. With extra focus on increasing its female workforce, workers from other minority groups
such as African Americans, Native Americans, Latinas are often overlooked thus their
representation is usually low.
3. Lack of appropriate feedback mechanisms leading to diversified viewpoints in the
implementation of the strategies. With this, the inability to quantify the effect of these
 programs because of the absence of any known matrix or methods also posed a
challenge to Google.
4. Their inclusivity programs like Unconscious Bias Training which were promoted to
raise awareness unintentionally highlighted the biases to create further division in the
workforce, also, their programs like BOLD, and Black Girls Code focussed on
improving the minority workforce, instead of the internal environment which came at
the cost of further misguided discrimination. Candidates who obtained employment
through these diversity programs faced further discrimination amongst their peers.

Unconscious Bias Training

To counter these issues, Google since 2013 has implemented various initiatives targeting
unconscious biases, involving its more than 70,000 employees. These initiatives included an
Implicit Association Test which measures racial prejudices, Unconscious Bias @ Work, Bias
Busting @ Work and partnerships with Clayman Institute and the Ada Initiative to promote
further research and awareness on unconscious bias.

However, experts say that unconscious bias training, in contrast to its objectives, highlights
the aforesaid biases, making the participants more aware of the same, which might in turn
lead to increase in biased decision making (popularly known as the “rebound effect”). Further,
these trainings include a lot of what not to do instead of what to do, which then lowers the
engagement from participants. Furthermore, making these programs mandatory to attend,
might cause participants to perceive the training as a mere obligation.

Strategies to reduce gender biases in workplace:

1. Blind Decision Making:

Removing the salience of gender in decision making will reduce the effect of
gender bias in the workplace. In the US, till the 1970’s, orchestras had less
than 10% of women. To improve gender diversity, blind auditions were made
the norm and now the gender composition has increased to more than 40%.
Blind decision making, implemented in the right sense would help in avoiding
gender stereotypes.
2. Substituting:
When hiring / evaluating a woman for her performance, ask yourself if you
would judge the person in the same manner if you were to judge a man in her
place. This would negate the effect of gender bias when women are violating
gender stereotypes.
3. Articulating new social norms:
Top management should form social norms to be followed in the organization.
In Google more men used to nominate themselves for promotion, when
compared to women. So, the head of engineering sent a mail that female
engineers should advocate for themselves and apply for self promotion.
4. Evaluate candidates jointly:
People tend to make comparisons during evaluation. If there is no person to
compare, people rely on biases to arrive at decisions. So, evaluations should
be made with quantifiable and objectively measurable benchmarks.
5. Individualizing:
Humans tend to lean back on their biases when there is an information gap. So
learning more about the person who is being evaluated before the evaluation,
negates the effect of biases.
6. Education:
Once people are shown that they can be biased, and its negative implications
to both women and organizations, they tend to take corrective actions. This can
be done by showing the mounting research that has shown the effect of
increasing gender diversity in the organization.
New systems can be implemented by Google to improve gender diversity. But at the end of
the day its the workers there who should implement these programs in their true spirit to get
the intended benefits of increased diversity.