Majority of Google employees 'male and white'

Google has admitted it needs to reflect greater ethnic and gender diversity in its workforce after prior 'reluctance' to publish figures.

Of Google's US workforce, an overwhelming 70 per cent is male. Just over 60 per cent of this is white, followed by 30 per cent of employees being classified as Asian. Only four per cent were described as two or more races, with 3 per cent identified as Hispanic, 2 per cent black and less than one per cent as 'other'.

Laszlo Block, senior vice president of people operations at the company, said Google had 'always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce' in a blog post.

'We now realise we were wrong, and that it's time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it's hard to address these kinds of challenges if you're not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts,' he wrote.

^{The gender and ethnic breakdown of US Google employees}

Mr Block said the company was 'the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be', and that it had invested more than $40 million in organisations to encourage women and girls to study computer science.

The search engine has also worked with 'historically black colleges and universities' to promote the subject.

is also planning to release its diversity statistics, following shareholder meetings attended by civil rights activist Jesse Jackson Sr.

Mr Jackson also sat in on Google meetings, and is calling for America's large tech companies to be more reflective of their consumer base.

An algorithm was recently launched which claimed to help fix the dearth of women and ethnic minorities in Silicon Valley.

Entelo Diversity uses a formula to seek out job candidates with a high likelihood of meeting a specific gender or ethnicity requirement, alongside their skills and qualifications.

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