Earlier this month, a leaked Google spreadsheet revealed that Black employees earn less than white colleagues, leaving questions about why this is happening and how things can change. We spoke to Black former Google employees about their experiences of negotiating their employment contracts at the tech giant and their insights. What did the spreadsheet reveal? The leaked Google spreadsheet, encompassing data from over 12,000 US employees in 2022, revealed that Black employees had an average salary of $ 147,000. By contrast, white employees earned $170,000 on average. White employees also
Airbnb has announced Google’s Senior Vice President of Research, Tech and Society, James Manyika, is joining its Board of Directors. Meet James Manyika Zimbabwe-born Manyika is Senior Vice President of Google’s Research, Tech and Society Team, a role which includes overseeing Google Labs and Google Research. Manyika is a graduate of both the University of Zimbabwe and the University of Oxford, where he holds two master’s degrees and a PhD in AI and Robotics. He also was a senior partner at McKinsey & Co. and sat as the chairman and
A leaked Google spreadsheet has revealed that Black employees at Google make $20,000 less on average than their white coworkers. Insider obtained an internal Google spreadsheet with over 12,000 U.S. staff reporting their annual salaries in 2022. The data covers software engineers, business analysts, salespeople, and legal counsel roles. Race disparities The data sheet found that Black staff at Google tend to make $20,000 less than their white co-workers, with $147,000 going to Black workers and $170,000 going to white workers. White staff also got $40,000 more in equity than
South Africa’s Competition Commission released a report that alleged that Google and tech companies were hindering fair market competition and the growth of South Africa’s digital economy. The watchdog claimed that Alphabet Inc. -owned Google’s search dominance “distorts platform competition” in favor of prominent market players. In addition, the report recommends several remedies focused on improving visibility for smaller South African companies in search results to address the issue. What did the report find? According to the commission’s report, Google’s model disadvantages new, small and underfunded South African businesses. The
Google’s Product Inclusion and Equity Team, led by Dominique Mungin, is working to ensure that the next generation of AI-driven image generation and recognition technologies does not perpetuate societal biases. Mungin, who has been at Google for 13 years, has worked on projects like the Monk Skin Tone Scale and Google’s Real Tone Tech. Now, her team has collaborated with Tonl, a stock photography company, to supply more diverse imagery for training machine learning models. In an interview with Tech Brew, Mungin admitted that skin tone challenges persist. An entire
GRAMMY Award-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco has collaborated with Google Lab Sessions to develop an experimental AI tool, TextFX. TextFX is an AI-powered tool for rappers, writers, and wordsmiths to enhance their use of lyrical and linguistic techniques. TextFX A play on the acronym for sound effects (SFX), TextFXis an experimental demonstrating how generative language technologies can empower the creativity and workflows of artists and creators. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco who drew inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he developed throughout his career. He frequently tinkers
Asmelash Teka Hadgu, the visionary behind startup Lesan, is changing the game for language translation, especially for Ethiopian Languages. Acknowledging the limitations of popular translation systems like Google Translate and Facebook, Lesan is on a mission to create language-specific technologies. Translating ‘low-resource’ Languages In an interview with Rest of the World, Hadgu explained that it has become urgent to create language-specific technologies because Google Translate and ChatGPT don’t fit the mark. AI translation models are known to be more accurate for ‘high-resource’ languages like English and Mandarin, and it was recently
This article was originally published by Lauren Jong on Medium. In 2017, I left my job as a UX designer at Google to work for local government. A lot of people questioned my decision. Google is a dream job for many — the quintessential fun, well-paid workplace for super smart people. And aside from that, people were in disbelief that local government even employs product designers. At the time, I didn’t feel confident sharing my reasons. After all, they were just my personal assumptions and hopes. Now that I’ve spent
This article was first published by Sha Hurley on Medium. March 31 was officially the end of my seven-year journey as a Googler. It’s been a stressful, yet healing time. Below, I share my reflections in the hope they will be an inspiration for some and a resource for others. Please share this post if you think it would help someone. I’ll be very interested in your thoughts below in the comments. Or DM me if something more private you’d like to connect on. This is going to be a long
The SANS Institute has partnered with Google to launch the SANS Cloud Diversity Academy (SCDA) as the White House releases it long-anticipated National Cybersecurity Strategy. SANS is the world’s largest provider of cybersecurity training and certifications. Now, through the SCDA, it is empowering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), women, and other underrepresented groups to launch their cybersecurity careers in a matter of months. The Academy will provide training in SANS courses and associated GIAC certifications and hands-on labs, focusing on cloud security. “As more businesses adopt cloud technology,
