Google works really hard at making sure 25 percent of its engineers are women
Google's business goal is to organize the world's information. Ambitious. Google's goal for hiring women engineers? "We're very focused on having about 25 percent of our technical workforce be women," Google VP Marissa Mayer tells a Bay Area public-radio interviewer in this clip. Google's cupcake princess added that Sergey Brin — he's the cofounder she didn't date — and Larry Page — the one she did — came up with that target shortly after they founded the company.
They'd read a lot of research around how to form the best companies and a lot of studies show that if you fall below 20 percent of the workforce being women, things become really imbalanced and unhealthy inside the corporate culture.
The silver-lining: Now when Google apologists start going on about the company's "20 percent" rule, the rest of us get to ask: "Wait, which one?"