Google seeks to add women to its inner circle - Omaha World-Herald

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. â€" At Google, data is king. Now the company is using data to figure out if it can anoint a few queens.

The company hopes its famous algorithms can solve one of the most vexing problems facing Silicon Valley: how to recruit and retain more women. Google has generally been considered a place where women have thrived, but it wants to figure out how to compete even more vigorously for the relatively few women working in technology.

Executives had been concerned that too many women dropped out in the interviewing process or were not promoted at the same rate as men, so they created algorithms to pinpoint exactly when the company loses women and to figure out how to keep them. Simple steps like making sure prospective hires meet other women during their interviews and extending maternity leaves seem to be producing results â€" at least among the rank and file.

At the same time, though, senior women at the company are losing ground. Since Larry Page became chief executive and reorganized Google last year, women have been pushed out of his inner circle and passed over for promotions. They include Marissa Mayer, who left last month to run Yahoo after being sidelined at Google.

“There was a point at Google when the cadre of women leadership was pretty strong,” said a former Google executive who would only speak anonymously to preserve business relationships. “That has changed.”

The valley’s longtime image as unwelcoming for women became a new topic of conversation recently when Ellen Pao, a junior partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer. And it persists even though more women than ever are leading or in top positions at technology companies â€" including Yahoo, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and Facebook.

Mayer, 37, was the first woman to be an engineer at Google and ran its most profitable business, search, for years. But in 2010, she was given a new assignment that many at Google considered a demotion, and then Page removed her from his committee of close advisers.

That committee shrank from about 15 people, four of whom were women, under Eric Schmidt, Google’s previous chief executive, to 11 with just one woman, under Page.

Also removed from the L Team, for Larry Page, were Rachel Whetstone, who oversees communications, and Shona Brown, who oversaw business operations and now leads Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, a lower-profile job. Only one woman remains â€" Susan Wojcicki, who oversees advertising.

Of the seven people Page appointed to lead product areas when he reorganized the company last year, just one, Wojcicki, was a woman.

People familiar with Page’s management style and the company’s reorganization said gender played no role in his decisions.

“Larry focused on certain products, and the people who happened to lead those products and became his direct reports were men,” said Laszlo Bock, who oversees people operations at Google.

Many senior women remain at Google, including the director of marketing, Lorraine Twohill, and the leader of the Washington office, Susan Molinari. Google has three women on its 10-member board â€" Diane B. Greene, Ann Mather and Shirley M. Tilghman, all outside directors.

“Being here so long, it has been a very supportive place for women,” said Wojcicki, who is the sister-in-law of Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google. “The founders understood it was something that was good to build into the culture early on.”

Some women in less prominent positions at the company agree.

“On the ground, I think that the sentiment is still that it’s a very welcoming place for women,” said a woman who works for Google who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Things haven’t really changed at the lower levels of the company.”

But others say the dearth of women at the top of Google reflects what is, overall, a male-driven engineering culture. Page values product people like himself over businesspeople, they say, and at Google, like many tech companies, product engineers tend to be men.

“Part of the issue is who Larry wants around him, and those are the guys he’s most comfortable with because he knows their whole engineering and computer science background,” said a former longtime senior Google employee.