Danielle Brown, Intel’s former head of diversity who left the company earlier this month, has landed at Google. Brown will be Google’s VP of Diversity, she posted on Twitter today.
Brown will start at Google in July and “will be responsible for managing our diversity and inclusion strategy, partnering with our senior executives on this vital work,” Google wrote in a blog post.
Back in April, Brown was promoted into an expanded role of VP of Human Resources and Group Chief Human Resources Officer at Intel. At that time, Barbara Whye took over as Intel’s chief diversity officer. It’s not clear who will take over Brown’s VP of HR role.
Brown joined Intel in 2009 as an associate for the company’s accelerated leadership program. For the last couple of years, Brown has been at the forefront of Intel’s diversity efforts. In the last diversity report under Brown’s leadership, Intel reported it hit its goal of retaining diverse employees, with a 15 percent exit rate for women and people of color compared to a 15.5 percent exit rate for employees in majority groups.
Brown’s hiring comes about six months after TechCrunch learned Google’s then head of diversity and inclusion, Nancy Lee, was stepping down from her role.
Lee, who originally joined Google’s legal team back in 2006, had been working on diversity at Google for the last few years. She started her diversity efforts as director of people operations in 2010, and became vice president of people operations in 2013.
In Google’s 2016 diversity report we saw that overall representation of women went from 30 percent female in 2014 to 31 percent female in 2015. But the overall percentage of black and Hispanic people did not increase at all, with overall representation of blacks remaining at 2 percent and Hispanics remaining at 3 percent. In 2015, only 4 percent of Google’s hires were black and 5 percent of its hires were Hispanic.
Today, Google is still 31 percent female and 2 percent black, but it’s now 4 percent Hispanic, compared to just 3 percent Hispanic in its last report.
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