Google Inc. (GOOG) Improves Retention of Women – a New Business Model?

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a very analytical company. It compiles data in innumerable ways to look at innumerable patters of users and consumers of its products and services with the goal of making those products and services more intuitive and friendly for the average user. But what the company was noticing that within its own ranks, some users of the office space were leaving Google and moving on to other positions – a group that was, as a whole, on its way up the ranks to perhaps taking up the upper floors of the company’s headquarters:

Women. When Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) realized that it was losing a disproportionate number of women on its payroll, Google decided to turn its analytic engines inward to find a root cause and attempt a fix. In a recent article Google was revealing the results of its latest algorithm, which was designed to figure out why women were leaving the company, or why the company was having a hard time recruiting women in the first place. Several reasons were cited in the analysis, but one in particular stood out and seemed to have the most dramatic effect – maternity leave.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) originally supplied three months of leave for new moms with partial pay. However, after checking the data on retention of women, the company changed its policy to five months with pull pay for maternity leave. Guess hat? the female attrition rate at the company dropped by half. The story did cite other reasons – women not touting their achievement during a job interview, or not participating self-nomination processes for promotions – but the most dramatic effect that Google could control was maternity leave.

How this actually translates on the bottom line is still a little hard to say, but if encouraging women to tout their achievements and to grant more liberal maternity leave – so the mind is recovered, not just the body – an benefit Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in making it a more diverse workplace, then perhaps such a policy can become a new model for companies across the country, as data seems to suggest a drop in female employment over the last several years (women in computer/technology jobs dropped 8 percent from 2000-2011 while the number of men rose 16 percent).