Dive Brief:

• Google has released fresh data on its drive to create a more diverse workforce, saying it had increased minority and female employees but was well short of its goal of a staff that reflected the overall population.

• The percentage of non-white, non-Asian employees in the US was largely unchanged last year, Reuters reported, although the percentage of women in the overall and technical workplace rose slightly.

• This year is the first time Google has shared information about minority hires.

Dive Insight:

Google's initial release of workforce demographics two years ago triggered a larger discussion throughout the industry and a drive by other companies to improve diversity. But the new numbers show that Google is struggling to meet its goals.

Attempts to improve gender diversity appear to have made the most progress. "Women now comprise 31 percent of all Googlers, and we’ve seen strong growth of women in technical and leadership roles. Similar to last year, one in five of our technical hires in 2015 were women, helping bring the total number of women in technical roles from 18 to 19 percent.

"Additionally, women now hold 24 percent of leadership roles across Google — up from 22 percent," Nancy Lee, vice president of people operations for Google, wrote on the company's official blog. Women make up slightly more than 50% of the US population.

The new numbers mark the first time Google has shared demographics about African American and Hispanic hires. Although Google is hiring black and Hispanic employees at a faster rate, only 2% of the company's employees are black and 3% are Hispanic.

"We saw encouraging signs of progress in 2015, but we’re still far from where we need to be," Lee wrote.