Turns out there are some answers even Google doesn’t have yet.

Like how to get more women into tech jobs.

“The numbers are bad,” Google’s Steve Woods said Wednesday night in Kitchener. “Only 16 per cent of technology roles in Apple, Facebook and Google are filled by women.”

Woods, Senior Engineering Director at Google Canada, spoke to about 200 men and women at the last Communitech Women In Tech event of the 2014-15 season. The evening was entitled Great People Build Great Companies.

Diversity in general is still lacking in the tech sector, he said. Ninety per cent of tech roles are filled by individuals of Caucasian or Asian background.

And why does that need to change?

Because it’s simple, Woods said: diverse backgrounds lead to better teams, which lead to better innovation. While it’s our tendency to hire people like ourselves, long-term data shows that the more varied a team is, the more novel the ideas it produces.

“Diversity resists conformity,” Woods said.

There isn’t one easy solution, he added. If there was, you can bet Google would already have figured it out. Google, like seemingly every other tech company in the world, is trying hard to solve the problem.

Google’s perspective, Woods says, is that it must bring people together who are smart and different.

Wood said he could go to the University of Waterloo and hire many brilliant, white-male, 21-year-old software developers. And he would be satisfied with them.

But that’s the easy way out, and not the route to flexible teams and novel solutions.

Woods said there are four key areas that Google — and the tech industry as a whole — can focus on to begin to create a shift:

• Hire diversely. Employees need to be recruited from non-traditional schools and non-traditional fields. The potential for their success has to be given as much weight as their degree or school credentials.

• Bias bust. We all have biases. We have to recognize our unconscious biases to be able to create an inclusive environment at work.

• Expand the pool. Girls, Woods said, are streamed away from computer science and math, beginning in Grade 7. The school curriculum needs to be updated, and we need to demystify how you can use technology in your career.

“Not every girl wants to build robots (in a technology club),” he said.

• Bridge the digital divide. Woods called this the hardest challenge for employers. “Talented people are being left behind because of a lack of money,” he said. Everyone needs access to technology, not just the fortunate.

There is no clear-cut solution — Woods and his audience agreed on that. During a lively q-and-a, Woods addressed the fact that he was a privileged white male giving a keynote address concerning the tech sector.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t working towards ensuring diversity in his world.

“It’s hard, and it’s everybody's job to solve this, not just the women, for example,” Woods said.