Silicon Valley Is Committed to Diversity When It's Most Convenient

Google fired James Damore, the engineer who wrote a now famous anti-diversity memo. But the actions of the company—and the Valley—have long told another story.
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Google's had a very busy few days. On Saturday Motherboard published a story on how a memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," written by an engineer and posted to an internal mailing list, had gone viral within Google. By the end of that day the text of that memo leaked, and on Monday the full document emerged publicly, complete with citations.

The engineer who wrote the memo, James Damore, argued against programs at Google that are designed to encourage racial and gender diversity. He also cited some extremely dubious ideas (to put it politely) in order to suggest that biological differences explained the lack of gender diversity at Google, specifically in the company's leadership and among its technology employees, and that trying to encourage diversity did the company a disservice. On Monday Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote his own memo, which explained that Damore had violated Google's code of conduct, but left the engineer's future at the company unclear. That night, Bloomberg reported that Damore had been fired (and is apparently considering legal action, though he'll probably have a tough time with that).

Conservative social media communities have turned into a roiling shitshow with an opportunistically confused understanding of the scope of the First Amendment, so it's probably worth saying explicitly that Google made the right call. Writing and publishing a document that uses pseudoscientific evidence to suggest thousands of your coworkers are inherently inferior at their jobs is the sort of thing that should get the person responsible fired.

That said, don't give Google too much credit. The company's firing of Damore constitutes a giant, world-spanning company handling an unusually public HR issue properly. That's a remarkably low bar for praise, especially since Google is still responsible for creating the conditions from which Damore's memo emerged.

When Google first released data about the diversity of its workforce in 2014, men made up 70 percent of the company around the world, and the disparity was even more stark among technology-focused jobs, with an 83 percent men-17 percent women split. In the intervening years those numbers have barely budged. The latest data, from January 2017, show the company at 69 percent men and 31 percent women globally, and 80 percent men 20 percent women in tech jobs. Google's leadership is 75 percent men, a slight decrease from 79 percent in 2014. In the United States the number of black employees hasn't changed much at all, it was 2 percent in 2014 and is 2 percent in 2017.

"The company's firing of Damore constitutes a giant, world-spanning company handling an unusually public HR issue properly. That's a remarkably low bar for praise."

Fortunately, providing at least some diversity data has become the norm among large technology companies, but these reports have also become something of a familiar genre, and Google's are no exception. Take the company's diversity page. Here, Google touts slight changes to its employee make up, replete with quotes from executives and links to positive press coverage, spinning the data as positively as possible. Other large tech companies, like Apple or Facebook, also make triumphal announcements on how their workforces are getting slightly more diverse, while others point out how disappointingly small these changes are.

But Google also resists the release of information that doesn't conform to the company line. It has confidentiality policies so strict that an employee sued over them last year. Googlers have, unsurprisingly, had to speak anonymously to tell reporters that Damore's ideas have some support within the company. Google also claims it has no gender pay gap, and has resisted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor, which alleges there is discrimination against women at Google, which one DoL lawyer told The Guardian appears to be "quite extreme, even in this industry." The company has cited the cost of compiling the data and concerns about employee privacy in its refusals to turn over data, and last month a judge ruled the Department of Labor is entitled to only some of the information it's seeking.

This isn't limited to Google. A report on the tech industry published by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declared "that composition of the select top ranked 75 Silicon Valley tech firms is strongly characterized by sex and race segregation," compared to non-tech companies in the same area, which employed roughly the same number of women and men. Making decisions like firing one engineer is comparatively easy, especially when your entire workforce and the global public is watching, but the numbers and reports of what company cultures are like remain largely the same. And so one has to wonder: how strongly are these companies committed to the values they claim to be, at least when there isn't a public relations opportunity (or disaster) at hand?


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