Hiring fewer white men and pursuing more hires of blacks, Hispanics, and women is “[moving] in the right direction,” according to Google’s “diversity” page profiling its hiring practices.
A declining share of white men composing its workforce is described as “progress:”
In a recent blog post, Google’s Vice President of People Operations Nancy Lee called for a “conversation about the need to improve diversity at Google and across the tech industry.”
With respect to Google’s internal promotions, merit is implied to have been subverted, at least partially, in exchange for “equitable outcomes” between varying groups defined by race, ethnicity, and sex:
We check and recheck processes like promotion and performance reviews to make sure they’re producing equitable outcomes, and address any gaps we find. …
We’ve long had gender pay equity in our workforce, and we recently shared our approach to compensation with the hope that other companies will adopt similar fair pay practices.
Lee also promotes “unconscious bias trainings,” heralding that “over 65 percent of [Google employees] have participated in unbiasing workshops.” No definition of “unconscious bias” is provided. No evidence regarding the benefits of “unconscious bias trainings” is provided. She advises other companies to follow Google’s example: “Additionally, we’ve shared our unbiasing materials and research on our platform re: Work with Google; now anyone from any industry can create unbiasing trainings for their team.”
Google invites website visitors to read praising profiles of its human resources management from Wired, USA Today, and Essence.
Wired’s Davey Alba calls for racial, ethnic, and gender hiring quotas across technology companies to “reverse the tech sector’s persistent lack of diversity”; countering the perceived will of “white men comprising the bulk of the workforce.”
Alba writes as if his readership is unaware that women compose half the population: “Women comprise about 30 percent of technology employees, despite being 51 percent of the population.”
Implementing racial, ethnic, and gender quotas in human resources management, writes Alba, is “the right thing to do.”
USA Today’s Jessica Guynn writes praise for Google’s donating $1 million to “organizations that serve Latino students and their families” in order to “increase the diversity of its workforce.” She alleges that technology companies in Silicon Valley have a “shortage of Latinos,” which she describes as a “pressing problem.”
As of this article’s publication, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) has a market capitalization of $663 billion, the second most highly valued company, placing it behind Apple’s valuation of $777 billion and ahead of the valuations of Microsoft at $543 billion and Amazon at $467 billion.
Alphabet employees donated a total of $1,597,332 to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign committee, according to Open Secrets’ data:
Read more about Google’s alignment with Democrats and the broader Left here.
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This article was originally published on June 11, 2017.