Despite its many attempts to “create an inclusive culture,” Google continues to find itself on the outside of woke culture looking in.
Five years ago, Google became one of the first major technology companies to release a “diversity report,” which breaks down its workforce by race and gender. Since then, not much has changed in Google’s line-up. Its employees are still predominately white and Asian males who tend to lean to the Left politically. If anything, Google’s attempts to create more diversity have made things worse.
Here are a few examples that occurred within the past few months:
- Last week, a departing Google employee released a memo detailing “the burden of being black” he experienced while working for the company. “Over the last five years, I’ve heard co-workers spew hateful words about immigrants, boast unabashedly about gentrifying neighborhoods, mockingly imitate people who speak different languages, reject candidates of color without evidence of ‘fit’ and so much more,” he wrote in the memo, obtained by Motherboard.
- Earlier this month, another Google employee accused the company of discriminating against her for being pregnant. In the viral memo titled “I’m Not Returning to Google After Maternity Leave, and Here is Why,” the woman detailed several encounters with her manager who regularly made disparaging comments about pregnant women in the workforce. After the employee reported her manager to HR, the retaliation against her was swift and drastic.
- Google has faced several lawsuits for its alleged discriminatory practices. In July, the company settled an age discrimination lawsuit. More than 200 Google applicants over the age of 40 received a settlement of $11 million after they took the corporation to court for its “systematic pattern and practice of discrimination against older people.”
There’s no evidence that suggests Google’s diversity initiatives have helped or changed the outlook and behavior of its work environment. In fact, the evidence suggests Google is regressing, not progressing. But those who have pointed this out have found themselves silenced, and in some cases, pushed out. Take, for instance, James Damore, who famously criticized Google’s inclusion strategy and was fired for it. He argued that gender differences, not discrimination, is responsible for the shortage of women in high-ranking tech positions. After his firing, Damore in turn slapped Google with a lawsuit which, regardless of its eventual outcome, has laid bare evidence of how internal online Google discussion forums became a breeding ground for harassment and anti-conservative threats and slurs.
Google then did what it does best: it created new rules for online forum discussions and mandated additional anti-harassment training. Google is so concerned with managing its image as a vibrant, tolerant, and diverse company that it’s willing to bury a deep-seated problem under layers of temporary (and usually fake) woke fixes. In doing so, Google has mistaken the forest for the trees. Online harassment and derogatory comments aren’t the problem, they’re the symptom of a hostile, mismanaged environment that no amount of diversity reports and company policies can fix.
Perhaps if Google wasn’t so consumed with its desire to be seen as the bastion of woke cultural progress, it could focus on its 80,000+ employees working in an environment that’s been accused of actual racism, sexism, and political bias. Unfortunately, Google seems to be more concerned with generating good PR than it is with stimulating necessary, philosophical debate.
A lasting solution must acknowledge an important truth: Googlers work in the environment they’ve helped create. When Google asked Heritage Foundation president Kay Cole James to sit on a council (the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council) earlier this year to help review Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) work, Google employees responded by petitioning for James’s removal, calling her inclusion on the panel “horribly negligent” if not “outright malicious.”
But the “rise of the woke workforce,” as Commentary’s Christine Rosen called it, wouldn’t occur if Google didn’t encourage and even support its growth. The company’s endless rants about diversity and tolerance have created the assumption that there is speech that must be silenced and action that must be condemned if it’s deemed offensive. Meanwhile, the memos continue to circulate and the lawsuits pour in.
Google is a sad example of how woke culture eats its own. It is breeding a den of vipers, for whom nothing the company does will ever be enough, and who will stridently enforce right-think among their peers. There will always be another fence, another hoop that the company must jump through to reach the impossible standard of diversity and inclusion the Left has set. But Google will keep trying, and many (or perhaps even most?) of its employees will suffer as a result.
