Google employees claim company is stopping diversity programmes to appeal to right-wingers

Teams responsible for such programmes have been downsized and positions held by full-time employees have either been outsourced or left vacant, staff say

(The Google logo displayed at the Google Playspace at CES 2020 in Las Vegas on Jan. 7, 2020. (David Paul Morris / Bloomberg))

Google has denied a report that it has rolled back its diversity and inclusion programmes in order to be better perceived by conservatives.

The company's comments came after a report that alleged training initiatives have been cut down or removed entirely and the teams responsible for such programmes have been downsized.

NBC reported that held by full-time employees were claimed to either have been outsourced or left vacant once those members left the company, report four current Google employees and two people who recently left the company speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.

“Any suggestion that we have scaled back or cut our diversity efforts is entirely false. Diversity, equity, and inclusion remains a company wide commitment and our programs are continuing to scale up," a Google spokesperson said.

The report described how one programme called Sojourn, which offered its last session in 2018, provided a “comprehensive” guide for employees to learn about implicit racial bias. By 2019 it had been completely shut down, according to seven former and current employees.

“One of the major motivations for cutting Sojourn is that the company doesn’t want to be seen as anti-conservative,” one Google employee said. “It does not want to invite lawsuits or claims by right-wing white employees about Google discriminating against them.”

Other sources familiar with Sojourn said that the training required multiple sessions and was intended to scale up from smaller sessions to a more in-depth program, since discrimination and bias training cannot be done in a single session.

Over the course of the last year, employees who worked on these programmes were swapped to sexual harassment policies and other human resource roles while others had work reduced or stopped entirely.

This includes two other programmes designed to support oppressed groups and build skills when discussing racial issues, DEI for Managers and Allyship 101, have also been removed, NBC said.

Google would not confirm or deny to NBC whether these modules were still in existence, but said that the concepts had been moved to another manager training programme.

The sources also highlight potential institutional racism within the technology company: “A hundred black employees could testify to the pain they feel in a climate that’s inadvertently hostile towards them and management will go back and say, ‘I need to get more data,’ and then three angry white men complain and everything comes to a halt,” one source claimed in the report.

Melonie Parker, Google’s chief diversity officer, disputed the allegations. Google said that Sojourn was indeed ended, but due to difficulty in scaling the program globally since it was focused on racial issues specific to the United States – where the majority of Google’s workforce are.

Google also said that it is bringing in outside contractors to conduct new training programmes advancing racial equality that it says will be tested in June, but would not provide details on the companies it has hired.

Newer programmes lack the framework from previous training programmes to orient white people about discussions of racial justice, employees claimed, saying the new programmes “are instead about how black people can navigate racism in the workplace,” something the tech giant has denied

This news comes after James Damore, the former Google employee who received vocal support from right-wing and alt-right voices following his lawsuit against the technology company for claimed discrimination against white men, asked for his lawsuit to be dismissed. The request was joined by Google.

Damore was fired from Google after circulating an internal memo arguing that innate differences between the sexes would explain why women were less prominent in the company. A National Labour Relations Board said that such a use of ‘biological stereotypes’ was offensive enough to cause disruption and making his dismissal lawful.

The researcher that Damore quoted in his argument also said that it was not his “area of expertise” and that “using someone’s biological sex to essentialise an entire group of people’s personality is like surgically operating with an axe.”