In January, the owner company of the biggest social media platforms in the world, Meta, announced that it would be ending its DEI programs, including the ones for hiring, training and picking suppliers. They announced an internal memo. After this move by Meta, Alphabet’s Google was quick to follow suit and announced that it would be scrapping its goal to hire more employees from underrepresented communities. Google is one of the many companies shying away from diversity-based hiring.
Alphabet’s chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, emailed the staff on Wednesday, “In 2020, we set aspirational hiring goals and focused on growing our offices outside California and New York to improve representation, but in the future, we will no longer have aspirational goals.” Google has been one of the most vocal corporations pushing for more inclusive policies in the workplace following the protest for the death of George Floyd and other black Americans. Moreover, in 2020, the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, said that by 2025, he wanted 30% of the leadership of Google to be from the underrepresented groups at a time when 96% of the leadership of Google comprised whites and Asians, out of which 73% were male.
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Alphabet’s filing with the US SEC on Wednesday showed that the company omitted a line that read, “[we are] committed to making diversity, equity and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” This line has been present in every filing of the tech company from 2021 to 2024. The spokesperson said that the line was removed after the DEI program review.
Parul Koul, a software engineer and president of the Alphabet Workers Union, said, “This is a real attack on gains that workers have made in the tech industry through movements fighting against racism, gender and LGBTQ discrimination, going all the way back to the civil rights movement. This is part of a troubling right-wing, anti-worker trend developing within tech companies that AWU (Alphabet Workers Union) is committed to fighting against.”
