Diversity for Thee, But Not for Me

Meanwhile, over at Google, it’s diversity for thee, but not for me.

The company has been propagandizing about diversity for years now. So have other Silicon Valley tech giants. Of course, talk is cheap. When you have all the money in the world, talk is even cheaper. What we really want to know is: how’s that diversity thing working out in practice?

Apparently, not so well. Uh, oh. Fair enough, the workforce became less white. But guess who picked up the slack: Asian males. There was a negligible increase in the percentage of female employees and in minority staff.

A group of shareholders had proposed that the company link executive compensation to diversity quotas. For reasons that do not make sense to me, the totally woke shareholders voted it down.

The Wall Street Journal has the numbers:

Google bumped the percentage of its female employees up by one-tenth of a percentage point to 30.9%. 

Despite falling more than 2 percentage points, white workers remained the majority at 53.1%, while Asians grew more than a percentage point to 36.3%. Black and Latino workers grew a tenth of a percent to 2.5% and 3.6%.

Google said it needs to do more on diversity, and added new data on hiring, attrition and gender by ethnicity. The new data showed black workers left the company at far higher rates than other groups. The report said its efforts at improving diversity must include “creating an inclusive culture” and not just boosted hiring.

There you have it. James Damore was fired for political incorrect thinking. The company declared itself to be a champion of diversity. It made for a good story. In practice, things are as they were.