Google: software engineering
candidates must be from “historically underrepresented groups”
In a recent lawsuit against the
Silicone Valley tech giant, a former recruiter for both Google and Youtube
alleges that his former employer applied filters to their hiring process that
were focused on race and gender.
Arne Wilberg filed a civil
lawsuit in San Mateo Superior Court against Google on the basis that they
employ racial and gender discrimination when hiring people to tech positions
within the company, violating both state and federal laws prohibiting such
activities.
Wilberg says he was told by the
tech staffing manager to consider only those candidates who were from
“historically underrepresented groups.”
He also alleges that he was
ordered to cancel interviews with candidates who were not female, black,
hispanic, and to trash any applications from applicants not fitting those
demographics.
It was when Wilberg refused to
comply with this order that he experienced considerable friction from the
company’s management. The Register reports:
A former recruiter for Google and YouTube has sued the
search ad beast, claiming he was fired for objecting to hiring policies that
discriminated against white and Asian men.
In a civil lawsuit filed
in January in San Mateo Superior Court, plaintiff Arne Wilberg contended that
he was an exemplary employee who received positive performance evaluations
“until he began opposing illegal hiring and recruiting practices at Google.”
The lawsuit follows in the wake of a similar claim in January by former Google
engineer James Damore, fired for penning a memo against diversity.
Silicon Valley-based tech companies, chided for hiring
mostly white and Asian men in technical and leadership roles, have tried to
figure out ways to develop more inclusive, diverse workforces. Many have
adopted policies and programs designed to encourage more balanced hiring, not
only to right past discrimination but for their own economic advantage:
According to management consultancy McKinsey, diverse companies deliver better financial
results.
The problem is that mandatory quotas based on gender or
ethnicity may violate US anti-discrimination laws, depending on how they’re
implemented.
Systematic
Google, Wilberg’s complaint claimed, “has had and
implemented clear and irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and
consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor
job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against
Caucasian and Asian men.”
The complaint cited Google policy documents from 2017 that
demand diversity in hiring goals.
It claimed the manager of YouTube’s tech staffing
management team, Allison Alogna, sent an email in March 2017 indicating that
new level-three software engineering candidates – specifically, geeks with five
years of experience or less – must be from “historically underrepresented
groups.”
When presented with orders to cancel level-three software
engineering interviews with anyone not either female, black, or Hispanic, and
to purge applications from non-diverse employees in the hiring pipeline,
Wilberg refused and faced retaliation as a result, it is claimed.
Wilberg, according to the lawsuit, “repeatedly told [his
managers] that it was illegal to have such hiring quotas favoring certain
groups based on race and gender, that it violated state and federal law, and
that Google must immediately cease and desist from engaging, in such illegal
hiring practices.”
The complaint contends that in response to Wilberg’s
efforts to challenge the diversity scheme, Google “on occasion would circulate
emails instructing its employees purge any and all references to the race/
gender quotas from its e-mail database in a transparent effort to wipe out any
paper trail of Google’s illegal practices.”
In an email to The Register, a Google spokesperson said the company
intends to vigorously defend against these claims. “We have a clear policy to
hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” Google’s
spokesperson said. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse
pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best
people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
While such discriminatory practices
are becoming more common, especially in academic circles, the very
organizations which bring services that are almost at the
level of a public utility and are now, in the wake of the
Russiagate phobia, increasingly becoming agents of censorship as they become
responsible for whether the content available on the internet
is properly politically correct is more and more becoming a concern.
Youtube is presently taking heat
for employing the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of its
content filtration advisers in order to determine what content
is considered “hateful” and subsequently removed from public availability.
With the SPLC’s eroding
credibility in recent years, it has become an organization that
apparently blacklists political incorrectness for profit. Now,
with the allegations revealed in this civil suit, it seems that the forms of
discrimination that are employed by the SPLC are becoming a matter of course in
the area of staffing at Google and Youtube’s tech sectors as well.