Inclusion Revolution

3Overhaul Your Recruitment

Soon after I left Google in 2017, engineer James Damore posted a fiery 10-page memo to an internal message board that argued that women aren't a “personality fit” to be an engineer and that the company was not inclusive, especially when it came to the ideas of conservative white men. Basically, he felt threatened by diversity initiatives. This was a white man who was arguing that white men were experiencing reverse discrimination. The full memo was posted to tech blogs and analyzed by mainstream media (Wakabayashi 2017).

This was not the first time that this tech giant was charged with the incongruencies of its diversity approach (perhaps the first time from a conservative white male POV though). But this was the first time it was forced to confront its inability to effectively address biases and barriers for underrepresented talent, while facing internal and external turmoil. If you can organize the world's information, how can you not better reflect it in your workforce? I had raised the issues of an ongoing culture of racism and sexism with Google leaders, and now they were very publicly being confronted with their years of inaction.

There's nothing like a PR crisis to put a fire under a CEO and senior leadership team. In February 2020, over three years after that contentious meeting where I presented our diversity hiring strategy, I was happy to see that one of our biggest asks came to fruition. Sundar Pichai (2022), the CEO of Google, announced ...