Google is joining a lengthening list of US companies that have abandoned or scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.
The move, outlined in an email sent to Google employees on Wednesday, came in the wake of an executive order from President Donald Trump aimed in part at pressuring government contractors to scrap their DEI initiatives.
Like several other major tech companies, Google sells some of its technology and services to the federal government, including its rapidly growing cloud division that’s a key piece of its push into artificial technology.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also signalled the shift in its annual 10-K report it filed this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In it, Google removed a line included in previous annual reports saying that it’s “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”.
Google generates most of Alphabet’s annual revenue of $350 billion (€338bn) and accounts for almost all of its worldwide workforce of 183,000.
“We’re committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities, and over the last year we’ve been reviewing our programs designed to help us get there”, Google said in a statement to the Associated Press.
“We’ve updated our 10-K language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”
Trump toughens up on diversity
The change in language also comes slightly more than two weeks after Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other prominent technology executives – including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg – stood behind Trump during his inauguration.
Meta abandoned its DEI programme last month, shortly before the inauguration, while Amazon halted some of its DEI programmes in December following Trump’s election.
Many companies outside of the technology industry also have backed away from DEI. Those include Walt Disney Co, McDonald’s, Ford and Walmart.
Trump’s recent executive order threatens to impose financial sanctions on federal contractors deemed to have “illegal” DEI programmes. If the companies are found to be in violation, they could be subject to huge damages under the 1863 False Claims Act. The law states that contractors who make false claims to the government could be liable for three times the government’s damages.
The challenge for companies is knowing which DEI policies the Trump administration may decide are “illegal”.
In both the public and private sector, diversity initiatives have covered a range of practices, from anti-discrimination training and conducting pay equity studies to making efforts to recruit more members of minority groups and women as employees.
Google ahead of the game
California-based Google has tried to hire more people from underrepresented groups for more than a decade but increased its efforts in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered an outcry for more social justice.
Shortly after Floyd died, Pichai set a goal to increase the representation of underrepresented groups in the Mountain View, California, company’s largely Asian and white leadership ranks by 30% by 2025. Google has made some headway since then, but the makeup of its leadership has not changed dramatically.
The representation of Black people in the company’s leadership ranks rose from 2.6% in 2020 to 5.1% last year, according to Google’s annual diversity report. For Hispanic people, the change was 3.7% to 4.3%. The share of women in leadership roles, meanwhile, increased from 26.7% in 2020 to 32.8% in 2024, according to the company’s report.
The numbers are not much different in Google’s overall workforce, with Black employees comprising 5.7% and Latino employees 7.5%. Two-thirds of Google’s worldwide workforce is made up of men, according to the diversity report.
SOURCE: EURONEWS
