https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...ity-manifesto-goes-internally-viral-at-google
At least eight Google employees tweeted Friday about a document that was circulated within the company calling for replacing Google's diversity initiatives with policies that encourage "ideological diversity" instead. The document, which is the personal opinion of one senior software engineer, was shared on a company mailing list but has since gone "internally viral," according to a Google employee who spoke with Motherboard.
Motherboard has not viewed the full document, but a screenshot we reviewed shows it's titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber." Descriptions of its contents were tweeted publicly by Google employees, and it was described in detail to me by a Google employee, who requested anonymity because of the company's notoriously strict confidentiality agreement. (A lawsuit against the company was filed in a San Francisco court last year over the company's "spying program" to prevent leaks.)
The person who wrote the document argued that the representation gap between men and women in software engineering persists because of biological differences between the two sexes, according to public tweets from Google employees. It also said Google should not offer programs for underrepresented racial or gender minorities, according to one of the employees I spoke to.
The document's author also wrote that employees with conservative political beliefs are discriminated against at Google and lamented about how "leftist" ideology is harmful. They argue that the company should have a more "open" culture where their viewpoint would be welcomed. The document said that improving racial and gender diversity is less important than making sure conservatives feel comfortable expressing themselves at work.
While the vast majority of Google employees did not support the document's arguments, some did. According to Dogan, who works on the company's Go programming language, the document's author was emboldened by some of the positive responses he got. "The author is now in contact with me explaining why he received *supportive* response," she tweeted. "If HR does nothing in this case, I will consider leaving this company for real for the first time in five years," she wrote in a threaded tweet.
"It's not worth thinking about this as an isolated incident and instead a manifestation of what ails all of Silicon Valley," the employee I spoke to who detailed the document's contents told me.
Google is currently wrapped up in a dispute with the Department of Labor over what an agency official testified are "systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce." Another official told The Guardian in April that it had discovered "compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters."