Google has become the latest Silicon Valley giant to pull back on its diversity initiatives.
According to The Wall Street Journal, an email was sent out to all employees on Wednesday announcing the changes.
The report states:
In an email to employees Wednesday, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.
In 2020, amid calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.
Parent company Alphabet’s annual report released Wednesday omitted a sentence stating the company was “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.” The sentence was in its reports from 2021 through 2024.
Black and Latino people have long been underrepresented in the tech industry. Google’s 2024 diversity report said 5.7% of its U.S. employees were Black and 7.5% were Latino. Four years earlier, those figures were 3.7% and 5.9%, respectively.
The email also confirmed the company was “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply” with President Trump’s flurry of executive orders aimed at removing every single DEI from the federal government.
However, the memo said that the company would continue to expand into cities and countries with diverse workforces.
“We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S.—and in many countries globally—but in the future, we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said.
“Google has always been committed to creating a workplace where we hire the best people wherever we operate, create an environment where everyone can thrive, and treat everyone fairly.”
“That’s exactly what you can expect to see going forward,” it added.
The move would inevitably have been signed off by CEO Sundar Pichai, who was among the senior business and technology executives present at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony.
Google follows in the footsteps of many other large companies and Silicon Valley giants in scaling back or scrapping its DEI programs altogether.
Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would scrap all of his company’s diversity programs and return to meritocratic-based hiring practices.
Among the changes included cutting the company’s entire DEI team, ending all equity and inclusion programs and no longer requiring suppliers to meet diversity quotas and targets.
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