Days after it was reported that James Damore's lawsuit against Google was quietly settled, NBC News reports that Google has ended or sharply curtailed diversity programs to "avoid being perceived as anti-conservative".
April Glazer:
Internal diversity and inclusion training programs have been scaled back or cut entirely, four Google employees and two people who recently left the company told NBC News in interviews. In addition, they said, the team responsible for those programs has been reduced in size, and positions previously held by full-time employees have been outsourced … Seven current and former employees from across a range of teams and roles at the company said separately that they all believed the reason behind cutting Sojourn and taking employees off diversity projects to move them elsewhere at Google was to shield the company from backlash from conservatives.
I was going to remark that this was a big bet on Trump's reelection from a big holder of proprietary data indicating the preferences and intentions of American voters, but that's not really justified. The servile, supplicative attitude toward conservatives is the default to which American corporations always return1. What are they afraid of, all told? What, specifically, is the bad thing that happens to Google as a result of diversity training?
1. Compare to how a Hollywood studio will acknowledge a mistake, explain the mistake accurately, promise not to make the mistake again, then cast Tom Cruise as Ghandi, etc., exposing the entire mistake management process as an unusually contemptuous and short-term PR exercise.
