Heartbroken

Watching as one by one tech leaders who pioneered affirmative action and DEI genuflect to MAGA and the Trump-Musk broligarchy is breaking my heart. The abandonment of values they once championed to kiss Trump’s ring was the height of hypocrisy and self-interest. Mark Zuckerberg through Cheryl Sandberg under the bus for the inclusion policies Facebook championed since 2015. And Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, seems to have forgotten its “Don’t be evil” motto, replaced in 2015 with “Do the right thing”, as a corporate code of conduct.

My career was made possible by affirmative action and diversity programs. I was a beneficiary of an affirmative action program initiated in the late 1960s by IBM, shortly after the accomplishments of the heroines of Hidden Figures. IBM recognized the hidden talent that helped it sell more systems to NASA and went out to find more of it. IBM recruited seniors at high schools in LA’s low-income communities who had been accepted to attend engineering colleges to participate in the initiative. This was how it all began for me as part of the Los Angeles cohort of interns.

Without that summer internship while earning my computer science degree, it was unlikely I would have overcome the barriers to a career in tech. If the first company that hired me, National CSS, was not a progressive organization, its leadership wouldn’t have embraced my program to hire and train individuals without 4-year degrees. If Tandem Computers, still the best company I ever worked for, didn’t walk-the-talk of its core value of respect for people and their diversity, it wouldn’t have brought together a task force of Black employees to advise leadership on our retention, inclusion, and advancement.

Meritocracy is a myth. As Black youth, the 150% rule is drummed into our heads. Work 50% harder. Be 50% smarter. Do 50% more. Despite exceeding expectations, too often during my career, a less-qualified white male was hired or promoted instead of me. And in most of those situations, the person that got the job had an inside connection – another advantage of privilege.

I’m grateful for those organizational leaders who recognized that removing barriers to opportunity women and people of color have faced for decades was mutually beneficial. And as a leadership scholar and practitioner, I know it takes courage to take such action.

“Diversity is central to Facebook’s mission of creating a more open and connected world. To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook. Diverse teams have better results, so this is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for our business.”

Sheryl Sandberg July 2015

…and for that truth Zuckerberg made Sandberg the scapegoat.

It’s sad that these businesses, primarily tech companies, now refuse to acknowledge that DEI improved their bottom lines. I wonder how the employees feel. I would feel betrayed.

Sandberg’s statement above accompanied Facebook’s introduction to an internal employee training video it made available to the public about managing unconscious bias. The message declared surfacing and countering unconscious bias is an essential step towards becoming the people and companies we want to be. That must have made many employees feel like Facebook cared about them. I used the video in most of my workshops on managing unconscious bias.

Today, I have been unable to find that video anywhere. What cowardice! And now I wonder if Google’s acclaimed Search Inside Yourself Institute will shut down. The programs help employees “develop the skills of mindfulness, empathy, compassion, and overall emotional intelligence to create the conditions for individual and collective thriving.” That’s inclusion. That’s now illegal.

This hurts because I believed the leaders in tech companies pioneering inclusion shared my values of integrity, honesty, respect, trustworthiness, and most important, servant leadership. But that type of leadership takes courage.

What happened to yours, Mark and Sundar?