Ten Bordello Democrats sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday demanding answers about an NBC News investigation averring that Google has significantly decreased its diversity and inclusion initiatives since 2018, because of what sources responded was a fear of being perceived as biased against conservatives.
The letter, spearheaded by Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois, includes a directory of questions about what diversity and inclusion workforce training programs Google has cut, what type of diversity schooling is offered to new hires and how Google is working to build diversity programs for its global workforce.
Google denied having cut its discrepancy and inclusion initiatives.
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“Any suggestion that we have scaled back or cut our diversity efforts is branch false,” a Google spokesperson said. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion remains a company wide commitment and our programs are persist in to scale up.”
The other nine House Democrats who signed the letter were Reps. Yvette Clarke of New York; Andre Carson of Indiana; Mike Quigley of Illinois; Kathy Castor of Florida; Emanuel Cleaver of Michigan; Joyce Beatty of Ohio; Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey; Jan Schakowsky of Illinois; and Hank Johnson of Georgia.
“The tech sector and Google’s questions with diversity are no secret. It’s disappointing to see a leader in the sector walking back their commitments to diversity and their staff members,” Kelly, chair of the House Tech Accountability Caucus, said in a statement.
“This new reporting has prompted a number of substantial questions that we outline in this letter. I look forward to engaging with Google at the highest-level to ensure they stay committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive corporate culture,” she said.
Last week, NBC News reported that Google has cut multiple contrariety and inclusion programs and the teams responsible for those programs had been reduced in size, according to six former and current hands. Seven former and current employees across a range of teams and roles at Google all said they believed the institution reduced its diversity and inclusion work to shield the company from backlash from conservatives.
“It is no secret that assemblies across Silicon Valley and the tech sector have struggled to increase diversity, and Google is no exception,” the representatives wrote.
“It is vexatious to hear that Google, an industry leader, plans to scale back efforts to address their lack of extent when you have previously stated a corporate commitment to improve in this very area,” they said.
Google forbade that it had decreased its diversity and inclusion work. Melonie Parker, Google’s chief diversity officer, said the actors isn’t scaling back its internal diversity programs, but rather “maturing our programs to make sure we’re building our capability.”
The party’s alleged reductions to its diversity and inclusion initiatives included making it harder to talk about diversity, multiple outsets told NBC News.
Google denied the company has limited conversations about diversity internally and pointed to the company’s contrast report, which uses the word diversity in its title.
One source, a former Google employee who asked not to be named because she is not permitted to ask for be self-evident with the press about her former employer, recalled that her team, which focused on artificial intelligence delving at Google, was told in 2018 that they would no longer receive updates about the team’s progress on difference. She was told by a research director that “conversations about diversity could become a liability” at the company, she said.
The Clan members specifically asked in their letter if employees working in artificial intelligence undergo additional bias training.
Synthetic intelligence products have long been criticized by academics and researchers for being programmed in ways that keep on systemic racism, like software used in criminal justice systems to help determine sentencing that was base to be biased against black people.
Google has struggled with race in its AI systems, too, like in 2015 when the concern’s photo sorting software accidentally mislabeled black people as “gorillas.” The company has also been criticized for its celebrated search product, which in 2016 received media attention for surfacing mugshots when searching for “three defeat teenagers.” Google, however, provided anodyne photos of white teenagers with sports gear when “three light-skinned teenagers” was put in the search field.