It’s no big secret that many, if not most, prominent liberals don’t live by the tolerance-and-diversity values they preach. (In fact, there’s an entire book about it.) Rich liberals cloister themselves in exclusive lily-white enclaves like Berkeley and Georgetown, send their kids to private schools, and generally avoid contact with anyone outside of their demographic comfort zone. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised to hear about Google’s appalling lack of diversity.
As a company, Google leans left—some would say far left. But don’t take that to mean they’ve jumped on board with that whole “equality” thing! In fact, it seems they’ve been slow to embrace this new-fangled idea called “diversity” that everyone is talking about these days.
This is an industry-wide failing. The Washington Post ran the story with the headline “Silicon Valley Has a Diversity Problem,” which might be the understatement of the year.
Google employees are 70% male. 61 percent are white, a whopping 30 percent are Asian, and 3 percent are Hispanic. And the percentage of black employees of either sex is an embarrassing 2 percent.
These numbers don’t even come close to reflecting the makeup of the general population. No wonder Silicon Valley corporations have been trying to hide their diversity statistics from the media.
We can look at this in two ways. On one hand, we could say that Google and the Silicon Valley “boy’s club” has a bias against anyone who isn’t a white or Asian dude. On the other, we could argue that Google isn’t discriminating, but simply hires top-notch candidates, regardless of race or gender.
I fail to see a problem with the latter, as long as all prospective employees are given a fair shot. Google should be able to hire the best workers, without the government sticking its nose in and forcing them to play some arbitrary numbers game in order to appear “diverse.”
But that’s a freedom that liberals—including the ones in Silicon Valley—don’t think anyone else should have.