YouTube Hiring For Some Positions Excluded White And Asian Males, Lawsuit Says
Image Credit: JAAP ARRIENS/ZUMA PRESS
Original Article | Author: Kirsten Grind & Douglas MacMillan
YouTube last year stopped hiring White and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee.
The lawsuit, filed by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years, including four years as a recruiter at YouTube, alleges the division of Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -2.94% Google set quotas for hiring minorities. Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.
A Google spokeswoman said the company will vigorously defend itself in the lawsuit. “We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” she said in a statement. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
People familiar with YouTube’s and Google’s hiring practices in interviews corroborated some of the lawsuit’s allegations, including the hiring freeze of white and Asian technical employees, and YouTube’s use of quotas.
Mr. Wilberg’s lawsuit, filed in January in California’s San Mateo County Superior Court, alleges that Google discriminated against him for his sex and race, retaliated by firing him when he complained, and in the process violated antidiscrimination laws. Mr. Wilberg declined to comment through his attorney.
The lawsuit highlights the tension facing the technology industry as it tries to boost minority hiring, a stated goal of many large companies, including Google. It also threatens to ignite simmering controversy about Silicon Valley’s politics and whether its predominantly liberal ideology is affecting how companies operate.
Google in particular has found itself in the middle of the gender debate following dueling lawsuits in January, one that alleged the company discriminated against women, the other claiming discrimination against conservative white men. The latter suit was filed by plaintiff James Damore, an engineer who was fired from the company last year for distributing a memo that suggested men were better suited to certain tech jobs than women. Google has said it disagrees with the allegations in those suits.
Mr. Wilberg, 40, alleges he complained to multiple managers at YouTube about its hiring practices over the past two years, and elevated those complaints to Google managers before he was ultimately fired last November.
Employers are allowed to undertake initiatives to promote diversity hiring, employment lawyers say. But under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes. That means they can’t employ practices like hiring quotas based on race or only hiring one type of minority candidate, attorneys say. Such practices would also run afoul of California laws.
Google’s internal website says “there is no such thing as a ‘diversity headcount’” at the company, according to one employee. The site also says it has a small program that allows hiring managers to bring on candidates from underrepresented groups.
Silicon Valley has faced public scrutiny over the amount of diversity in its workforce. The technology industry is more white (68.5%) than the overall U.S. private-sector workforce (63.5%), according to data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2014. Women make up about 30% of employees at leading tech companies in Silicon Valley, while they account for about 49% of workers at non-tech firms in the same region.
About 69% of Google’s employees last year were men, down 1 percentage point from 2014, the company said. The portion of Google’s workforce that is white or Asian has remained at 91% since 2014.
Google recruiters are responsible for identifying candidates, but hiring decisions are ultimately up to hiring committees, according to Google.
YouTube has about 23,000 employees, according to an estimate by networking site LinkedIn Corp. Alphabet had 80,110 full-time employees at year-end, according to a company filing.
