When workplace policies collide with the realities of DEI And how Google sacrifices women to keep order by Tanuja Gupta full text of testimony .

Full text

My career at Google has come to an end because of this company’s willful ignorance of caste
discrimination, the double standards of its DEI programming, the weaponization of
confidentiality to avoid accountability, and a normalized practice of retaliation against those who
speak out.
If we never had a chance to meet in the halls of Google during my 11 years at the company,
allow me to introduce myself. My name is Tanuja Gupta. I was born and raised in Texas after my
parents immigrated to the United States in the 1980s from India. By birth, I am half Hindu, half
Jain, though I most closely identify as a Jain. After high school, I attended college at New York
University where I graduated in three years and made the Dean’s List every semester. I worked
full time through my last two years of college, and started my career in tech at the age of 20. I
have since worked in technology for another 20 years as an engineering program manager.
During my cumulative 11 years at Google, I have been promoted 3 times. When I was an
individual contributor (ie not a people manager), I co-organized the Google Walkout to protest
how sexual harassment and discrimination were handled at Google, going on to successfully
advocate for ending forced arbitration within our company. Outside of Google, I have continued
to advocate for both the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the recently passed HR
4445 to end forced arbitration for sexual misconduct in the workplace.
In April 2019, after Google ended its policy of forcing arbitration, I became a people manager for
our Google News team. In 2020, I received that third promotion to “Level 7” and to date, have
built a team of 17 reports. During my last performance review, which ended May 2nd, I received
a rating of ‘Strongly Exceeds Expectations.’ I sit 4 degrees of separation from our CEO (me →
Sr. Director → VP → SVP → CEO). Aside from being entrusted to lead several key initiatives for
our 700+ cross-functional News team, I also founded a diversity, equity and inclusion model that
became the blueprint for other teams at Google. After two years of building this program, I was
co-awarded Google’s Search Superlative Award in 2021 for the impact of my work and this DEI
model.
I’m sharing all of this because everything you read below will come down to credibility -
mine, the banned speaker’s, Google’s and my fellow Googlers’. It’s also a reminder that
no amount of work success, number of successfully executed projects, or accrued
credibility makes you any less disposable if you challenge the structures of power.
One element of this DEI program model I mentioned is to run a speaker series, where experts
from different organizations come speak to Googlers to educate them on matters of equity in
different industries and countries. Since April is Dalit History Month, we wanted to shed light on
caste discrimination. For those who are not familiar with this topic, the caste system is a
millennia-old system of exclusion originating in South Asia. It impacts over 1.9B South Asians
globally today, including 5.4M South Asians here in America. Dalits (the most oppressed in the
Caste system) have been historically subjected to violence and denied access to education,
healthcare, land ownership, and other social capital. Dalits are considered ‘untouchable’
because they are considered ‘polluted’. And today, even though this sort of discrimination runs
afoul of federal and local laws, Dalits, including those who have migrated to other countries like
the United States, continue to suffer discrimination in private and public spaces —including tech
workspaces, specifically Google.
In September 2021, two Google employees approached me confidentially about the caste
discrimination they had witnessed at the company. They shared the struggles they faced simply
having a talk at Google about caste discrimination. I agreed to host this talk as part of our News
DEI program and connected to them my direct report to execute. The News DEI Speaker Series
was all set to have a talk about caste equity on April 18th with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the
co-founder of Dalit History Month and Equality Labs. Thenmozhi Soundarajan is a leading
expert in caste equity and a Dalit herself. Her work led to the first Congressional hearing on
caste discrimination in America, and her organization Equality Labs has been essential to the
Cisco caste discrimination lawsuit. Caste discrimination follows South Asians wherever they go.
So considering how matters of caste equity are covered in the news (or not) AND given the
huge South Asian population in tech, my News team found this topic relevant and timely for our
speaker series.
However, starting two days prior to the talk, a series of actions, reactions (and inaction) started,
leading to what I believe are retaliatory measures towards me and discrimination towards South
Asian caste-oppressed employees:
● Wed, Apr 13 - Fri, Apr 15
○ A handful of Google employees send emails to myself and/or members of
Google product & HR leadership at different levels with concerns, accusations
and disinformation about the talk and speaker.
○ Someone doxxes my direct report by posting her email about the talk on Twitter.
○ I meet with my VP and Chief Diversity Officer, who collectively decide to
postpone the talk and perform due diligence on the speaker. They also ask me to
debunk the misinformation in the emails from a handful of Googlers.
○ They promise to hold the talk once the due diligence is complete.
● Mon, Apr 18
○ Meanwhile, I host a talk with Thenmozhi off-corp so it’s open to the public - watch
here on YouTube.
○ I and several other Googlers donate to the speaker’s organization, Equality Labs,
via our internal gift match platform since it is an approved organization (click
here).
● Two weeks pass with canceled HR meetings and no response on the information I
have provided on the speaker.
● Thu, Apr 28
○ I post this email describing what’s happened to groups to reach ~8K Googlers,
launch an internal site at go/caste-equity and invite Googlers to sign a petition if
they believe the talk should be reinstated.
○ I host another talk with Thenmozhi off-corp, with a much bigger audience this
time - watch here on YouTube.
○ HR asks my manager to submit a Talks@Google form as another form of vetting
the speaker - to date, I have never heard back on the results.
○ Employee Relations (HR) also reaches out to me, which I assume is to help with
my direct report’s doxxing case.
● Fri, Apr 29
○ 400+ Googlers sign the petition, and multiple tech companies and activists send
us endorsement letters of Thenmozhi Soundarajan (which are forwarded to our
Chief Diversity officer and CEO). I post this email.
○ I meet with Employee Relations, where I realize I am now under investigation
because Google employee(s) escalated concerns about me.
○ Moderators remove my emails from the industryinfo@ and pmtpm-discuss@
forums.
○ At this point, I’m tracking three separate investigations with different parties (i)
Security, to investigate who doxxed my direct report, (ii) ERG PeopleOps, to
investigate the proposed speaker’s credentials and vet the complaints of the
Googlers and (iii) Risk Compliance, to investigate me based on concerns by
people I do not know.
● Two weeks pass, Dalit History Month ends and I hear nothing on the HR
investigation nor the Talks@google submission. Meanwhile, my email spawns new
threads that (a) deny caste discrimination (ex1, ex2); (b) label caste-oppressed people
as less educated (ex); (c) contain Hindu-phobic allegations (ex); (d) make claims of
caste equity reverse discrimination (ex); and (e) ask for my petition to be a survey, as if
we should only hear about this topic from this speaker if the dominant majority group
agreed (ex). At some point, the Moma search for [Equality Labs] also has a top
suggested result with content from a known disinformation site. Another 200+ Googlers
sign the petition to reinstate the talk with Thenmozhi.
● Thu, May 12
○ HR notifies me that I have violated the People Manager Code of Conduct and
that I will receive a written warning letter later in the day. The investigator also
confirms that if I was an individual contributor, this investigation would not be
happening. They also ask me to take down several parts of the go/caste-equity
site, including any reference to HR actions and specific statements by three
Googlers - who will all be contacted separately as well. (One of the Googlers
confirmed HR never contacted him.)
○ Separately, the Head of Product Inclusion & Equity reaches out to me to learn
more about caste as it relates to our products.
○ Two hours later, in a meeting with my VP (pronouns: they/them), I find out that
the person who is responsible for deciding whether or not we will have a talk on
caste equity (and whether or not Soundarajan can be the speaker) has been my
VP all along. And that they will conduct a listening session with the Hindu
Employee Resource Group to help them make a decision. They also confirm the
contents of my warning letter: my performance rating in the next cycle will
automatically be lowered, affecting my compensation, and I will be ineligible for
promotion for at least the next promotion cycle.
● Mon, May 16
○ I meet 1:1 with our VP, who says we should have the conversation on caste
equity, but with a different speaker. I ask them to meet with the original speaker,
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, to at least hear from her directly. My VP agrees.
Right after, we meet with my direct report to break this news and make a plan to
move forward where the DEI HR team will help us source and vet speakers.
Read the full TRANSCRIPT here, PII redacted.
○ I meet 1:1 with my Manager and have a conversation which cinches my letter of
dispute, as you see a week later.
● Tue, May 17
○ My VP, Thenmozhi and I meet for 40 minutes, where my VP asserts this is not a
legal discrimination issue and acknowledges Thenmozhi is being held to a
different standard than all other speakers. Read the full TRANSCRIPT here, PII
redacted. (If you read only one transcript, let it be this one.)
● Thu, May 19
○ After multiple pings, I recap to my VP, manager and HR that we have sourced
multiple alternative speakers, but have been explicitly told not to reach out to
them by HR.
○ We also still have no understanding of the vetting process, or what was
objectionable about Thenmozhi in the first place.
○ I do not hear back from HR, and still haven’t to this day.
○ I confide in a colleague who says to me “they’ve been waiting for an opportunity
to do this to you for years”. This triggers my memory and I remember the report
on Project Vivian as reported in VICE, where the end forced arbitration group that
I founded is discussed explicitly. And I am the last Walkout organizer at the
company. It suddenly occurs to me that the punishment I have received may
have nothing to do with this episode, but that Google may have finally just found
that opportunity to fire me without firing me.
● Mon, May 23
○ 11:15am EST - I dispute the warning letter (read 1,2,3,4, PII redacted) - to date, I
have received no response with the requested information / clarifications from
HR nor my VP.
○ 11:20am EST - I formally request a legal investigation for retaliation and
workplace safety (read 1,2,3,4,5, PII redacted).
○ 6:00pm EST - I resign from Google. My manager states, “I had a feeling the
second I read the letter … I think about everything I could have done and should
have done. I guess I don’t see a full version of this story where I could have
made you and Google happy.”
● Tue, May 24
○ My VP reaches out for a chat, asking if I have plans, offering their personal email,
willing to make introductions to people in government and tech. When I ask,
“would you stay if you had to sign that letter?”, they reply “I don’t know.”
○ They also say that they will separate the DEI talk from the Product Inclusion talk,
so it will not go through the HR DEI processes.
○ My VP confirms, “I can run my product and engineering business however I like
without HR involvement. The problem with this whole thing, sadly, has been the
word ‘DEI’ in the speaker series, and then basically that gets into a world in
which multiple groups feel like they have purview.”
○ Lawyers from Alphabet - not HR from Google - reach out to start the investigation
of retaliation. They ask for my lawyer’s contact information.
● Wed, May 25
○ My direct report, my manager, my VP and I meet to discuss a status update, my
VP resharing what they shared the day prior.
○ My VP confirms that they have ‘laid the groundwork with the Hindu ERG’, and
‘we should be careful about the language we use in the future’.
○ Speakers on caste will be vetted by Central Compliance rather than HR, but the
vetting criteria and process is unknown (still haven’t received the objectionable
material on the original speaker to date).
○ We hold on reaching out to the nine alternative speakers while our VP confirms
a) whether the vetting process will be behind the scenes or involves an interview
with the prospective speaker and b) whether Thenmozhi will be sent through this
process or not (my VP wants to think about it).
■ During this whole process, Thenmozhi sources these speaker options for
us due to her desire to ensure Google still has the caste equity talk.
However, the majority of the prospective candidates are not Dalit nor
South Asian.
○ Read the full TRANSCRIPT here, PII redacted.
● Thu, May 26
○ Comms go out to the News team about my departure.
○ We also learn that the new vetting process, steps still unknown, will be discussed
at Google Leads the Tue, May 31st. (see here).
● Tue, May 31
○ Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is over.
○ I have no update on the new vetting process.
○ I still have not received the specific social media posts that made Thenmozhi
unacceptable in the first place.
○ The contract for Thenmozhi has still not been upheld.
○ The person who doxxed my direct report has still not been found.
○ A separate talk about caste by HR is being planned with a non-Dalit, non-South
Asian speaker.
The above are the verifiable facts, but I’d like to share some personal conclusions. As I do,
remember that Alphabet (Google) is like a nation-state. Our executive leadership changes less
frequently than US elected officials, and our market cap value of $1.45 trillion rivals the GDP of
countries like Canada, Australia or South Korea. Bear this power in mind when you consider the
weight of Google’s choices.
1. Retaliation is a normalized Google practice to handle internal criticism, and
women take the hit. It is no secret that women are often tasked with matters of
diversity, equity and inclusion in corporate America. We are also often the ones who
raise our hands too, perhaps because we’re often disproportionately affected by the lack
of diversity, equity and inclusion. However, it feels increasingly unsafe to work in this
space. In this particular case, four women of color (me, my two direct reports, and
Thenmozhi Soundarajan), were harassed and/or silenced. Before us, April Curley was
terminated in 2020, after she vocally opposed and called for reform of the double
standards Google imposed on Black employees and applicants. Timnit Gebru was
terminated in December 2020 after she criticized the company’s approach to minority
hiring and published a research paper pointing out the bias flaws in a new AI system for
learning languages. Margaret Mitchell, Gebru’s colleague, was removed for publicly
denouncing Gebru’s removal and continuing to investigate the circumstances of her
dismissal. Many of my fellow Walkout organizers have been dismissed or resigned from
the company for their protests of Google’s sexual harassment policies. We’ve all been
punished for our internal criticism because we’re “disruptive” to the workplace. But
practicing equity is fundamentally disruptive because we’re trying to correct for structural
imbalances rooted in decades - centuries - of injustice. And in particular, if managers are
the ones with the power to enact significant DEI-related changes, but are bound by a
policy that punishes disruption, how much does Google really want its DEI efforts to
succeed?
2. The machine of Google HR needs to be disassembled and completely rebuilt.
a. First, Google policies are written so broadly that they can cover anything, so you
have to question this selective enforcement.
b. Next, since you’re told to keep everything ‘as confidential as possible’, you can’t
speak out for fear of further penalties. Which means you can’t verify if what
you’re being told is true or not. Google weaponizes confidentiality to avoid
accountability.
c. The very structure of HR is a shell game. All of these teams use different terms
that obscure the fact they are all ultimately in HR. If you’re a Googler who is
going through an investigation for the first time, you may not realize that
Employee Relations and People Ops are HR. Or that the other teams you’re
working with (ex: GSOC for doxxing investigations) are NOT in HR. And they’re
all pointing to one another - or your management - for who has the final say on
what.
d. Now consider the fact that official DEI practitioners are being lumped into HR.
Our Chief Diversity Officer, ERG Advisors and Diversity Business Partners …
They all report to HR, and are constrained by the whims of HR. Why would
anyone be a DEI practitioner if they aren’t ensured safety to conduct their job
duties or gaslighted by the team that’s supposed to ensure safety for all
Googlers? DEI without those protections is performative, and increases risk for
everyone involved. Which is why my VP is working around HR to get a caste
equity talk on the books.
3. Google is woefully and willfully ill-equipped to deal with matters of caste
discrimination, and that has led to the events and harm you’ve read about today. Of all
the organizing I have done at this company, I think many are surprised that fighting for
caste equity was the lightning rod issue that took me down. But I have an Indian CEO
and SVP who both know exactly what’s going on and tacitly approve of everything that’s
happened. I know this because multiple VPs and Directors confirmed that in Sundar’s
Leads meeting, they discussed the need for a new universal vetting process of speakers
to ensure this doesn't happen again. So my hope is that Googlers start to understand the
magnitude of this issue, and the threat that their greater understanding poses to the
South Asians in power.
So what can you do?
1. Learn everything you can about caste discrimination at go/caste-equity-learn. To get
started: watch this talk, listen to this interview and read this article.
2. Resist checking in with South Asian colleagues. Google has unwittingly just told
every caste-oppressed Googler to go back in the closet, affecting their psychological
safety, jeopardizing their future at the company and potentially their immigration status.
Don’t put the burden of your education on the excluded.
3. Demand that Google specify caste as a protected class in all locations (not just
India) and that all managers are trained on what this means for the workforce. We
recognize caste in our product policies (YouTube, Google), so let’s make sure this is
recognized in our people policies as well.
To the News team and all the people who reached out in the past week, it broke my heart to not
be able to respond to your messages. I hope you understand now. I printed out each message
(both public and private) and I will carry so many of you in my heart forever. No team is perfect,
but our News team community was the real deal - banding together when it really mattered. I
also hope you’ll remember that the retaliation I’ve faced is not a result of our News leadership,
but of my management chain, HR and Google executive leadership. Direct questions
accordingly.
To my talented, compassionate, insightful and essential News T/PgM team colleagues - I'm so
sorry so many of you got caught in the cross-fire. I am rooting for each of you always.
Last, I know I am privileged to be able to write this letter because I’m leaving with the assurance
of a future. The real victims are a) Thenmozhi Soundararajan, whose voice was stifled and
b) the people who experience caste discrimination every day, but cannot speak out for
fear of losing their immigration visas or being the target of hate crimes … or both. The
fight for all of them continues whether I’m here or not - I hope you’ll join me.
-- Tanuj