YouTube accused of racial bias in lawsuit
A former YouTube recruiter is suing the company’s parent, Google, alleging YouTube discriminated against white and Asian male engineers in hiring, and perpetuated a toxic culture in its efforts to recruit more women and minorities.
The employee, Arne Wilberg, worked at Google for nine years and spent the last four as a recruiter at YouTube. He said he was fired in November 2017, after a protracted battle over YouTube’s hiring practices and culture. The suit was filed Thursday in San Mateo County Superior Court.
“For the past several years, Google has had and implemented clear and irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” the civil suit states.
A spokeswoman for YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Google spokeswoman provided the Wall Street Journal a statement saying the company has “a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. 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.”
Wilberg alleges that in April 2017 he was told to cancel all interviews for junior and midlevel software engineering positions, except for those with applicants who were female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.”
Wilberg says he refused to carry out the directive and was penalized and threatened with termination. Ultimately, he claims, he was fired for resisting company policy.
Google’s workplace culture and hiring practices have become the subject of multiple lawsuits, both from those who argue that the company has gone too far in its attempts to diversify, and recently from a former employee who alleged that he was fired for speaking out about company culture in defense of women and minorities. The issues received national attention last year when former Google engineer James Damore released a memo that argued that men are biologically more suited to coding careers than women. Damore sued after he was fired.
Wilberg’s lawsuit more generally describes a company that moved erratically in its attempts to hire more women and minorities. “Google used Weekly Recaps to track the number of hires who were ‘Female,’ ‘Black,’ and ‘LatinX,’ ” and had quarterly hiring quotas for engineers, the suit alleges.
Wilberg alleges attempts to cover up those hiring practices. “Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees purge any and all references to the race/gender quotas from its e-mail database in a transparent effort to wipe out any paper trail of Google’s illegal practices,” the lawsuit states.
According to Wilberg, some employees expressed disagreement with the policies, and complained at a meeting about the way managers “spoke about black candidates as the team needed to hire more blacks . ... One team member complained that managers were speaking about Blacks like they were objects,” the suit said.