In a podcast with conservative figure Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social media company is dumping its DE&I policy, but its Australian office has told B&T it values a diverse workforce and the policy shift would not alter its approach to recruitment.
Meta is done with diversity, at least in its recruitment process. An internal memo, which was reported by Axios confirmed that Meta’s DE&I programs were being turfed, citing changing ‘legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States”.
The memo, which was circulated by Meta vice-president of human resources Janelle Gale, confirmed that Meta is dismantling its DE&I programs including its Diverse Slate Approach, which “is currently being challenged”. Meta is also binning its representation goals, which have been used to promote diverse hiring practices.
“We build the best teams with the most talented people,” Gale wrote. “This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools, but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics (eg race, gender etc.),” Gale wrote.
“Instead of equity and inclusion programs,” Gale wrote, Meta plans to build programs “that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.”
Meta will also end efforts to hire minority-owned vendors and suppliers.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to flag the changes and take aim at the Biden administration for pressuring Meta into “censorship”. He said that changes to Meta’s DE&I programs had been floated internally for some time.
The move follows Meta’s recent decision to abandon fact checking and relax rules around content moderation. A report from The Intercept on training materials for Meta employees illustrated the wider range of permissible speech now allowed on the platform; these include examples like “Gays are freaks” and “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit”.
A Meta Australia spokesperson told B&T that although the Diversity Slate Approach has been abandoned, it will have minimal impact in how the company finds and recruits talent in this market.
“This doesn’t change our approach to hiring diverse teams in our workforce, which include people from different races, sexuality, political views and so on because we believe diverse teams perform better,” the spokesperson said.
“We continue to believe in having a multi-talented workforce made up of cognitively diverse teams. We will always value teams with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. They are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities, ultimately helping us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone.
“We have never hired talent on the basis of race, sexuality and other identity characteristics, and this will continue.”
Meta will also continue training to reduce bias in the workplace and has support groups for women in tech, First Nations, LGBTQI+ and other communities within the business.
‘What the Zuck?’
Abandoning diversity is the latest attempt by Zuckerberg to curry favour with President elect Donald Trump, and has left diversity advocates and industry figures stunned.
Nishma Robb, who was the top marketer at Google UK and now runs women’s brand accelerator Glitersphere, wrote on LinkedIn: “The anti-woke brigade just cancelled the movement they accused of cancelling. Let that irony sink in for a moment.”
Meta joins a growing number of US headquartered companies, including McDonald’s and Walmart that have abandoned DE&I policies in recent months.
“Why?” Robb continued. “Fear of being labelled ‘woke’, fear of right-wing lobbying groups, fear of the shifting political winds.
“What we’re witnessing is a classic reaction to perceived threats to privilege – as if equality somehow means taking something away from the traditionally advantaged. We see this same pattern in the frightening rise of male toxicity among young men, stoked by figures like Andrew Tate, resulting in documented increases in violence against women and misogynistic behaviour.”
Former Twitter EMEA boss Bruce Daisley said that diversity in large tech companies has been a problem for some time, especially at senior levels.
“It was an unspoken truth that our London office didn’t look like the city we were working in,” Daisley wrote in a blog.
He said Meta’s rationale for ditching its DE&I program was an attempt to “pull the wool over your eyes”.
“DEI initiatives are an attempt to overcome the historic disadvantages that some groups have suffered from in society. The backlash suggests some easy alternate logic: we used to hire the best people and now we hire tokenistic candidates to signal that we’re good people,” Daisley wrote.
“This regressive argument of [Zuckerberg’s] isn’t focused on getting the best people and creating the best organisations, it’s designed to win tribal arguments that aren’t interested in evidence or data.
“Not only do I think this disinterest in diversity is objectively wrong, the attempt to perform a 180 switch is just mendacious. Zuckerberg was either lying to you about what he believed last year or he’s lying to you today. By either measure he’s a liar.”
