Silicon Valley is in a tricky moment. Tech executives have been forced to decide whether they’re going to bend or potentially break.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, leaders at tech behemoths like Meta and Alphabet have bent to his will. Others, most notably Apple, seem willing to risk breaking. But it’s unclear what the right approach is, or if there even is a right approach.
In separate conversations with Gazetteer SF, two former heads of diversity at various Silicon Valley tech companies were on opposite sides of the aisle. One feels for the leaders at these companies trying to navigate these uncertain times, while the other said he simply can’t feel bad for companies that still have an overwhelming amount of power.
Rachel Williams, a longtime proponent of diversity and inclusion in tech who previously headed diversity at companies like Yelp, StubHub, and Google X, told Gazetteer that companies are likely still trying to figure out how to best proceed.
But the first step in survival, she said, is finding safety and finding cover so that they “can survive the moment and make it to the future.” That means auditing their social media, websites, and reports, and then determining the risk level, she said.
Albrey Brown, former DEI lead at DocuSign and Airtable, told Gazetteer he understands why the tech industry might feel weary about being vocal about DEI work. But at the same time, Brown said he struggles to “be sympathetic toward any institution that has overwhelming power over the people they do and the people they don’t hire.”
There’s a laundry list of tech companies that have distanced themselves from DEI in recent months: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Uber, Salesforce, The RealReal, and Twilio. The list goes on.
In March, two former Silicon Valley startup industry darlings, cloud storage company Box and on-demand dog walking service Wag, became the latest companies to change or scrap DEI mentions in their annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gazetteer has found.
Tech companies have largely been remiss to comment on such changes, and Box and Wag are no different. Neither company responded to Gazetteer’s request for comment.
Despite her lengthy career working in DEI roles at tech companies, Williams said she’s “not upset” with companies removing DEI vernacular from their sites or annual reports.
“We need to acknowledge that the threat is very real, both personally and organizationally that this administration is not messing around,” Williams said.
But there is a silver lining: At least companies are discussing DEI at the stakeholder level, and see it as a business imperative, she said.
In the earlier days of the fight to get Silicon Valley to care about DEI, advocates pushed for companies to recognize the business case for diversity. Fast forward to last month, and Apple shareholders considered — and ultimately rejected — a proposal to step back from DEI.
“For me, that is a win,” she said.
And while it may be tempting to do the “easy work” of canceling tech companies for removing DEI content, Williams said “we shouldn’t join the witch hunt,” especially if we don’t yet know whether companies are truly stepping away from DEI work.
“I know there are some companies removing the evidence on their websites, but still continuing to do the work,” she said. “And there are some who are removing the evidence and removing the work. I think we’ll see the difference in a few short years of who those folks are. I think if it comes to light who the folks are that are completely doing away with the work, in addition to the evidence of it, those people will be called to task, and they will meet the fate of Target.”
Brown, meanwhile, pointed to companies both inside and outside of tech standing their ground. There’s the NFL, Costco, and Apple, all of whom have relatively diverse workforces. Though, they all certainly have room to improve.
“When your constituents aren't the people being affected it’s very easy to take a step back and say, ‘we’re not doing this,” Brown said. “Whereas if you look at diversity numbers for most tech companies, they are negligible.”
That’s partly why Brown said that none of what we’re seeing from many companies in Silicon Valley right now is surprising to him. Plus, he said, this moment “has been a long drawn out sequence of events since the peak in 2021” after George Floyd was murdered.
During that time, even as tech companies were speaking out in support of Black Lives Matter, DEI leaders, Brown included, were “skeptical about what companies were actually committed to,” he said.
“That’s not to say they weren't committed at all but in my personal opinion, it was ‘we're going to wait until the tenor of the conversation changes,’” Brown said. “And that’s what we're seeing now.”
It was this scenario that Brown saw coming. And it’s why he ultimately stepped away from his last official DEI role, which he held at workflow platform Airtable. Airtable was “a great tech company” that did a good job focusing on Black and brown employees in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, Brown said, but he noticed that “the case for diversity kind of went away after the crisis died down.”
Airtable did not return Gazetteer’s request for comment.
