Women Techmakers, a group that aimed to provide community and resources for women in tech, was one of Google’s landmark career resource programs. However, the company recently announced that it would be severing its connection with the program and handing over ownership to tech education nonprofit Technovation, according to CNN.
The news, which was delivered in a short, internal email, has elicited decidedly negative reactions, CNN reports. Many members told CNN that they felt surprised and sidelined by the decision, especially after Google removed years of videos and other content they’d produced for Women Techmakers over the years.
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“Everything that I ever hosted and facilitated for Women Techmakers is gone,” Sherry Yang, an ambassador for Women Techmakers, told CNN. “And there are just as many ambassadors who were in the community that put in so much effort to be part of this, (and) their history just erased.”
While Women Techmakers still exists, many of its members feel as though the separation from Google means that they’ve lost an important association and pipeline.
“The message it sends to women in tech, and really women in general, is that we cannot count on unwavering support from big corporations,” Vassiliki Dalakiari, a software and AI engineer in Greece, told CNN. “We need to keep speaking up until we are heard. Google helped to do that, and they decided to quietly turn their back on us.”
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Google declined to comment on the decision, but Technovation CEO Tara Chklovski told CNN that Google is still providing some funding to the program and will continue to provide access to events and programs that it hosts.
Google parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, GOOGL)) announced in February that it was killing diversity hiring targets. “In 2020, we set aspirational hiring goals and focused on growing our offices outside California and New York to improve representation… but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” an internal e-mail from Alphabet Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi that was reviewed by Reuters said.
Citing the company’s role as a federal contractor, Cicconi said that the company would be evaluating many of its DEI programs. Women Techmakers appears to be the latest casualty of this evaluation.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sociology professor who specializes in the study of workplace inequalities, told CNN that companies like Google started these programs due to pressure from gender equality groups, federal regulators, and even their own employees.
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However, following President Trump’s executive orders on DEI programming, things have changed.
“The pressure from the federal government is off, and now they actually fear that the Trump administration will come after them if they have any targeted programs,” Tomaskovic-Devey said.
Still, that change doesn’t make the news any easier to swallow for Women Techmakers members.
“Ending a global women-in-tech program without informing or engaging its most active contributors sends a clear message and it’s disappointing,” Dalakiari told CNN. “WTM made a real difference, and I’m not sure that decision reflects the values many of us signed up to represent.”
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This article Google Drops A Landmark Career Resource Program To Negative Reactions: ‘We Cannot Count On Unwavering Support From Big Corporations’ originally appeared on Benzinga.com
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