“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices?” This question, posted by a female engineer on an internal Microsoft message board, was not a complaint about the fact the company is 73% male, or that black and Latin American employees make up just 10% of the US workforce, compared to roughly a third of Americans overall. Rather, it was the opposite. “To be clear,” the commenter continued. “I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men.” Microsoft has not publicly commented on the post, although it was reported that plenty of employees pushed back against the original commentator. But the idea that policies designed to create a more equal playing field are, in their own way, discriminatory, is an idea that has recently come to the fore. The Microsoft comment came just two years after James Damore, an engineer at Google, posted his infamous “memo”. In the 10-page document, he wrote “we need to stop assuming gender gaps imply sexism” rather than biological differences and criticised Google’s diversity programmes as “discrimination” which “can actually increase race and gender tensions”. Google responded by firing him. But, as the Microsoft incident shows, for once the search engine was unable to settle the question once and for all. Has a backlash against diversity outreach begun?
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