Chapter 7: Progress in Affirmative Action: How Backlash Is Holding Us Back

In August of 2017, Google engineer James Damore posted a 10-page missive against the company’s diversity policies arguing that affirmative action (AA) hiring policies had resulted in a culture of extreme and unfair gender imbalances in the tech giant’s workforce. Yet at the time of his complaint, Google’s workforce was 69% male, 2% African American, with only 20% of females holding technical jobs, far below the national average of 26%. Google quickly responded with promises of greater diversity, but perhaps more importantly, this incident reflects the increasing animosity towards affirmative action policies (AAPs) expressed in backlash incidents in many Western democracies.