Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’

FILE PHOTO: A sign is pictured outs a Google office near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, U.S., May 8, 2019. REUTERS/Paresh Dave/File Photo

The rising Hindu nationalist movement that has spread from India through the diaspora has arrived inside Google, according to employees and an activist on caste bias. In April, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder and executive director of Equality Labs – a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste – was scheduled to give a talk to Google News employees for Dalit History Month. But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees, according to copies of the documents as well as interviews with Soundararajan and current Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation. Soundararajan appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias. Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday and viewed by The Washington Post. Soundararajan – who has given talks on caste at Microsoft, Salesforce, Airbnb, Netflix, and Adobe – said Equality Labs began receiving speaking invitations from tech companies in the wake of the George Floyd protests. “Most institutions wouldn’t do what Google did. It’s absurd. The bigoted don’t get to the set the pace of conversations about civil rights,” she said. Longtime observers of Google’s struggles to promote diversity, equity and inclusion say the fallout fits a familiar pattern. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo. In Gupta’s goodbye email, she questioned whether Google wanted its diversity efforts to succeed. “Retaliation is a normalized Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit,” she wrote. Gupta was one of the organizers behind the 2018 Google Walkout, in which 20,000 Google employees around the world briefly walked out of their offices to protest the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment. The other organizers have already left the company. In a statement, Google spokesperson Shannon Newberry wrote, “Caste discrimination has no place in our workplace. We also have a very clear, publicly shared policy against retaliation and discrimination in our workplace.” “We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which – rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness – was creating division and rancor,” Newberry wrote. Equality Labs, based in Oakland, Calif., advocates for the civil rights of the caste formerly referred to as “untouchables” in a millennia-old system of social hierarchy that originated with Hinduism in India, but has proliferated to different religions across South Asia. Many Indians have moved to the United States to work in tech companies, and several Big Tech CEOs are of Indian origin, including Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Twitter’s Parag Agrawal. Some employees allege the patterns of discrimination have been replicated within Silicon Valley companies. Soundararajan, who is Dalit, spent years convincing policy teams at social media companies to include caste as a protected category in their hate speech policies. In meetings, company representatives seemed to have little understanding about caste, even though it impacted hate speech in their biggest markets, she said. So Equality Labs had to gather data and help social media companies develop cultural competency on caste. The group took the same research-driven approach to examining caste bias in the workplace. Through its advocacy on content moderation, Equality Labs developed a strong network of Dalit tech workers. After the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against Cisco alleging caste discrimination, their phone lines were flooded with reports about bias and the group once again began collecting data. (Although U.S. employment law does not explicitly prohibit caste-based discrimination, the DFEH argues caste is a protected under existing statutes. Caste is a protected category in India, however. This leaves companies such as Google and Cisco, which have offices in both countries, with different standards for discrimination.) After the Google Walkout, Gupta went on to successfully advocate for ending forced arbitration both in Congress and inside Google, where she is also known for her work on diversity. Last September, Gupta was approached by two Google employees about the caste discrimination they had witnessed at the company, she wrote in her departure note. That prompted her to invite Soundararajan to present at a speaker series Gupta hosted on diversity, equity and inclusion for Google News. For the presentation, Soundararajan hoped to talk to the 60 or so Google employees scheduled to attend – who work in product and engineering in News and Search – about caste equity in newsrooms, building on a talk she delivered at Google’s Cloud Next event in November 2021. She planned to explain the makeup of mainstream Indian publications and the importance of highlighting Dalit journalists when reporting on issues such as climate change or elections, because of the insight they could bring from the perspective of the most vulnerable. Two days before Soundararajan’s presentation, seven Google employees sent emails to company leaders and Gupta “with inflammatory language about how they felt harmed and how they felt their lives were at risk by the discussion of caste equity,” according to emails sent by Gupta. Some of the complaints “copied content from known misinformation sites to malign the reputation of the speaker,” Gupta’s emails said – sites and organizations that have targeted academics in the United States and Canada who are critical of Hindu nationalism or caste hierarchy. These online campaigns can spook institutions unfamiliar with the politics of caste, Soundararajan said. “They ask, ‘Are there people in their own community that disagree with them? Maybe this is a battle we don’t want to get into.’ ” Google had previously vetted Soundararajan to give a similar talk, but executives postponed her presentation to the Google News team. Then the controversy within Google migrated to an 8,000-person email group for South Asian employees, according to three current employees. After Gupta posted a link in the email group to a petition to reinstate the talk, respondents argued that caste discrimination does not exist, that caste is not a thing in the United States, and that efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division. Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs. Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes. To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told the Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.” Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment. According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste. In a Google Meet video call in mid-May after the talk was canceled, Soundararajan said Edwards acknowledged that Google had subjected her to a level of vetting no previous speaker had to endure. Google declined to make Edwards available to comment. Soundararajan warned that this level of scrutiny would mean that no Dalit would be allowed to speak on caste. She compared it to not letting an abuse survivor speak about the #MeToo movement. Edwards acknowledged the challenge, but said she had to deal with people crying on the other side of the line, Soundararajan said. Amid all the controversy, Gupta and Soundararajan posted on YouTube a version of the talk they had intended to give. During the video call, Edwards said she watched the talk and thought it was amazing.(This article was available on The Washington Post Syndicated Service on June 2, 2022) Source: https://www.newsindiatimes.com/

Read More........ → July 19, 2023

Be your own man: Tata's advice to Cyrus Mistry

Mumbai: Be your own man, Ratan Tata has advised Cyrus Mistry, who will succeed him at the helm of the $100 billion Tata group two weeks from now. "I don't think it is right to have a ghost to shadow over somebody," says Tata, dismissing any notion that his larger-than-life persona would linger even after he retires on December 28 when he turns 75. The Tata patriarch has told Mistry, 31 years younger, "you should be your own person, you should take your own call and you should decide what you want to". Tata spoke about his 50 years with the group, 21 as its chairman, the highs and lows of his tenure, his equation with Mistry and his post-retirement plans during an expansive interview to PTI in his office at "Bombay House", the group headquarters. Mistry, currently Vice Chairman of the conglomerate that spans automobiles, IT, hotels, tea and steel across 80 countries, has been working closely with Tata to prepare for the transition. Have you passed on a success mantra to  Mistry?,  the  outgoing  chairman  was

asked. "No, I told him the same things that I told myself when JRD (late J R D Tata) handed over the mantle to me. The first reaction of anybody is to be Mr J R D Tata because you are filling his shoes. "I instantly told myself, 'I can never do that'. I will never be him much as I try to imitate him. So I took a decision to be myself and to do what I thought was the right thing. I told Cyrus the same thing," he said. During the transition, Mistry had asked him from time to time, 'is this ok, that ok'. He had responded by telling him that he should look at things as "if I were not there because you should be your own person". He had told Mistry, "if you want my inputs I will give it to you but be your own man and be yourself and just be driven by the fact that every act you do and every move you make has to stand the test of public scrutiny". That, he said, was the test he had given himself. "If it stands the test of public scrutiny, do it....if it doesn't stand the test of public scrutiny then don't do it." Asked if his counsel would be available to his successor, Tata replied, "Yes, certainly. He knows where to reach me and, we in fact, would talk business and stay in touch after I leave." He then disclosed that the two of them would have lunch every couple of weeks "over something and we will talk about whatever he wants to talk about". Tata, who will remain Chairman of the various Tata trusts, which hold 66 per cent shares of Tata Sons, was asked as to whether this would not give him a large influence over the group. He replied, "I don't want to say I will have a large influence over the group. I think I would have to wear a different hat of being the major shareholder. The same kind of view that a shareholder might have, not a Chairman's  view  of  the  company. "I should  not

be involved in the business of the company or how the company goes about its growth. But at the same time I should be concerned about the return I get on my shares because it is the only income that the trusts have."The dividend from Tata Sons was to be distributed for charity by the trusts. "So I should protect that," he said. Looking ahead to the future of the group, Tata said that he personally believed that it was poised to continue to grow. "Where it would grow, I think Cyrus Mistry should have his space and define where he would like it to grow," he said. His 20 years at the helm was enough time to charter course. Quite often an organisation has played out one course and is ready to go in a different direction, he said. Often, an unwillingness to have that "course correction brings about the demise of an organisation because when you bring fresh blood into it, he sees things in another way," Tata said. The group would continue to grow at the same kind of growth that it had achieved but the patriarch warned, "competition is growing all the time and sustainability of business is becoming more and more difficult". He went on to say, "So I am sure Cyrus will bring new ideas and new things. I feel very confident that the organisation and his leadership will grow." Asked about the changes he had not been able to achieve in the group, Tata said that he had wanted a more open, flat organisation where there is not much hierarchy, where there is much more informal working relationship at all levels. "We are very hierarchical, not feudal--given to honouring years of experience... We don't touch each other's feet but we still almost bow down every time when one passes." Describing his long tenure as a "journey of great learning", Tata said that he had a role model to look up to in Mr J R D Tata whom he had got to know about six years after he joined the group. He knew him but was not close to him and they had come close together because they were both pilots. Did he have any regrets in life? "No, I don't like to look back. There are many things that, if I have to relive, may be I will do it another way. But I would not like to look back and think what I have not been able to." What is the legacy he would leave at the Tatas? "Apart from values and ethics which I have tried to live by, the legacy I would like to leave behind is a very simple one--that I have always stood up for what I consider to be the right thing and I have tried to be as fair and equitable as I could be. "I may have hurt some people along the way but I would like to be seen as somebody who has done his best to do the right thing for any situation and not compromised," the Tata patriarch, one of the world's most influential business leaders, concluded. Be your own man: Tata's advice to Cyrus Mistry

Read More........ → December 15, 2012

Sachin Tendulkar’s Emotional Farewell Speech

"Well my friends.. please settle down, let me talk, I will get more and more emotional. My life between 22 yards for 24 years, it is hard to believe that the wonderful journey is coming to an end. I would like to thank all the people who have played an important role in my life. I have a list here but I apologise if I forget someone. The most important person in my life, my father, who passed away, is the man I have missed so much. He told me at the age of 11 to follow my dreams but to not take shortcuts. To be a nice person and to try my best. Every time I have done something special and shown my bat, that has always been for my father. I do not know how my mother coped with a naughty child like me. For her, it was most important that I remained healthy and fit and she took care of me. Even before I played for India, the day I started playing cricket she began praying for me. A big thank-you to my mother for all of her sacrifices. During my school days, I stayed with my uncle and my aunt. After a hard day's cricket, my aunt would feed me so I could play the following day. I was like a son to them. My eldest brother always told me that he had 100% faith and confidence in me and he know I would give it my all. The first cricket bat I had was presented to me by my sister who still fasts for me when I play. My other brother has sacrificed his career to make sure I get the very best treatment. He introduced me to my coach and even last night, we were discussing my dismissal. You should always talk about your technique and without him constantly getting me to examine mine, I would have been a lesser cricketer. The most beautiful thing happened to me in 1990, when I met my wife. Those were special years and it will always continue that way. With her being a doctor, there was a wonderful career in front of her. When we decided to have a family, she said she would step away from her career and told me to pursue cricket. Without her doing that, I wouldn't have been able to play so freely. Thank you for staying with me, putting up with all the ups and downs. You are the best partnership I have had in my life. The two most precious diamonds in my life are my children. They have already grown up. Time has flown by! I wanted to spend so much time with them on their birthdays, sports days and on holidays. I have missed a lot of this. I have not spent enough time of your life with you both and promise you the time from now is dedicated to you. My in-laws have been so loving and supportive. They have always given me advice. It is always so important to have such a strong family unit around you. The best thing they have done is to let me marry my wife, so thank you. Throughout my time playing cricket, I have always had such good friends. They would always give me the time and encouragement. They did anything
they could to support me. Thank you for being there. My career started when I was 11. My life changed when my brother took me to meet my coach. He watches every game that I play. Back in the day, he would take me all over Mumbai to make sure I received enough match practice. On a lighter note, he never said well played to me in fear of me getting complacent. He can now rest easy, my coach has had a great influence on my life, thank you sir. My cricket career started here in Mumbai at this ground. I wanted to play here and thank you to the officials for looking after my cricket. BCCI has been fantastic right from my debut. Believing in my ability and selecting me for India at 16, was a big step. I really appreciate your support for when I was injured and you made sure I had the best treatment. I have played with some great players over my career and they have all helped make me be a better cricketer. My team mates in front of me are like my family away from home. It is going to be difficult not being part of the dressing room. I will miss you. When MS Dhoni presented me with my 200th cap on the morning of Day 1, I told the team that we are so, so fortunate and must be proud to be part of the national team. I know that all of you will continue to serve the sport in the future in the right way. We have been blessed to be chosen to have
this opportunity and I have every faith the team will serve India going forward. I would be failing in my duties if I didn't thank the doctors and trainers who have somehow managed to keep me fit. Without your services I wouldn't have been able to play. They have been very committed, so thank you for keeping me in shape. Unfortunately we lost one of my managers but his lessons stick with me. He told me to play freely and he looked after things so I could focus on the cricket. My current management team have this carried on. The media backed me a lot when I was doing well in my school days and have continued to do so throughout. Thank you very much for being behind me and to the photographers for capturing such memorable images. Finally, I want to thank all of the people here who have flown in from all over the world to be here today. Whether I score 0 or 100 plus, you have cheered me. Without your commitment, my life wouldn't have turned out this way. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart the memories will always stay with me. Especially your chant "Sachin, Sachin". I am sorry if I have missed out anything, I am so grateful to you all. Thank you and goodbye!" Source: Article, 

Read More........ → November 16, 2013

Second Presidential Debate: Clinton, Trump spar over lewd comments, emails

St. Louis (US): Republican Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton sparred over a number of issues including the billionaire’s lewd comments about women and the former State Department Secretary’s deleted emails, in the second presidential debate here on Sunday night. The two presidential nominees accused each other with Clinton saying Trump was “not fit to be the President”, while the billionaire taking on her over the whole birther claim against President Barack Obama, saying: “You owe Obama an apology.” Beginning the debate, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked about the 2005 video in which Trump made lewd comments about women, saying: “You bragged that you sexually assaulted women — do you understand that?” Responding to Cooper, Trump said: “No that’s not what I said. This was locker room talk… I am not proud of it but this is locker room talk.” He then pivoted to terrorism and “bad things happening” in the world. Taking on Trump over the issue of lewd comments, Clinton said: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the last 48 hours about what we heard and saw.” Clinton said though she had differences on policies and principles with the Republican candidates in the past but for Trump, she said: “…he was not fit to be president and commander in chief.” “I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it (video) that it represents exactly who he is. We’ve seen him rate women on their appearance, ranking them from one to 10… it’s not only women, it’s not only this video… This is who Donald Trump is,” she added. Trump then accused former President and the Democrat’s husband Bill Clinton of doing much worse than talking about sexual assault. Clinton quoted US first lady Michelle Obama saying: “When they go low, we go high.” Trump then targeted Clinton on the email issue and said: “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your (email) situation… you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said. Clinton responded: “Everything he just said is absolutely false and I am not surprised.” There was also a moment in the debate when Trump insisted Clinton to answer the question about healthcare first, after nearly jumping in to answer despite it not being his turn. “Go ahead, I’m a gentleman,” he quipped. Clinton called reining in the cost of the Affordable Care Act the highest priority of the next

president. She “agrees” that premiums have gotten too high. Clinton added she wants to save what works with Obamacare but warned repealing it wholesale would lose all those benefits that came with the new healthcare system.  “Obamacare will never work. It’s very bad health insurance,” Trump said, insisting that it is too expensive. Trump claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them, something he said was an “expensive process”. When asked by a woman in crowd about Muslims in the US being targeted and facing hate crime, Trump said: “Muslims have to report it when they see hate going on. Muslims have to report the problems when they see them.” Trump also spoke about the parents of the dead and the Gold Star Iraq war soldier. “Captain Khan is an American hero… if I were president at the time he’d be alive today,” he said. “I would not have had our people in Iraq, Iraq was a disaster.” On his proposed Muslim ban, Trump said: “This is the greatest Trojan horse of our time. I don’t want to have hundreds of thousands of people coming in from Syria when we know nothing about their values, nothing about their love for our country. Source: ummid.com

Read More........ → October 14, 2016

Bikinis at the Olympics...is this a real issue?

By Mark Sappenfield: In one women's beach volleyball semifinal amid a driving rain at the London 2012 Olympics Tuesday, neither team wore just their bikinis. What women wear has been a big issue here. The Christian Science Monitor:  Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor will try for their third consecutive gold medal in beach volleyball Wednesday when they face fellow Americans April Ross and Jen Kessy in the final at the London 2012 Olympics. Now that that's out of the way, can we talk about what they were wearing? In the semifinal between Ross/Kessy and Brazilians Larissa and Juliana, neither team wore just their bikinis on a cold London night with driving rain, prompting International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge to promise a full investigation. "This is clearly not in the Olympic spirit," he said. OK, he didn't say that, and there is no inquiry. But in the sometimes alternate universe of beach volleyball, that it often what it feels like. From head scarves to skirts, there has been a lot of talk at the London Olympics about what not to wear for women, but nowhere more so than at beach volleyball, where the decision earler this year to allow women not to wear bikinis has been met with relief by women's rights groups, dismay by some casual fans, and a gigantic shrug by the players themselves. It is the flip side to another and rather more momentous first at London 2012: Each competing nation has brought at least one woman athlete. To reach that goal, which the IOC made a high priority, the federations that govern Olympic

Read More........ → August 10, 2012