“[Liz] has been standing up within Google as an inclusion advocate–for employees and users–since 2010 (two years after joining the company). “Employee organizing [in tech] is not new,” she says. “It’s just [this] public manifestation of it that is.”
Fong-Jones began with a focus on equity engineering–flagging and working to remedy cases in which products don’t meet the needs of marginalized communities. A simple example would be insuring accessibility for vision- or hearing-impaired users, but it can extend to addressing harmful technologies, as Never Again sought to do.”
“It’s no coincidence that engineers are leading the revolt. “Engineering is regarded as a profit center for the company,” says Google Cloud Platform engineer Liz Fong-Jones, who assisted the Never Again campaign. “We’re expensive to replace, and that’s where a lot of our power comes from.” As a transgender woman, Fong-Jones has been leading dialogue about diversity issues at Google since 2010. Similar conversations around inclusion and pay equality have been filling employee chat rooms at other big tech companies.”