“An employee revolt last week forced Google to back off a controversial and potentially lucrative military drone project. This week, employees are finding their voices again by joining shareholder groups to pressure Google to increase the racial, ethnic and gender diversity of its workforce.
The activism is shaking up Google, which isn’t used to being publicly challenged by its own employees.
Liz Fong-Jones, a Google site reliability engineer, says she and a group of employees felt they had no choice but to take the unusual step of speaking out at the shareholder meeting after efforts to get management to address concerns proved unsuccessful. She hopes protest votes from concerned investors will motivate executives to make diversity a priority.”