As HBCU leaders prepared to meet with Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week to discuss the company’s relationship with the schools, a fired Black Google executive said the company believed that HBCU computer science grads struggled with basic coding.
“Google’s stance was that ‘our interview feedback case studies and curricula analysis demonstrate that current HBCU CS Departments are not graduating strong technical talent. HBCU CS students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures,’” April Christina Curley tweeted on Thursday, Jan. 28.
Curley said the language came from an initiative Google handed her when she was hired in 2014 called the “Project Bison Proposal.” The purpose of the proposal was to “help Howard (which is the nation’s top ranked HBCU) student meet the Google bar.” Curley’s thread continued, stating that Google said getting HBCU students to their standards was “the right thing to do for the future of diversity in technology. With this huge percentage of the pool currently not hirable, we need to look at ways to impact change in the HBCU system.”
A Black queer woman, Curley worked as a diversity recruiter for Google from 2014 to September 2020 when she said she was terminated by the tech giant. In December 2020, Curley alleged on a Twitter thread that Google was not only lacking in diversity, but also retaliated against those who speak out against racist policies.
Despite the fact that she “single handedly increased Google’s black engineering hiring from HBCUs by over 300%,” Curley claims she was “fired in the middle of a MF pandemic because they [Google] were tired of hearing me call them out on their racist bulls**t.”
Curley said she wrote the Twitter thread after hearing news that Google had fired renowned Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher Dr. Timnit Gebru as the co-lead of its Ethical AI Research Team with no warning while she was on vacation.
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Gebru said she was fired after sending an email that raised concerns about the lack of diversity at Google and discriminatory treatment of Black and Brown employees. Gebru said she was told to retract a research paper she was working on which was critical of the company’s technology.
“I was fired by @JeffDean for my email to Brain women and Allies. My corp account has been cutoff. So I’ve been immediately fired :-),” Gebru tweeted the night of Dec. 2.
In her Jan. 28 Twitter thread, Curley challenged HBCU heads to ask specific questions including how much money Google spends on outreach, how many HBCU students have been hired in the last six years and how many HBCU students have been retained in their roles.
Though Google didn’t respond directly to Curley’s accusations, it did release a statement to Technical.ly saying it “has a large team of recruiters who work incredibly hard to increase the hiring of Black+ and other underrepresented talents at Google, including a dedicated team that partners and strengthens our relationships with HBCUs.” The company said that in 2019 it “welcomed graduates from 19 HBCUs and over the past decade, we’ve expanded our recruiting efforts to more than 800 schools.”
Curley maintains that Google has a big diversity problem and Black and brown employees and women experience racist microaggressions daily at the company from supervisors.
“It’s the mid-level employees and strategies that oftentimes impact Black and brown people the most,” Curley said. “Most of the grievances that my kids have told me [about], whether they be an intern or full-time at Google, 98% have been with their manager.”
Google added insult to injury when Curley learned she’d been replaced by a white woman, she tweeted. Again without responding directly to Curley’s accusations, Google defended its recruitment hiring.
“We have a large team of recruiters who work incredibly hard to increase the hiring of Black+ and other underrepresented talent at Google, including a dedicated team that partners and strengthens our relationships with HBCUs,” the company told CNN Business.
Morgan State University President David Wilson, who was among the HBCU heads meeting with Pichai, said he conducted a focus group with current students and alumni who are employees or former employees at Google. His said his findings were positive.
“One of our black female (students) did inform me she was the first Black woman to be on her immediate team there at Google and one of only two Blacks on the larger team,” Wilson told CNN Business. “But she was never made to feel like she didn’t belong … They are having good experiences.”
Curley said the students’ experiences are a direct result of the work she and two other Black women did.
“Those kids were my kids that I brought into the company. (Google is) able to take credit for it because I laid the ground work, myself and two other Black women,” Curley said. “To be quite honest I don’t want anything from Google. They just need to be held accountable.”
