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Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
Too late. If you search for "Shaft" in Google, the top result is the IMDB page for the 2000 remake, which no one wants to see. Bing brings up the wikipedia page for the 1971 original.
After all, didn't a Google executive pretty much tell us that if we've nothing to hide we've nothing to fear
Absolutely. If only Google had said that the reason it didn't want the data released was to protect the privacy of their staff. Then they might have managed to claw back some street cred.
My theory is that in an effort to reduce workplace distractions, the majority of their staff have no sexual organs at all. Google simply wants to protect them from embarrassment, even though the staff have literally have nothing to hide!
they just don't want us to know that it's about 40%borg and 15%greys
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Ha ha ha! Wait, that's not funny... Did you mean something like "In Soviet Russia, diversity tracks you!"?
Dark Reflection
We all knew given the naming of iPad, that they had no women in their marketing/strategic decision making (all that synergy stuff) dept.
More likely it'll prove this wasn't a joke.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Speaking of all white men in the work place, why do companies even bother hiring men anymore if they can apparently pay women less for equal work?
Our corps are A-OK with offshoring jobs so why aren't they gendershoring them as well?
This is slashdot. Thee is NO way anyone looking in here would think the "computer geeks" are uniquely rational, or that they breed ...