The MAGAfication of Facebook continued apace this weekend, as CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg List of announced Additional changes Aiming to appease the president-elect Donald Trump before The jet To Mar-a-Lago to meet him again.
In addition to canceling his company’s fact-checking program, stepping back from content moderation, and elevating Republican executives and board members — all moves Zuckerberg made last week — Meta will also end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which were launched to address the scarcity. of women, black and Hispanic workers in the technology industry.
But Zuckerberg, V Friday appearance on Joe RoganThe podcast essentially argued that these programs had worked also Good. “I think it’s one thing to say that we want to be welcoming and provide a good environment for everyone, but I think it’s another thing to say that masculinity is bad,” Zuckerberg said. “I think culturally we’ve shifted to that part of the spectrum where it’s all like, ‘Masculinity is toxic and we need to get rid of it.'”
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutral,” he added. “I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a little more has its own advantages that are really positive.”
It’s a bizarre claim coming from the CEO of a company where men outnumber women nearly two to one: In 2022, the last year for which Meta’s employee data was published, Only 37% Among its workers were female, a number that had not budged since Meta began reporting it five years ago. The same is true for Silicon Valley as a whole, where women, blacks, and Hispanic workers remain largely underrepresented despite years of (to some extent) corporate diversity efforts. only Last Septembera new analysis by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finds that women in tech have made no representative gains over the past generation.
But what has changed is the prevailing mood in both Washington and San Francisco. A rising strain of vaunted “anti-woke” thinking. He was injured recently Silicon Valley, where a series of high-profile tech bros are based, including, in particular, Mark Zuckerberg– They remade themselves from depraved, anti-social nerds into MMA fighting, wild boar hunting, hyper-masculine provocateurs. Trump, on the other hand, has long championed a similar ethos, starting with his dismissive and cavalier style Reducing treatment Women and extends to his disdain for “wokeness” in all its ambiguous forms. Zuckerberg began Planning a dead turn to the right After his meeting with Trump on Thanksgiving, New York Times I mentioned. On Friday, CNBC broke the news that Amazon would do so, too Rolling back its DEI programs.
Indeed, Meta feels like a less welcoming workplace for women, non-binary and transgender workers. The company removed tampons from men’s bathrooms last week times I mentioned. Friday’s changes removed Meta’s chief diversity officer, ended diversity hiring goals, and reduced the priority of minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors.
Zuckerberg acknowledged to Rogan that DEI programs were well-intentioned and that women, in particular, still face bias in the workplace. But he said efforts to correct that have gone “somewhat.” He did not provide any details about how or whether Meta would work to address gender disparities in the future.
