Alphabet Inc’s shareholders, including top executives, on Wednesday voted down several proposals, defeating campaigns to tie pay to diversity goals and to get the Google parent to provide more data about efforts to moderate user-generated content.
Alphabet management, which effectively has voting control of the company, had moved against the proposals.
Shareholders and employees said that a gender pay gap and lack of diversity could make it difficult for the company to hire and retain workers, posing a long-term risk to its ability to innovate.
“At Alphabet, diversity and inclusion activities by individual contributors have been met with a disorganized array of responses, including formal reprimand,” Google software engineer Irene Knapp said during the shareholder meeting. “The chilling effect ... has impaired company culture.”
The company remains committed to an internal goal to reach a “market supply” representation of women and minorities by 2020, which could help bring hiring in line with the diversity of the candidate pool, Google vice president of people operations Eileen Naughton said.
Reuters in March reported that several hundred employees formed an organized effort asking Google to adopt several measures, including human resources (HR) guidelines that specify protections for anyone involved in an internal HR investigation.
The shareholder proposals had centered on some of Google’s biggest issues outside of the antitrust scrutiny it is facing at home and abroad.
Employees and shareholders have challenged the company to address the persistent underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in the company’s US workforce relative to the national population.
Google is fighting multiple lawsuits from ex-employees accusing the tech giant of discriminating against women regarding pay and promotions.
Employees have also demanded that the company do more to promote civil discourse on its internal online message boards.
How to combat extremist material on Google’s YouTube video service and other public products has also been a major challenge for the company.
Google has tried to quell advertiser unease about advertising on open platforms such as YouTube and stave off proposed regulations to impose penalties for failure to remove problematic uploads.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”