The article is gated so I can’t see if they address this but when companies make such announcements isn’t differential laying off / firing due to race illegal?
If it were race-based that would be illegal. It sounds like what Twilio has done is ensure that their firing criteria simply don't encode prior organizational sources of racism, not that they decided "we will fire the white men".
One cited example is "last hired, first fired" layoffs - if your company has recently improved the diversity of its candidates resulting in a more diverse hiring pool, firing the newest hires would unwind that.
A company that wants to be racist might even deliberately choose the arguably-innocent policy which results in firings disproportionate to the makeup of the company. So this just seems to me like Twilio doing the opposite - ensuring that the firing criteria aren't a proxy for race
One cited example is "last hired, first fired" layoffs - if your company has recently improved the diversity of its candidates resulting in a more diverse hiring pool, firing the newest hires would unwind that.
A company that wants to be racist might even deliberately choose the arguably-innocent policy which results in firings disproportionate to the makeup of the company. So this just seems to me like Twilio doing the opposite - ensuring that the firing criteria aren't a proxy for race