A look at Google's product inclusion team, tasked with making sure its products are without bias related to race, gender, sexual orientations, or disabilities
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's diversity push had, by 2019, already moved through two phases covered in prior reporting: the 2015 I/O keynote that put women and people of color onstage and raised the bar for other tech companies, and the 2017 hire of ex-Intel VP Danielle Brown as VP of Diversity, which came with stark workforce numbers — 1% black and 20% women in tech roles. This Fortune piece marks the third phase: applying inclusion review to the products themselves, not just the headcount.
The team's remit — bias tied to race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability — later became institutionalized under Annie Jean-Baptiste, profiled as Google's first Director of Product Inclusion & Equity in a 2023 interview, and it now operates alongside external accountability, including the law-firm-led civil rights and racial equity audit Google commissioned after years of pressure from advocates and Democrats.
First-order effects
- Google product teams building Search, Assistant, and consumer-facing services now route design decisions through inclusion reviews for race, gender, sexual-orientation, and disability bias before launch, adding a checkpoint that did not exist when diversity efforts were confined to hiring.
Second-order effects
- The program gives Google a concrete answer to critics and Democratic lawmakers who spent years pushing for external scrutiny — pressure that culminated in the racial equity audit — and sets a template rival platforms face pressure to match, much as the 2015 I/O keynote did for stage diversity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, product inclusion review becomes a standing function inside large consumer tech companies — a shift from reporting workforce demographics to embedding bias review in the development process, with external audits as the enforcement layer.
The trend: Big tech's diversity work is migrating from workforce representation metrics into product development itself, with dedicated inclusion teams and external audits replacing keynote symbolism.