ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Alphabet’s engineer-dominated culture promotes the meritocracy ideology through hiring, job segregation, and work inequities. It argues that Alphabet exhibits an engineer-dominated culture that prides itself on data-driven problem-solving. Companies that rely and thrive on the Internet are automatically assumed to be iconoclasts of old corporate culture. The chapter also argues that an engineer-dominated culture promotes a meritocracy ideology that is blind to gender, race, and class. It describes how the discourse of Alphabet’s hiring produces the ideology of meritocracy that is supposed to be blind to gender and race. The discourse, in turn, acts on prospective and current employees making them believe their privilege is rightfully deserved because of their merits, not because of their race or gender. The denial to material benefits and cultural access uncomfortably echoes many gender, racial, and class exclusions in different societies over many historical time periods.
