 A Twitter thread that captured the attention of the nations as a few days before Christmas has launched a national conversation about diversity in tech. And the sister charge with leading that fight is April Curley, a tech diversity consultant and a former employee at Google who levied significant information about the company's approach to diversity and more specifically to HBCUs and she joins us for one of her very first multimedia interviews. So first, Ms. Curley, thank you so much for joining us. I guess the most obvious question is what kind of led you to reveal the details about your departure from Google and specifically the treatment of HBCU students and graduates at the company? Well, first of all, just wanted to say thank you for having me and for inviting me. This conversation is at this point in my life of the utmost importance because I know how many of my peers experience very similar experiences. I know how many students who are headed into tech and deserve better. I know how many students that that number looks like. And so I just wanna make sure that we're giving this dialogue is due diligence. So thank you for having me. In terms of what sort of brought me to talking about this, I would be lying if I said that I was intentional about having this conversation explode in the way that it did. That was not at all how it happened. I wanna be very clear that when I tweeted what I tweeted, I wanted to go into a new year with just putting all of that behind me. And I wanted to just share a few things that I didn't think would at all be surprising to hear given the conversation around diversity in tech for so many years, I didn't think that what I was sharing was anything surprising. And so when it took off, I didn't realize at the time that the universe was electing me to bring this conversation to the forefront. But now that it has elected me to be that person, I'm more than willing to elevate the conversation. And so yeah, I went into it and just said, let me share a few thoughts. It took off and then it opened up, I think the opportunity for us to be honest about how it feels to be black in tech, how it feels to be a black woman, how processes are biased against black people and particularly HBCU students in tech. And so for that reason, yeah, I felt like I was compelled to continue to talk about it. I could have been done with it in December. But I think wanting to hold the tech community at large accountable for how black people are treated in that space and unprotected in that space for me is the most important piece of this conversation. Let's talk about that. Cause you've been very transparent, not only about the specifics on the HBCU engagement with Glenn, but your personal experiences. And we can go as far as stop as short as you would like to, because I know we want to be protective of mental space and not triggering anything cause it's traumatic. Every last one of us has lived through something like this. Thank you for that. But as much as you would care to, can you talk about the environment for you personally and the environment that kind of led to the perception of HBCU students not being a hot commodity despite the public facing stuff on Google's back. Yeah, I mean, so I want to encourage folks to maybe haven't had the chance to read my thread or some of the follow-up, some of the follow-up tweets that I sent. But I do encourage folks to go back and read that because one of the things that I want to make very clear is that I never necessarily opined on the way that HBCU students were treated at Google necessarily because that is important. And those stories exist, particularly in my six year career at Google I have lots of stories that exist from HBCU students and their experiences at Google both positive and negative. But to me, the foundation of those initial tweets really rested in two things. A, the ways in which I learned the hiring processes at Google were and continue to be biased against HBCU candidates. And I can tell you that for you. And B, the way that I was then harmed in trying to advocate for better policies and better practices and advocate for black and brown students coming from HBCUs. And so those two pieces were really the main focus of my initial tweets. But yeah, I would say that the environment for myself and for so many other black women at Google was not a safe, it wasn't a safe space. And that was seen in so many ways whether that was me being retaliated against by being put on performance improvement plans just for raising my voice or me being told that's not the scope of your role. You shouldn't be worried about certain things that are happening in the hiring process. If all we hired you to do was increase applications that HBCUs or having zero promotions in six years and not ever a penny increased in my pay. So like there were very small things that sort of all built together in terms of the tipping point for me and so many other black women that I think like those would be the things that I would highlight in terms of my experience. And then when it comes to looking at the experience of HBCU students, I want to emphasize that if HBCU students worked with me or my other teammates at the time, I would expect that they would all have good things to say because I worked very hard in my six years at Google to be the avid kid and the voice for black and brown students because I believe with every fiber in me that they deserve the opportunity to be in tech and they are qualified and there is a strong pipeline for it. And so any HBCU student that worked with me in the last six years or two of the other black women teammates that I had should say all great things about their experience with Google because I was the face of Google to them. And so yeah, those two pieces can all work together at the same time. I can have a really bad experience at Google while also working to make sure that black students have the opportunity to be in tech and create spaces that are safe for them once they get into tech. Did you ever find that that was a double-edged sword for you to know inner workings that you personally experienced but then say, I got to kind of shield folks that I'm trying to bring in from this? You got it, you got it. That was exactly it. It was an internal conflict that I had to deal with and process every single day. It was me asking myself, are the pros of me bringing in so many strong black technical talent to this company do those pros more than outweigh the cons in which I know that once they get here they may or may not be embraced. They may or may not be protected. They may or may not be advocated for. And so I had to weigh that. And in my brain, I wanted every one of my kids and my students to at least have the opportunity. And once we got them in the door then let them flourish and move in the way that made sense for them and their career. But just the initial getting them in the door getting their foot in the door, that for me was important. And then allowing the students to choose how their career path would wind. And so I had to deal with that every day. And it was a struggle every single day. It was the moral injury that you really can't place a price on because it lasted long after. Do I feel like I made great decisions about how many students we were able to get hired at Google from the HBCU space? I feel really great about that because I know that students who are graduating with the CS degree from an undergraduate institution they're gonna make $115,000 off top when they graduate. And that to me, that economic empowerment of our community is important because I know how much that changes a family unit not just an individual. So that to me more than outweighs the potential experience that they could have. They may or may not have a bad experience but they might have an experience that mirrors mine in which case then I'll feel really bad. But at this point, the pros for me more than outweigh the negative experiences that I individually went through. And some of your other interviews, you talked about one of the experiences was having a meeting with the manager who commented on your accent. You're from Baltimore. I lived in Baltimore for the last 20 years of my life. I can't imagine you were going through the halls of Google like, what's up, Doug? But I'm trying to understand it because it seems from your perspective it happens on a micro level with people and it happens on a macro level with institutions. Is there a connective thread or is there one instance or one philosophy that you think connects all those things about how people perceive black folks or some black folks at Google or many black folks at Google. Is there something that draws those things together? I mean, I think the first thing that I think of is just the corporate persona in that space and what it means to fit in. And what it means more importantly to want to be around others who are very similar to you. And that is a culture that's pumped. In fact, it's an entire thing that Google looks for when they're hiring candidates. It's called Googliness. And so if that's a major component in your hiring process, if you're already deciding who fits in and who doesn't fit in to your mold, then you're going to find yourself in a place where you are being biased and where you are excluding others because you don't believe that they fit in. And that's exactly what happened to me. I was hired, by the way, by two incredible women who believed in me and hired me not in spite of my background, the fact that I come from a low income community, the fact that I may sound a little bit different or whatever the case may be, they hired me because of that, because they knew that would make me a stronger advocate for those communities. And so it turned into later on, well, actually, April, we don't know necessarily if that's, you know, if your approach is a turnoff, it's coming off as aggressive, it's coming off as intimidating as I was told often by white women in particular. And by the way that I speak, just being very direct or assertive or passionate, if you hear the way I speak, I'm convicted and doing the right thing and having integrity. And so that to them was uncomfortable. That was uncomfortable. And so that's how I experienced it. But I also know that in the cases of so many other black people at Google who did not come from, you know, tech background, their parents weren't, you know, tech professors or they weren't coding since they were five. They also found themselves having a hard time feeling like they fit in at Google. And so this is a thing across all of tech. Tech looks very homogenous for a reason, right? There's this saying internally at Google that says great people know great people. And essentially what that means is if we have invested in you and hired you for who you are, we expect that you know people who are just like you. And when you have a system that's created to support white and Asian men, that's what you're gonna see continue to be perpetuated because that's who they're bringing in as well. So yeah, this conversation is so much bigger than, you know, just the way I accent a two or you or do, you know, it's bigger than that. It's about what they believe to be, you know, the profile of someone who deserves to be in tech. And oftentimes that person does not look like me. They don't sound like me. They don't show up like me. And that became a problem more and more in my time at Google for sure, because they were uncomfortable by it. Talk about the, for as much as you can that the effort to try to move some of those issues up the ladder. Because I think that this speaks to a lot of cultural issues of black folks and HBCU folks in predominantly white space, regardless of industry, but more pervasively in tech. Where you are being ostracized, you are being denied opportunities, you are forced into not only being a token but knowing it and being comfortable with it. What was it like to try to push the agenda and say, you know, this is wrong and we shouldn't be doing it this way. And these are the things that I'm noticing and these are the numbers that go along with it. What was it like to go down that path of trying to get accountability and reconciliation? Yeah, honestly, it was exhausting. It was exhausting. It was exhausting and it felt impossible. It felt impossible to continue to do that in the way that it needed to be done. And so, you know, I did early on in my career, HR told me to take a medical leave after bringing so many things to their attention and trying to really like move the needle, they turned around and made me and gas lit me, made me feel like it was, you know, my incompetence or that I somehow lacked. And so, they encouraged me to take a medical leave and I took it, which so many black women at Google do, by the way, the number is extremely high. And, you know, I did that the first time and then the second time around that they started talking, you know, employee assistance programs or counseling. When they started having that conversation with me again, I was like, you know, this isn't a solution at all. These problems will exist in the same way, whether I'm a medical leave or not, whether I exist at the company or not. And so, having that conversation and having it fall on deaf ears in so many instances it was detrimental in so many ways to your health because you do start to think, you know, maybe it is me, maybe I'm the only one that sees this as an issue and therefore it's not an issue. And then you start to, you know, second guess yourself and your talent. So it took a toll, it took a toll. And I think that obviously therapy has helped and having family and friends, having so many other black women who have had similar experiences, you know, unfortunately we're all a part of this awful club at this point that has helped and that continues to help support that, you know, this story that I'm telling is not new at all. So yeah, and by the way, I just wanna say, you know, the folks who oftentimes I saw pushed back from, it came from middle management. And in some cases, these folks were people of color, black people, black people. And so sometimes even that felt even worse than anything else that I experienced. It was just, you know, the notion of having so many knows and so many barriers and so many, you know, instances where I was told that our focus is not or our investment is not going to be as deeply rooted in the HBCUs as I wanted them to be from black people. That to me, I think hurt the worst. And so sometimes I know, you know, companies like Google know exactly what they're doing when they decide to use, you know, someone who looks like you to actually be the, play the role of the oppressor. That's a very intentional thing that people do, that companies do, that Google has done. And so I wanna call that out because this wasn't just, you know, these weren't practices that were just upheld by white women. Most of them were white women. But in a few handful of instances, particularly two managers that I had to report to HR, they were black men. And I wanna be very clear about that. Do you attribute that to black folks who may not have been familiar with HBCU culture? Or was it their response to the culture of Google, like, hey, we got a West Coast network that we're comfortable with. Like don't get too far outside of this. Or was it, why do you think that that was the case? I do. I mean, I think that, you know, the two men that I just referred to, one was a Harvard red, one was a Stanford red. And so, you know, their understanding of, you know, what it means to be a qualified candidate or talented looked very different in their brains. And so I think that that played a role. But more importantly, I think that the power structure that exists at Google and the leadership chain and the way that it works is top down. I think that that plays more of a role in decisions that were being handed down that were detrimental to black and brown people. And black and brown students. And black and brown faculty for that matter. And so, you know, when you have a structure where your direct manager is telling you, you have to do this, right? Or you won't be considered for promotion or you won't be considered for, you know, other leadership opportunities. And that manager is gonna do everything that they can to please that manager. So in the structure that I sat in, you know, I had a direct manager who was black, but everybody else above him was a white woman. Everybody else above him was a white woman. So the decision-making that was coming down the chain about how to do right by black and brown students and communities was coming from white women. And that's what was handed down to me. What I was expected to do on the ground, on the forefront. So to me, it has more to do with, you know, the pressure that's put from the higher ups, top down approach, who have no clue what it's like to be, you know, disenfranchised or underrepresented in any regard. So I think it has to do with that. You and Tendee Jabru are the two sisters that are standing up for us in this space right now and continuing to do so. If they follow you guys on Twitter, you see the conversation continues. It didn't stop in December. That's right. And it didn't stop with a recent meeting with HBCU presidents. Yeah. I know it's complex, but how do you reconcile what Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a joint statement with the presidents, which is to say, hey, we're going to work on this, but so far so good versus what you know your experience to be, because these are two different messages. And I think that people who are paying attention are in the middle of like, okay, now who, which black folks do we believe? That's an incredible position, but who do we believe? Yeah. No, thank you for asking this because I do, you know, I've had a chance to think about it and I have lots of thoughts about it. I'll start off by saying, which I hope is, I hope it's clear in the way that I speak that when it comes to the HBCU space, when it comes to other black spaces, I have nothing but respect and operate with a heart of service because that's what I'm supposed to do, period. And I know, you know, in the schools that I had a chance to work with over my last six years at Google, I will charge the HBCU presidents at those institutions that I worked with over the last six years, Howard, Hampton, Dillard, Xavier, Morgan State University. I charge those presidents to go ask each and every one of their computer science students what their relationship was like with me and how April works to make Google accessible for them. And they will 100% tell you that I showed up consistently for them with love, with respect, with humility and fervor in service to them. Being their advocate at all costs, 100% of my students will say that about me. So of course, you know, it's going to seem on the surface that things are fine. But at this point, the way that I sacrificed my life for six years in proud service to the HBCU community in space, just for them, some of them to turn around and dismiss my account of abuse and trauma, you know, just to stay faced with a company that at this point has only paid them lip service, it's disappointing. And furthermore, it is the responsibility of HBCUs and other key representatives within the black community to protect, serve, defend black women, period. So for there to not be any discussion in that meeting about what my experience was at Google, what Dr. Gabriel's experience was with so many other women, black women in tech are saying for there to be no discussion about that, it's offensive, and ultimately it's detrimental to black youth who dream of being in tech one day, right? It's going to impact them if it's not addressed now. So I'll say this, you know, as it currently stands, it's a very well-known fact that tech is not a safe space for black women. It isn't, this has been talked about for a little while now. And so until this issue becomes a fight that we are collectively responsible for and ready to take on as a solid unit, we're gonna keep letting Google and other companies like Google get off the hook with zero accountability. And so yeah, I would love 100% love. I invite any HBCU that wants to have a conversation with me, one-on-one, let's do it. Let's do it and bring their students even more into the conversation and do it. That's what I want to see happening, dialogue within our space so that we can come to a collective sense of how we're gonna hold companies accountable. Is there a possibility that two things could be true? That Google could suck as a overall corporation at working with and for black folks, particularly in pipelines to the company. And at the same time, some people, some programs, some initiatives do a good job reaching out to specific universities and colleges. Is it possible for those things to coexist or would one overlap the other and eventually you'll know what they really are about? They do coexist. And the reason is because you had people like me who are on that side, right? Somebody like me who is creating programs who will create a safe space for black students who will say, this is wrong, we have to do a better job, we have to do it the right way. When you have somebody like me who's in the middle, I can be that for them, right? I can make sure that while we are continuing to work on doing better by black students, at least the ones that I have with me that I got on my back, at least they are going to be taken care of. Now that I'm going, I truly don't know. They backfilled my role with the white women. So that's not at all to say that white people can't do great diversity work. That's not what I'm saying because I have worked alongside several teammates who have been great in doing diversity work. But that's not at all how this should have been resolved. No, I don't doubt that those two things can coexist that we still have a lot of work to do in tech, but also some students are going to have fantastic experiences because tech is fun, working in tech is fun, if you don't look like me necessarily. So it can be fun for those students. And I do know that when I was responsible for bridging that gap, it absolutely played out in that way. And I can probably have about two or three other people who shared that same kind of accountability to make sure that our students were safe when they were in my hands at Google for sure. It's a cast 22 in a lot of ways because as you talked about your personal experience, you, we want more African-Americans in the tech space. We want them in all, I want to be in every industry that we can be in. Yeah. But it's not safe. So how do you reconcile the notion of we should be there, we've earned the right to be there, we can be talented and creative and rise in these jobs. It's not safe yet. What is it a chicken and an egg proposition? We got to wait till it's safe to get in there or do we keep putting people in there to be subject to mistreatment? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if I've arrived at, you know what a layered solution looks like. It can't just be one answer or one approach. But what I do know is that if tech companies wanted to get it right, they could and they could do it overnight, period. The pipeline exists. There are talented black students that exist. They are qualified. They can exist at Google and Google can do a good job, a better job of making sure that those folks who come to the company are safe and are protected. And so, you know, I don't know how we start thinking about the approach. In fact, I do have a lot of thoughts on how we start to attack this and, you know, use the CPR method, right? But I would like to be paid to do that. Exactly. Save that. Don't get me wrong. I'm interested in getting it right. If they're serious about getting it right, see me because I did it for six years, for sure. Well, that actually leads into my last question. So what does the future look like? Because this is a big, big fight. This is a huge fight against the biggest tech company in the world. Yeah. Do you want to remain in tech? You have a diverse background. Do you want to stay here? Is it entrepreneurship? Is it work with schools? Like, what is the future hold for you? That's a big question. I 100% trust the universe. I trust God. I know that, you know, my path is already worked out some way, shape, or form. But what I do know is I would like to bridge, you know, what really gets me going, which is I love the K-12 space, both of my degrees are in education. I love tech at this point. And I love policy. And so if there's a way to marry those things, I'd be a very happy camper. But, you know, I know a few things to be true. Whatever work I'm going to be doing in the near future, I can guarantee you, I'm going to always be in service to black and brown people. I'm going to always be in service to people that identify as coming from low income communities, because that's where I come from. I'm going to always be in service to queer people of color, right? All those communities, all those identities that make up who I am, that's who I will dedicate my life working for. So I can't tell you what's next, but I do know whatever you find me doing, it's going to be, that's the trending theme, right? Of my career path. And so I know that that is in the near future. I just don't know how that looks or what that looks like. I have lots of opportunities on the table. I'm just trying to weigh options and figure it out. But yeah, this discussion has opened up a lot of doors for me and I'm humbled beyond humbled. And so I'm just riding the wave trying to figure out practically what comes next.