Can you really call them toxic and disruptive when they're doing exactly the thing they were told they were hired for?
Companies hire activists because they want to look good without actually changing things. Activists go to work for companies because they want to change things. So, naturally, the company has to lie to the activist about their function to do this, and the activist has to be naive about it. If the activist starts doing what they want to do, and not what the company wants them to do, then the company will fire them, and the activist will reach for an explanation.
I'm with you on this one; a company can't hire an activist and expect that person to not commit activism. Of course, a pessimistic person might say "it just makes it easier to fire them for 'just cause'", making the company sound good going into and out of the employment agreement.
"Look how awesome this activist is we're hiring," easily becomes "Look how unreasonable this employee is we're firing."
> Companies hire activists because they want to look good without actually changing things.
I agree with this statement but for the life of me I can’t come up with a satisfactory answer as to why companies don’t want to actually change things. Is it purely institutional inertia? Are the benefits of a more diverse workplace not accepted by the powers that be, so efforts to achieve that are undermined?
It's that companies are made up of a bunch of humans, not omniscient rational agents.
The company doesn't "want" anything. It's a big social machine that is not so much designed as evolved, and only the very core of the company experiences selection pressure.
At the center of every company is a system that prints money. This bit is almost all that really matters, and is the part that experiences selection pressure.
Threaten it, screw with it, or break it and you will be out of a job, because you either killed the company or got thrown out by people who were afraid you would (or, sometimes, who are just greedy and were worried you'd hurt the amount of money they make through the company).
Everything outside of that central system is secondary, and doesn't really impact the company's survival a hoot.
People at the company may love their secondary systems, really believe they matter, and pour sincere effort and careers into them, but when secondary systems come into conflict with primary systems, they Lose. Every. Time.
In the very long term, nothing else can happen, at least in for-profit companies. Competition will destroy kinder companies by being ruthless to secondary systems that the kinder ones keep. This is what Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex calls the "Malthusian race to the bottom". Amazon and Wal-Mart are locked in a violent struggle of this nature right now.
I think most people are not entirely aware of these dynamics, as my premise that companies are mostly evolved not designed suggests.
So, in all likelihood, there are very sincere people who really want to see the company change for the better recruiting activists and noble researchers.
Everyone likes to feel that they're being goodness, so they all applaud the secondary "goodness optimization" systems.
After enough time, though, those activists come into conflict with a primary system, and discover to their shock that they don't have the leverage to change it at all. This is particularly astonishing to them because they've fought to change a lot of secondary systems and had many successes there.
They (rightly, from their frame of reference) refuse to budge, get fired or leave, wash their hands of the place, then start at the next place in one of its secondary systems.
From behind the former Iron Curtain, I can smell the "we need to pay lip service to a powerful dogma, but we think implementing it would be a disaster" approach. This was a normal state of things in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
If Timnit Gebru were a cynical opportunist, she would just hop on the bandwagon, pretend to care and collect her paycheck. But she seems to be a true believer, and true believers won't accept ineffectual groveling. They want to see the real thing. Ergo, collision.
But why do they think implementing this would be a disaster? Seems you are saying the fundamental issue is a lack of buy-in, and I am unclear what this stems from. The research shows diversity adds value to companies. Fewer blind spots, better long term performance.
I think Shakespeare described this by the words "hoisted on his own petard".
In this case, both Google (a social justice activist gets them into a public screaming match, what a surprise) and Ms. Gebru (played chicken with her employer and lost).
Companies hire activists because they want to look good without actually changing things. Activists go to work for companies because they want to change things. So, naturally, the company has to lie to the activist about their function to do this, and the activist has to be naive about it. If the activist starts doing what they want to do, and not what the company wants them to do, then the company will fire them, and the activist will reach for an explanation.