Strange bedfellows

Nick Wingfield has an article in The New York Times about politics and Silicon Valley:

The technology industry’s leaders have found their collective voice on a social issue in the last week, rallying with great intensity against a new Indiana law that will allow businesses, they predict, to discriminate against gay couples. The heads of Apple, Salesforce.com, Yelp, and Square have all publicly criticized the law, as have leaders from other industries. But on many other issues of the day that ignite strong passions— from race relations to income inequality to gun control— tech leaders are much quieter.
The contrast is a reminder of the balancing act happening in the executive offices of Silicon Valley. On the one hand, there is the dread that nearly every corporate leader has about taking strong stands on issues that might offend customers, partners, and employees. On the other, there is the exuberance of an industry just learning to embrace its role as a cultural and business leader, one often animated by grandiose corporate mission statements about wiring the world and empowering people with information.
“So many tech companies have embraced a mission that they say is larger than profits,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate firm. “Once you wrap yourself up in a moral flag, you have to carry it to the top of other hills.”
Until recently, tech leaders have waded into political battles when there was a direct connection to their businesses, staking out positions on immigration reform, copyright legislation and Internet service regulation. Many of them write checks to finance candidates and ballot initiatives, to Democrats and progressive causes, more often than not.
With gay rights and same-sex marriage though, any remaining hesitation has vanished.
Opponents of the law, signed last week by Inidana Governor Mike Pence, a Republican, fear it will be used by business owners to refuse services to people participating in same-sex weddings. Pence said that he wanted the law changed by the end of the week. A similar bill was passed on Tuesday by the Arkansas legislature.
In an opinion article published online by The Washington Post, Timothy D. Cook, chief executive of Apple, declared: “With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.”
Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, which has a significant presence in Indiana, canceled all company events in the state, and has exhorted others to follow suit on social media. But in a recent interview he said he had deliberately sought to make a business case, not a moral case, for his objection to the Indiana law. “I’m a CEO,” he said. “I’m not a pastor or politician or a civil-rights leader.” Benioff said that he had emailed friends of his in tech to join him in opposing the law. “We’re wading into territory none of us is comfortable in, which is social issues,” he said. “But it was crystal clear that, by all of us going in together, it was going to be okay.”
The last generation of tech leaders, including Steven P. Jobs of Apple, Andrew S. Grove of Intel, and Bill Gates of Microsoft, were more focused on building their companies than on social issues, at least while they were running them, said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. “The great success at companies such as Apple and Salesforce, in combination with more socially conscious CEOs, has made it easier to speak out,” said Yoffie.
Technology companies are wellsprings of support for gay rights. The industry is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, long a bastion of gay culture, and most large tech companies have large, active gay-employee groups. Cook, who announced he was gay in 2014, leads the most valuable company in the world.
“When it comes to gay rights, it’s an easier topic to get into,” said Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management. “Generationally, the population is there with the CEO.”
While there is still vocal opposition to same-sex marriage from religious conservatives, the issue has quickly lost the divisiveness it once had. Most polls show fifty to sixty percent of the American public supports same-sex marriage, and hundreds of companies have urged the Supreme Court to strike down state laws banning such unions.
Tech executives who are not on board with same-sex marriage have found themselves out of a job. Last year, Brendan Eich, chief executive of Mozilla, a web browser maker, was pressured into resigning after it emerged that he had donated a thousand dollars in 2008 to support a California measure banning same-sex marriage.
Technology leaders as a group have not shown the same kind of full-throated support for other social issues. In a joint statement, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, who run the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Oakland, California, said Silicon Valley had done a commendable job of taking a stand against overt discrimination, including in Indiana. But companies have been less effective at increasing the “dismal representation” in their work forces of other groups, including women and minorities. “We would like to see the same level of steadfast commitment and action with respect to the hidden biases that permeate the valley,” they said.
Big technology companies are taking steps to increase the diversity of their workplaces by encouraging more girls and minorities to study computer programming in school. They have only recently started to come clean on how far they have to go by publishing employment statistics under pressure from civil rights leaders like the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson.
There is still a strong countervailing school of thought among tech leaders that Silicon Valley is a pure meritocracy, where the key to being rewarded is talent and hard work. The fault lines over that issue were further exposed by a gender discrimination lawsuit by Ellen Pao, who sued her former venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. A jury ruled against Pao’s claims recently.
Technology leaders have been hesitant to inject themselves into broader discussions about race relations, even as the national debate over police treatment of black men became a national issue over the last year. One exception was Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter and the chief executive of Square, an Internet payment company. He posted to Twitter extensively in August of 2014 from demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri after the police shooting of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown.
Starbucks is a cautionary tale of how even well-intentioned efforts to stimulate dialogue on race can go awry. In March of 2015, the retailer’s chief executive, Howard D. Schultz, shelved an effort to encourage baristas to write the phrase Race Together on coffee cups, after the plan to start conversations with customers was widely ridiculed.
Still, Benioff predicted that tech’s unity on the Indiana law was just the beginning of a new outspokenness. “I think it opens the door for us,” he said. “It shows us we don’t have to be afraid to compete against these politicians.”

Rico says that, if they were serious, these companies would shut down operations in Indiana until this stupid law went away...