Woke Companies Have Been With Us for a Long Time
April 17, 2023 11:02 am ET Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto Woke corporations aren’t so new. The arm-twisting approach described in Gregory Angelo’s op-ed “I Helped Make Corporations Woke, and I Regret It” (April 13) first affected me in the mid-1980s. I was an engineering manager at a large U.S.-based semiconductor company in Texas with hiring responsibility. One afternoon, I and about 25 of my peers were sent to a conference room for human-resources training. Greater hiring levels of women and minorities were becoming a growing priority. The training communicated the importance of a diverse workforce and that it was our responsibility to achieve it via hiring and promotion. Our HR department practice at the time, however, was to remove all indications of race and sex from résumés. That included removing the candidate’s name. I asked our HR head how I was
Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Woke corporations aren’t so new. The arm-twisting approach described in Gregory Angelo’s op-ed “I Helped Make Corporations Woke, and I Regret It” (April 13) first affected me in the mid-1980s. I was an engineering manager at a large U.S.-based semiconductor company in Texas with hiring responsibility. One afternoon, I and about 25 of my peers were sent to a conference room for human-resources training.
Greater hiring levels of women and minorities were becoming a growing priority. The training communicated the importance of a diverse workforce and that it was our responsibility to achieve it via hiring and promotion. Our HR department practice at the time, however, was to remove all indications of race and sex from résumés. That included removing the candidate’s name.
I asked our HR head how I was to determine whether the résumé of interest to me was from a racial or ethnic minority or a woman. His answer: “That’s your problem.”
James Schmidt
Scottsdale, Ariz.
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