- To protest their boss Mark Zuckerberg and his recent company-wide changes, Meta employees are reportedly sneaking tampons back in men’s bathrooms in its offices. But it isn’t the only tech company seeing some resistance amid Trump 2.0.
Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had a prime seat for the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Before the big event, he made a number of changes at his company. He killed its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, ditched fact-checking for community notes, and made some notable hires: Dana White to the board, and Joel Kaplan to lead global policy.
Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, too, where he claimed corporate America had embraced “feminine energy,” and that it needed more “masculine energy.”
It seems part of the rolling back of DEI initiatives meant removing tampons and pads and other sanitary products from men’s bathrooms at all Meta offices. But to protest their billionaire boss, workers are reportedly bringing their own tampons into men’s bathrooms and circulating a petition to save them, five people familiar with the matter told the New York Times.
The recent pushback from workers against their billionaire Big Tech bosses goes beyond Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Across Silicon Valley, tech employees are subtly dissenting after their leaders sat behind Trump when he was sworn in.
A Google employee was reportedly asked to approve an animation of fireworks that would be featured on the search engine for Trump’s inauguration. The employee did it, but buried in the code itself, the worker disclosed it was done unwillingly, as an order from CEO Sundar Pichai, two people with knowledge of the incident told the outlet.
“With the understanding given to me from my leadership that Sundar Pichai has personally required that this team launch this feature at this time, I give my approval,” the Google worker wrote in the system for tracking updates to its code, according to the New York Times, which viewed a copy of the message.
Meta and Google did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Apart from its executives attending the inauguration and sitting behind the Trump family, the companies each made a million-dollar donation to the inaugural fund, according to multiple reports.
That said, not all companies are falling in line with Trump’s anti-DEI efforts. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Costco, Salesforce, Apple, and Microsoft, among others, continue to advocate for their diversity policies.
