Google employee fired over diversity row

considers legal action

Computer engineer James Damore, axed for suggesting women were less
suited to certain tech roles, may challenge dismissal

The computer engineer fired by Google for suggesting women are less suited
to certain roles in tech and leadership is considering taking legal action
against the company.

Segregated Valley: the ugly truth

about Google and diversity in
tech
Read more

James Damore, a chess master who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT
and worked at the search engines Mountain View HQ in California, caused
outrage when he circulated a manifesto at the weekend complaining about
Googles ideological echo chamber and claiming women have lower
tolerance of stress and that conservatives are more conscientious.

He was fired on Monday after the search giants chief executive, Sundar
Pichai, said portions of Damores 10-page memo violate our code of conduct
and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes.

Damore has now said he would likely be pursuing legal action.

I have a right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my

working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behaviour, which is
what my document does, he said in an email reported by the New York
Times.

In a further email to the rightwing website Breitbart, he reportedly said: They

just fired me for perpetuating gender stereotypes.
Damore had argued in a document circulated internally and then leaked that
Googles left bias has created a politically correct mono-culture that
maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.

He said: The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women

differ in part due to biological causes, and that these differences may explain
why we dont see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

The senior software engineer had worked at Google since 2013 and had
previously studied computational biology at Princeton, Harvard and the
University of Illinois where he graduated with a bachelors degree in 2010 in
the top 3% of his class, according to his CV posted online.

In his memo, subtitled How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and
inclusion, he said he wanted to increase womens representation in tech
without resorting to discrimination.

He complained that discriminating just to increase the representation of

women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for womens
representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons and
school dropouts.

His suggestions included the company making tech and leadership less
stressful because women are on average more prone to anxiety.

His dismissal followed outrage in Silicon Valley because Damore sought to

explain the gender imbalance in the tech industry as a function of biological
difference.

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, said on Tuesday that he would like
to hire Damore, declaring censorship is for losers. Writing on Twitter he
said: WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James
Damore. Women and men deserve respect. That includes not firing them for
politely expressing ideas but rather arguing back.

He added: I value intellectual diversity and workers rights to not be fired for
politely expressing the wrong opinion.

It also sparked a conservative backlash, with Breitbart and other rightwing

websites rushing to Damores defence.
Breitbart quoted an anonymous employee who claimed that the diversity
gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point
where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second.

For conservative employees, this is obviously demoralising, but it is also

dangerous. Several have been driven out of the company or fired outright for
sharing a dissenting view.

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Trump advocate Peter Thiels venture

capital firm, wrote an open missive to Google asking it to stop teaching my
girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to
HR.

While many condemned his note, some Google staff defended Damore, taking
to anonymous message boards such as the workplace gossip app Blind to
share their views.

Can we go back to the time when Silicon Valley [was] about nerds and geeks,
thats why I applied [to] Google and came to the US. I mean this industry used
to be a safe place for people like us, wrote one on the app, which requires
users to prove they are from the company they claim to be part of when
signing up.

Public comments, however, were much more critical, with Google employees
tweeting that the internal response to the doc ranges from anger and disgust,
to sadness, and it went viral because 99% of people wanted to comment
about how unsupported/wrong/hurtful the doc was.

Google is in a difficult position because it accepted that much of what was in

the memo is fair to debate.

Pichai said in a note to colleagues on Monday: People must feel free to

express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo such
as the portions criticising Googles trainings, questioning the role of ideology
in the workplace and debating whether programmes for women and
underserved groups are sufficiently open to all are important topics.

Googles vice president of diversity, integrity and governance, Danielle Brown,

said Google was right to take a stand on building an open inclusive
environment, but recognised strong stands elicit strong reactions.

She said part of being open was fostering a culture in which those with
alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their
opinions. But she said that needed to work alongside principles of equal
employment and anti-discrimination laws.

Some legal observers have questioned whether Google has broken

employment law by firing Damore.

Dan Eaton, an employment lawyer, in San Diego wrote on CNBC: Federal

labour law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an
employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working
conditions California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire
employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political
course of action.

He also said It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for

challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be
discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not
actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.

A spokesman for Google in London declined to comment on the legality of the

decision.