Search giant fires writer of memo
Google has sacked a software engineer who questioned its diversity efforts.
SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Monday fired a software engineer who wrote an internal memo that questioned the company’s diversity efforts and argued that the low number of women in technical positions was a result of biological differences instead of discrimination.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said portions of the memo had violated the company’s code of conduct and crossed the line “by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
The memo has also served as a rallying cry for conservatives and the alt-right who view Google — and Silicon Valley — as a bastion of groupthink where people with different opinions are shamed into silence.
James Damore’s 10-page memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” argued that “personality differences” between men and women — like a woman’s having “a lower tolerance for stress” — help explain why there were fewer women in engineering and leadership roles at the company. Damore said efforts by the company to reach equal representation of women in technology and leadership were “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”
The memo was originally posted on an internal mailing list and was shared widely inside the company and across Silicon Valley.
In a short email exchange after his firing, Damore, 28, who was a senior software engineer in Google’s search division, said he had not expected this type of reaction when he shared his missive last week. He joined Google in 2013.
“As far as I know, I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” he said. Damore said he would probably take legal action against Google.
Damore studied molecular and cellular biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, according to an online résumé. He conducted research in computational biology at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining a Ph.D. program at Harvard. He completed a master’s degree but dropped out before receiving his doctorate.
In a footnote for his memo, Damore said he considered himself a “classic liberal,” an ideology associated with advocacy of free market economics and libertarianism.
“There’s no free speech in the private sector workplace,” said Katherine Stone, a labor and employment law professor at University of California, Los Angeles. “Clearly, the company was concerned that he was making the environment difficult for people to do their jobs.”