Google fires employee for ‘Left-wing’ bias memo
GOOGLE has fired a software engineer who wrote a memo accusing the company of Leftwing bias.
James Damore had also blamed ‘biological causes’ for the shortage of women in senior technology jobs and leadership positions. He said they won fewer promotions because of their ‘neuroticism’.
Google said the Harvard graduate had to go for perpetuating gender stereotypes. Some of his fellow employees had suggested that they would refuse to work with him.
Mr Damore’s ten-page document went viral after it was posted online
‘Not a viewpoint Google endorses’
at the weekend. He argued that employees of the US search giant were shamed into silence if they had conservative views.
‘This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed,’ he wrote.
Mr Damore blasted Google for trying to boost race and gender diversity, saying it should place more value on ‘ideological’ differences. ‘We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs,’ the memo said.
‘These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life. Women on average look for more work-life balance, while men have a higher drive for status on average. I’m simply stating that 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 don’t see equal representation.’
Mr Damore claimed women were more interested than men in ‘feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas’ and had a ‘stronger interest in people rather than things’.
He said that explained why women prefer jobs in social or artistic areas, while men may like computer coding because it requires ‘systemising’
The internal document said women tended to be less assertive: ‘This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up and leading.’
In a statement to staff, Google chief Sundar Pichai said ‘portions of the memo violate our code of conduct by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace’.
Bloomberg News reported that the software engineer confirmed his own dismissal in an email.
Mr Damore said he was considering legal action.
Danielle Brown, Google’s vice-president of diversity, integrity and governance, said the document was ‘not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses’. She added: ‘We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success.’
Mr Damore received support in conservative media outlets.
On Breitbart News, once run by Steve Bannon, now chief strategist to President Donald Trump, commentators discussed whether to boycott Google.
THE retribution was as swift as it was harsh. After an employee at Google circulated a memo to colleagues arguing that differences between men and women may partly explain why there were fewer females than males at the company, he was sacked by the internet giant.
According to the firm’s CEO Sundar Pichai, he had breached the company’s ‘basic values’. Any suggestion that one group of colleagues have traits that make them ‘less biologically suited’ to certain areas of work is offensive, Mr Pichai explained, and breached Google’s code of conduct.
Certainly, the memo was controversial and politically incorrect. Many female employees were reportedly incandescent.
But did it really merit such a response? After all, common sense and millennia of real-life observation have shown that men and women operate differently, and that men on average have more interest in technology than women.
The fact is that men are good at concentrating with extraordinary focus, whereas women tend to be better at seeing a broader picture.
Men are usually better at chess, while women often have superior people skills, greater intuition and are more able to solve ‘big picture’ problems. Yet for a company such as Google, so keen to flaunt its politically correct worldview on issues such as diversity and inclusivity, its employee’s opinions were beyond the pale.
Which is why it has sacked engineer James Damore.
In his memo, Damore stated that Google has a Left-liberal bias in all it says and does — and, more perniciously, that it wants all of us who use its services to share these Lefty views.
That is a terrifying thought, given the extent to which the company pervades our lives.
Punished
Far from solely providing efficient access to useful and unbiased information, Google relentlessly promotes a very particular brand of Californian, hippie-derived, one-world politics on everything — from minority rights to a contempt for traditional values, as well as a cast-iron belief in man-made climate change.
‘When it comes to diversity and inclusion,’ wrote Damore in his infamous memo, ‘Google’s Left-bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.’ Those with conservative views ‘stay in the closet’ to avoid hostility, he added.
The great irony, of course, is that although Google and YouTube, the video sharing site which it owns, both proudly declare their commitment to free speech, its own employee, Damore, has been punished for speaking freely.
There appears to have been scant debate or discussion prior to his dismissal. Simply an illiberal and arrogant pronouncement from on high that his job had been terminated.
But then Google has always excelled at arrogance — and hypocrisy.
For while it sanctimoniously parades its supposed high morals, its commitment to equality and support for minorities and the oppressed, such are its warped priorities that it allows all sorts of poisonous content to be shown unchecked on its internet sites and continues to make money from such appalling material.
On Monday, for example, it emerged that Google had ignored pleas from Scotland Yard to remove YouTube videos extolling gang violence and inciting knife and gun crime — material that puts lives at risk and yet is accompanied by adverts from which the internet giant profits.
Indeed, this week, London Mayor Sadiq Khan criticised YouTube for ‘glamorising gang culture’, citing four videos in which gangsters wear balaclavas and masks, and brag about how they would murder rivals.
Google has also been reprehensibly slow to crack down on pornography, despite repeated warnings from the British Government.
It allows jihadist videos to be shown online and while it has promised recently to do more to ban them, this as yet unfulfilled pledge came only after years of pleas from politicians and security forces on both sides of the Atlantic.
Billions
Of course, this is a company that has made billions from harvesting people’s private information from their computers — monitoring internet sites we visit, what we buy and what we’re interested in — and passing it on to advertisers.
In 2013, Google was fined millions for violating internet privacy after collecting vast quantities of personal information, such as personal emails and bank details, through its Street View mapping operation.
Earlier this year, it was fined £2.1 billion by the EU for breaching competition rules by putting the search results for its own shopping service at the top of users’ screens.
On top of all this, what about oh-so moral Google’s tax dealings?
Two senior academics recently calculated — despite the firm’s fog of fiscal secrecy — that it pays tax in the UK at some 2.8 per cent a year on revenues of £1 billion. How can that be called social justice?
When Google’s boss Eric Schmidt was challenged, he snapped: ‘It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic.’
With the breathtaking arrogance that comes from being a $600 billion behemoth, he said Google was delighted to be paying so little tax, and had no intention of paying any more.
Perhaps that’s why the firm can afford to host lavish international gatherings for the wealthy and influential — such as one in Sicily recently where Prince Harry was a guest.
Such secretive gatherings of the rich and powerful confirm public suspicions that high-tech firms such as Google form an unaccountable elite that control increasingly large areas of our public and private worlds.
Equally worrying, a symbol of Google’s huge interest in direct political power and influence is its plush new offices on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., which are the same size as the White House.
Yet while aggressively pursuing power and avoiding tax — at the same time as providing a platform for criminals and terrorists and using our private data to enrich its cult-like bosses — Google persists in an awful charade in which it tries to convince us that it cares and ‘celebrates diversity’. Good grief, on its website, it even talks about love. It says: ‘We believe in removing barriers so Googlers can focus on the things and people they love, and in providing benefits that serve the unique needs of our Googlers.’
In practice, Google’s only real ‘belief’ is in making money. Its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are each worth around $40 billion each: the 12th and 13th richest individuals in the world.
It is not the money-making I object to, however. To my mind, capitalism, as long as it’s conducted within the law, is the best system yet devised for lifting people out of poverty.
The problem is Google’s sinister but self-righteous instinct to control information, direct opinion and suppress dissent.
Censor
Recently, the firm announced it would be working with a group called the Anti-Defamation League to block videos that constitute ‘hate speech’.
And while this could mean gangland and jihadist material is policed better, there is a big risk Google might censor content that conflicts with its own politically correct outlook.
Significantly, the director of the Anti-Defamation League is a former special adviser to Barack Obama, who has been accused of turning the once impartial organisation into a Left-wing pressure group.
This week, the historian and Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson, lambasted vigilantes who increasingly dominate our media and the internet.
Chillingly, he said: ‘Mark my words, while I can still publish them with impunity: the real tyrants, when they come, will be for diversity (except of opinion) and against hate speech (except their own).’
This is something the Google rebel who voiced his views on the fundamental differences between men and women found to his cost yesterday.