Google finds itself in a cultural war over diversity
Some employees report harassment, threats
SAN FRANCISCO – The firing of Google engineer James Damore for suggesting men are more suited to technical roles than women triggered a culture war inside the Internet giant. Some Google employees said the company doesn’t do enough to protect them from harassment that includes hateful comments and violent threats.
These employees, many of whom volunteer as diversity advocates, said they’ve been targeted by some of their own co-workers for fighting to bring greater diversity to Google’s 78,000plus staff of mostly white and Asian men.
The workers said comments expressed in internal company forums have been leaked to the public and published on far-right websites, leading to mistreatment by online vigilantes.
They said they’ve been subjected to doxing — the online publishing of personal identifying information, such as an address or phone number — on websites such as 4Chan and Kiwi Farms after screenshots were included in a 161-page lawsuit Damore filed in January alleging Google discriminates against whites, conservatives and men.
“What we want is for our company to be a great place to work and for ev-
eryone to be able to do their job without having to worry they are going to get a death threat in their email,” Google software engineer and diversity advocate Tariq Yusuf told USA TODAY.
Google said it met with the affected employees and addressed direct threats.
“As we’ve said before, we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and an important part of our culture is lively debate. But like any workplace, that doesn’t mean that anything goes,” Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano said in a statement. “When we discover code of conduct violations, we take action, including termination of employment.”
Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman, said she was the target of a harassment campaign conducted by a group of “extremists” inside Google. She said she knows “multiple” colleagues who were not contacted by human resources or who were told the company couldn’t do anything about their concerns.
“We need to see concrete and meaningful action,” Fong-Jones said.
Offering abundant perks, Google’s corporate culture is supposed to be one of the friendliest on the planet, inspiring loyalty among staffers and regularly landing the company atop lists of the best places to work.
Yet tensions have arisen over the company’s attempts to re-engineer its mostly white-and-Asian male demographics to include more women and people of color, painting a less rosy picture of work life.
Conservative anger
Members of the far right escalated their campaign against Google and the tech industry in recent weeks. Chuck Johnson, who was kicked off Twitter in 2015 after tweeting about wanting to “take out” civil rights activist DeRay McKesson, filed a lawsuit against Twitter on Jan. 8, the same day Damore filed suit against Google. That week, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released undercover videos of Twitter employees that it said showed the company is out to quash conservative voices.
Google, one of the best known companies on the planet, helped kick off tech’s push to bring more women and people of color into the industry in 2014 when it went public with its demographics, revealing that it employs few women and very few African Americans and Hispanics.
In addition to a broad range of initiatives aimed at creating a more diverse workforce and welcoming corporate culture, Google has begun to support racial justice causes with grants from its philanthropic arm, Google.org.
The company has encountered some setbacks. It’s being sued by women who allege Google pays them less than men and investigated by the Labor Department over “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.” Google said its own analysis of employee compensation shows no gender pay gap.
Resistance to Google’s diversity efforts — from hiring more women and people of color to unconscious bias training — has grown on the company’s internal message boards.
That debate blew up in August when Damore’s memo leaked, and he was eventually fired. This month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he did not regret firing Damore, claiming it was not a political decision but a necessary step to make sure women at Google felt that the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.
“It is important for the women at Google, and for all the people at Google,” Pichai said. “We want to make an inclusive environment.”
Flash point firing
In his memo, Damore wrote that although he did not oppose diversity, efforts to increase the number of women in technology were unlikely to succeed because in general, women are more interested in people than ideas.
Several Google employees told USA TODAY that Damore’s firing marked an escalation in the harassment campaign, in which a small group of instigators stepped up efforts to target diversity advocates inside the company.
Among the tactics they alleged: camouflaging harassment as free speech and goading diversity advocates with seemingly innocuous questions into making inflammatory statements that were then reported to human resources as violations of Google’s rules.
By far the most chilling behavior was the public harassment incited by coworkers, Fong-Jones said.
According to Wired, at least three Google employees had their phone numbers and addresses posted publicly. Political provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos shared an image of the Twitter profiles of eight people at Google, some of them transgender employees, with his 2.5 million Facebook followers.
Fong-Jones had her name and face plastered on a website run by far-right blogger Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day.
Beale published excerpts of a conversation between Fong-Jones and a colleague, in which Fong-Jones argued that Damore should not have been allowed to publish his memo on an internal Google channel.
“Google’s SJWs (social-justice warriors) are starting to get nervous as evidence of their internal thought-policing begins to leak out into the public,” Beale wrote.
Fong-Jones said she was targeted by violent threats and transphobic slurs.
Workers want Google to do more
“In recent months there has been a pattern of taking diversity advocates and doxing them by putting them on blast to the ‘alt-right’ communities,” Yusuf said. “Now they have to be careful. ‘How much of myself do I want to put out there?’ Which is ironic because one of the big mantras of the company is being able to ‘bring your whole self to work.’ ”
Employees said that although some people in human resources and management have been supportive, taking steps to protect employees from harassment and threats, Google’s leaders have been largely ineffectual, telling all parties, in essence, to knock it off and get back to work. Yusuf called the response from top executives “apathetic.”
Alon Altman, a senior Google engineer, told USA TODAY that Google management seems to be stuck in a cycle of “assuming good intent,” even when dealing with repeat behavior and offenders. The fallout from that approach, according to Altman: The company’s efforts to recruit and retain people from underrepresented groups are being harmed as former Google employees encourage job seekers not to apply to Google and current employees consider leaving.
“I’d like to see Google make more of an effort to protect our safe spaces and to make sure that people who get information out of the company from sensitive forums with malicious intent are disciplined accordingly,” Altman said. “I think Google is doing a lot of things that are right. But I think that Google is not doing enough. Google should take an explicit stance, at least internally, and say these things are not OK.”