Google software engineer fired for writing memo questioning diversity

[CaptRenault]

Let this story be a warning to any white, heterosexual American (or for that matter Canadian) male employee of a large organization (50+ employees) who dares to openly question the value of diversity. If you do so, you WILL be fired. :boom:

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo
bloomberg.com
By Mark Bergen and Ellen Huet
August 7, 2017, 9:21 PM EDT

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting the web company’s diversity policies, creating a firestorm across Silicon Valley. James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes." A Google representative didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Google’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai sent a note to employees on Monday that said portions of the employee’s memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace." But he didn’t say if the company was taking action against the employee.

Damore’s 10-page memorandum accused Google of silencing conservative political opinions and argued that biological differences play a role in the shortage of women in tech and leadership positions. It circulated widely inside the company and became public over the weekend, causing a furor that amplified the pressure on Google executives to take a more definitive stand...

Here's a link to the text of the engineer's blasphemous memo:

Google Engineer Memo Text on Gizmodo

 

[ssj3]

All they care about is diversity of skin color, gender, etc. When it comes to diversity of thought, they will shut you down if they don't like what you have to say.

 

[cloudsurf]

Hey guys this is not an issue of diversity.
Its about a guy taking pot shots at gender equality at the work place. He was putting down women. He should be fired.
CaptR do I detect a bit of sarcasm in your post?

 

[Gobroncosgo]

Hey guys this is not an issue of diversity.
Its about a guy taking pot shots at gender equality at the work place. He was putting down women. He should be fired.
CaptR do I detect a bit of sarcasm in your post?

I believe in freedom of speech, but like cloudsurf said, read what the guy wrote - he was saying women are biologically unequipped to do high stress work, not that diversity is bad. If he said the same about blacks, asians, whatever.....he'd have been canned without question. This really isn't any different.

 

[westwoody]

If you get surgery do you care if the operating room staff are ethnically diverse or do you want them to be as well qualified as possible?

All we have here is a single memo he wrote. He could be sincere or he could be a malcontent. Was he repeatedly passed over for promotion by less qualified but more politically correct candidates? Or was he a latent racist and sexist? We have no context or history.

 

[CaptRenault]

I can see that some people are too lazy to read the memo (or have poor reading comprehension skills).

For the sake of those people, here are the key points as summarized by the memo writer in his introduction. Just remember: openly (probably even privately) expressing viewpoints such as these in a large American or Canadian organization WILL get you fired.

• Google's political bias has equated the freedom from offence with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
• This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
• The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
• Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
• Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
• Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

 

[CaptRenault]

I read that a lot of female employees planned to publicly quit if the guy wasn't fired.

I read that millions of liberal Americans were going to move to Canada if Trump got elected president. :lol:

 

[CLOUD 500]

We live in an era of political correctness and extreme feminism no one can express their opinions freely anymore... It is no longer a country with freedom of expression.

 

[jalimon]

We live in an era of political correctness no one can express their opinions anymore... It is no longer a country with freedom of expression.

Well they can Cloud500. But to express your opinion you better be rich or do not care to be poor cus you will be fired!

Cheers,

 

[CLOUD 500]

Well they can Cloud500. But to express your opinion you better be rich or do not care to be poor cus you will be fired!

Cheers,

That is my point. Everyone is being censored for the sake to be politcially correct. You got to be very careful these days what you say and also even how you look at a woman or even approach her she can claim sexual harassment/assault and you would be sent to jail.

 

[Carmine Falcone]

A number of people have already said what needs to be said. This guy wasn't fired because he dared to question diversity. He was fired for saying that basically there are less women engineers because women aren't biologically equipped to engineers. Once you can have the guts to type something that retarded, bye! I'm not an engineer because I'm shitty at upper level math courses, not because I'm a guy. You should hope a woman would get fired if she said there are less male nurses because men aren't really capable of being nurses.

It's important to remember to conduct yourself a certain way as a representative of any company. If he had a conversation among his male co-workers rather than feeling the need to post something potentially controversial on the Internet, he might still have his job.

 

[jalimon]

That is my point. Everyone is being censored for the sake to be politcially correct. You got to be very careful these days what you say and also even how you look at a woman or even approach her she can claim sexual harassment/assault and you would be sent to jail.

And this from a company that was supposed to be different. They have become hungry profit cocksockers like any big corporation. Shame shame and shame

Cheers,

 

[Carmine Falcone]

Also to his credit, I think he posted the manifesto on an internal G+ board or something of the sort but it got out because he asserted something pretty controversial so it was leaked. His manifesto has the earmarks of MRA, which in my personal experience has been guys demanding men's rights because they never learned how to talk to women. I'm certainly willing to believe a 27 year old who is already a PhD might not have all the social skills needed to speak to women, smart as he may be.

I don't know if the government had anything to do with his termination. But in between the bad PR, interrupting the boss' vacation and, as a practical matter, damaging his relationship with every female colleague and even some of the males, Google had no choice but to let him go.

 

[bushleague]

I don't see that as an attack against his freedom of speech.

What we have here is an employee who used his freedom of speech to express, among other things, the view that a certain group of the population is biologically unfit to be employed. He has the right to think so, and the right to tell everyone at his company that he believes it's okay to discriminate against a certain segment of the population, because he has reasons. If I was this man's boss, I would have to ask myself: do I agree with that? Morally, am I okay with that? But also: is it good for my company and my staff to have someone who is willing to discriminate against others? Would it cause more problems down the line? How does this affect teamwork and relations between employees? Do I eventually want this person to access a position of leadership? What if this man has to work with people "different" from him (in this case, women) within the staff or as a business relation outside the organization, how would that go?
More than virtue signallng, there are legitimate reasons from a business standpoint to question this man's judgement and wonder if he's good to have around in your organization, no matter how competent he may be.

Now that he's out of a job, any employer who hires that man will have to answer these questions as well.

Nobody's taking away our freedom of speech. We have more ways than ever to express our views and opinions. With great freedom of speech comes great responsibility: think before saying stuff just because you can.

And you know, maybe he's right. Maybe it's an act of courage to go against the majority and voice these unpopular opinions in this day and age, with women around in the work place and all, with their boobs and PMS and asking for time to pickup their kids at the daycare centre after work. If I had lived in 1930s Alabama surrounded by people who were racist because it was the norm, it would have been an act of courage to go against the grain and say that I wanted equality for my fellow black people. Maybe I get it all wrong and it's actually the same thing.

I'm sick and tired of hearing "you can't say anything anymore", "everybody's always offended", "people are snowflakes" blah blah blah "real life won't give you participation trophy so i punch you in the face because i'm bigger and i can"
Whatever happened to being decent to people?
And whatever happened to take responsability for your words instead of blaming "feminism" and "sjw's" and "the pc crowd" and everybody else when you say something that is controversial and that you know will not go over well with everyone? You want to be an asshole, own it and own the consequences, I lost jobs for less than that and I don't claim somebody violated my freedoms.

 

[CaptRenault]

...an employee who used his freedom of speech to express..the view that a certain group of the population is biologically unfit to be employed...

I read the memo a couple times but I could not find the part where the engineer said "...a certain group of the population is biologically unfit to be employed." I must have overlooked that part. Can you please quote it from the memo? Thanks!

 

[CaptRenault]

...He was fired for saying that...women aren't biologically equipped to be engineers...

I read the memo a couple times but I could not find the part where the engineer said "...women aren't biologically equipped to be engineers..." I must have overlooked that part. Can you please quote it from the memo? Thanks!

 

[Bred Sob]

I think Google was absolutely right to fire the guy. He had obviously put the company to shame by exposing to the whole world their totalitarian intolerance. His crime made all the more outrageous by the fact of his common-sense essay (apparently) being 100% factually correct.

Dear Google: please note my valiant defense of your reputation and don't make my life miserable. Which you can do in a second knowing my browsing history and many other interesting details of my life.

 

[Sol Tee Nutz]

I read the memo a couple times but I could not find the part where the engineer said "...women aren't biologically equipped to be engineers..." I must have overlooked that part. Can you please quote it from the memo? Thanks!

They have their own newspapers that have alternative views.

 

[FreeG]

Another aspect not discussed was Googles promotion process. It relies on peer review. So if you're a few male coworker to this guy, you'll immediately think you're not going to get a positive review from his views. Since he made his views public, the company had to take action to prevent future accusations of discrimination (which might typically be hard to prove, but here is much closer to black and white).
A former president of Harvard made a more academic, more nuanced argument for the difference in numbers of males and females in tenured positions on math/engineering/etc in universities. He received a LOT of flak and resigned the next year.

The point isn't that we should squelch such discussion but to bring it out with respect and with full canvas of the factors, whether they be biological, social, etc. The Harvard guy tried but didn't do it well or clearly enough. The Google guy didn't try as hard.

Googles president acknowledged that he doesn't want opinions and views silenced so he sees the potential risks for the firing.

 

[transatlantic]

Don't shit where you eat.