Google engineer who penned ‘anti-diversity memo’ gets fired, files labor complaint

If you’re paying close attention to the recent tech news, one of the biggest things to come out of Silicon Valley, or Google to be more specific, is this “anti-diversity memo,” as it’s being called, written by a now ex-Google engineer. James Damore, who’s written the manifesto, was just fired by the company on Monday for “perpetuating gender stereotypes” and violating Google’s code of conduct. Damore was arguing in the memo that the biological differences between men and women are the cause of the gender gap at Google and in the tech industry in general. And he puts to question Google’s diversity efforts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke up, or rather wrote down his thoughts in a note to employees saying, "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."

On the day Damore was fired, he also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in the US saying that Google’s upper management has been “misrepresenting and shaming” him. “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,” Damore told The New York Times. And he seems to have a case on his hands, at least enough to “get through the courtroom door,” as one lawyer points out to Wired that “Damore's lawyer might argue that his memo was protected under California law, because it related to allegedly unequal treatment of employees.”

Source: The Verge