Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech
Mr. Damore, who worked on infrastructure for Google’s search product, said he believed
that the company’s actions were illegal and that he would “likely be pursuing legal action.”
“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,” Mr. Damore said
In an email titled “Our Words Matter,” Mr. Pichai said
that he supported the right of employees to express themselves but that the memo had gone too far.
The memo, called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” angered many in Silicon Valley because it relied on certain gender stereotypes — like the notion
that women are less interested in high-stress jobs because they are more anxious — to rationalize the gender gap in the tech industry.
In a companywide email, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, 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 put the company in a bind.
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.
