Fired Engineer Claims Google Is Conducting a Witch Hunt
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James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired this week after a 10-page anti-diversity memo he wrote went viral, says he feels “betrayed” by his former employer and that upper management used him to “have a very clear signal that what I did was harmful and wrong and didn't stand for Google.” Damore, who opened up in an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, argued that “it would be career suicide for any executives or directors to support me.” And he claimed that Google’s human-resources department had been contacting employees who expressed their support for his plight, suggesting that the company was stifling dissent. (“That’s absolutely untrue,” a Google spokesman said.)
Damore told Bloomberg that he published the memo about a month ago, but that it only gained traction in the past week, when parts of it were published by various news outlets. “I shared [the memo] with many of our diversity programs and with individual Googlers but no one higher up ever came to me and said ‘don’t do this,’” he said of the memo, in which he argued that biological differences explain some gender disparities in the workplace and suggested that Google’s efforts to increase diversity may be discriminatory. “It was only after it got viral that upper management started shaming me and eventually firing me.”
While Google has said the company respects freedom of expression, leadership have argued that Damore’s views were beyond the pale. New head of diversity Danielle Brown explained over the weekend that while open dialogue is important to Google, it can only exist within the principles of equal employment. Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai called the memo “not O.K.” and “offensive” in his own note to staff on Monday, when Damore was fired. Susan Wojcicki, the C.E.O. of YouTube, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, wrote in an op-ed Wednesday that she “felt pain” because of Damore’s memo, and asked whether his argument would make sense were it applied to minority groups or other underrepresented groups in tech.
Damore called Wojcicki’s inquiry a “false analogy” in his interview with Bloomberg. “She’s trying to lump me in with racists and other bigots, which I’m not,” he added. “I’m not a sexist, and I’m not a racist. That’s just trying to smear my image rather than actually looking at the evidence.”
Damore’s comments were his first in a major network interview. He’d appeared on popular alt-right media personality Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel earlier this week, and had done an interview with another YouTube host popular with the alt-right, Jordan B. Peterson. In both interviews, he described himself as someone who cares about diversity and inclusion, and whose questions about biological differences between men and women came from a positive place. But Google’s response to people who questioned programs that provide additional support to women and minorities, he said, was repressive. “I went to a diversity program at Google, it was . . . not recorded, totally secretive,” he said in an interview with Molyneux. “I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions there, there was lots of just shaming and ‘No you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ and ‘You can’t do this.’”
Many conservatives were quick to uphold Damore as evidence that Silicon Valley liberalism has gone too far. Despite their adulation, Damore says he doesn’t associate with the right. “I’m more of a centrist. I don’t think we should have such a strong ideology that really divides different people,” he told Bloomberg. “I think that there's a lot more that we can do to bring people together. I'm very sympathetic to maybe some of the same struggles that especially some of the conservative people at Google face.”
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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