Google has fired an employee responsible for a right-wing memo that was critical of the organization’s liberal diversity policy, proving once more that Google supports diversity only as long as it does not include viewpoints diverse from the company’s left-wing ideologies.
James Damore, who served as a software engineer at Google since 2013, told YouTube chat-show host Stefan Molyneux in an interview that he wrote a 10-page memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” after attending a “secretive” diversity training session that rubbed him the wrong way.
The memo, which was posted on an internal mailing list and was shared throughout the company, criticizes Google’s diversity policy, which attempts to create equal representation of women in technology and leadership. According to Damore, the policy is unrealistic because it does not take into account the “personality differences” between men and women and the unequal distribution of men and women in the industry in general. As such, Damore contends that the policy is “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”
“At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership,” he wrote. And while he accepts that bias certainly does exist, he said it is “far from the whole story.”
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Damore explained that because men and women are biologically different, they have personality differences as well. For example, women tend to be less competitive than men, which may inhibit them from pursuing promotions in the same way men would. Additionally, top leadership positions often require long, stressful hours, which may disrupt the balanced and fulfilling life that women tend to seek based on their personality traits.
Damore provided some “non-discriminatory” recommendations to reduce the company’s gender gap that take into account the different traits of men and women rather than attempting to force equality.
For example, since women tend to be more cooperative and have a stronger interest in people rather than things, “We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration,” he wrote.
The memo also contended that Google has become so vigilant about combating biases that it has created a “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.”
The compelling memo is well-documented and includes links and graphs based on scientific and statistical evidence. Most free thinkers would recognize that it is not stereotypical or some sort of angry alt-right diatribe, as those on the Left are claiming. However, despite Damore’s heavy reliance on statistical data and biological facts, it irritated the Left because it dared to recognize differences between men and women. In fact, several women at Google reportedly had such an emotional response to the memo that they had to take a personal day to recover from it. (And they say there are no personality differences between men and women!)
According to Google’s thought police, better known as its recently appointed vice president of diversity, integrity, and governance — Danielle Brown — Damore’s memo violated the company’s policy against “advancing harmful gender stereotypes,” Vox reports. But what Damore really seemed to do was violate the company’s policy of falling in line with Google’s groupthink.
In an internal memo sent to Google employees, Brown dismissed Damore’s arguments as “incorrect,” as if there is no room for debate on the subject. She added, “Like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”
Declaring that Google is “unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company,” Brown employed the Left’s doublespeak when she asserted that all employees with “alternative views, including different political views, [should] feel safe sharing their opinions.” “But,” she added, “that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.”
Damore has stated that he may take legal action against the company, and though California is an at-will state, Damore claims that his termination was the result of his whistleblowing against a potentially illegal company policy. “As far as I know, 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,” he told the New York Times.
On this, he may have some legal standing. The Times explains, “There may be a way to argue that the memo and its recommendations — such as ‘stop alienating conservatives’ — constitute a ‘concerted activity’ to aid and protect his fellow workers, which may be protected under federal law.”
Furthermore, there is proof of Google’s discrimination, as other Google employees have secretly taken screenshots from internal Google posts that showed other Google employees stating that they would create blacklists of people opposed to the company’s diversity efforts. Breitbart News published some of those screenshots.
Damore has also found a great deal of support from people outside of Google, in addition to some inside the organization who have publicly defended him. A crowdfunding page has been created to raise money on Damore’s behalf, and he has already received a job offer from Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.
