Google fires engineer who “crossed the line” with diversity memo

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. (credit: Sam Churchill)

Google has fired James Damore, an engineer who wrote a controversial essay arguing that the company has gone overboard in its attempts to promote diversity. Damore confirmed the firing in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

“At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership,” Damore wrote in an internal posting that went viral within the company over the weekend. The posting was subsequently leaked to Gizmodo. However, he argued, that’s “far from the whole story.”

Biology is partly responsible for differences between men and women, Damore wrote, and “these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”