After leaving Harvard’s doctorate program in systems biology to join Google as a software engineer in 2013, James Damore joked on his Facebook page that he knew he had made the right move as he enjoyed a morning smoothie with oats. It was the type of workplace perk that is standard for Google employees.
That initial assessment of Google seemed far removed from the contentious memo written by the 28-year-old Mr. Damore last week that has enraged advocates of greater diversity in the technology industry. The memo has also served as a rallying cry for conservatives and the alt-right who view Google — and Silicon Valley — as a bastion of groupthink where people with different opinions are shamed into silence.
His 10-page memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” argued that “personality differences” between men and women — like a woman having a lower tolerance for stress — help explain why there were fewer women in engineering and leadership roles at the company. He said efforts by the company to reach equal representation of women in technology and leadership were “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”
The memo was originally posted on an internal mailing list and was shared widely inside the company and throughout Silicon Valley. It struck a nerve and was harshly criticized inside a company and an entire industry struggling to explain why women are underrepresented in key engineering ranks and are often underpaid when compared with their male peers.Google fired Mr. Damore on Monday and said that he had violated the company’s rules by “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.”
In a short email exchange on Monday after his firing, Mr. Damore, who was a senior software engineer in Google’s search division, said he had not expected this type of reaction when he shared his missive last week.
“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 said. Mr. Damore said he would probably take legal action against the company.
Like many new hires at Google, Mr. Damore boasted an impressive academic background. A competitive player of chess and computer strategy video games, he studied molecular and cellular biology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, according to an online résumé. He conducted research in computational biology at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining a Ph.D. program at Harvard. He dropped out before completing the program.
In a footnote for his memo, Mr. Damore said he considered himself a “classical liberal,” an ideology associated with advocacy of free market economics and libertarianism.
Mr. Damore’s memo was rebuked by a number of his fellow employees. Few Google employees came out publicly in defense of him, but some surreptitiously showed their support by leaking screenshots from internal Google posts of employees saying they planned to create blacklists of people who did not support the company’s diversity efforts. The screenshots appeared on Breitbart News, which has championed Mr. Damore’s memo.
“Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up those very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of getting fired,” Mr. Damore wrote in an addendum to his original memo. “This needs to change.”
Others outside the company came to Mr. Damore’s defense. Eric Weinstein, a managing director at Thiel Capital, an investment firm run by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and supporter of President Trump, said Google was sending the wrong message to women.
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