Contentious Memo Strikes Nerve Inside Google and Ou
SAN
FRANCISCO — 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
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.
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