Ex-Google employee claims he was fired for being white, male, and conservative

A Google employee fired after writing a widely-circulated memo saying women are less equipped to succeed in tech filed a lawsuit Monday claiming that Google systematically discriminates against politically conservative white men.

James Damore made headlines in August after he wrote a 10-page manifesto arguing that women aren’t as successful as men in Silicon Valley because of “biological causes.”

Damore was ultimately fired after his memo, meant to be circulated internally, was leaked to the media. In a subsequent memo obtained by Recode, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff Damore had violated the company’s code of conduct.

“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” Pichai wrote.

Damore told the New York Times in response that he would “likely be pursuing legal action.”

His subsequent lawsuit, which also lists fellow ex-Google employee David Gudeman as a plaintiff, alleges that Google tried to silence conservatives and enabled management to take “extreme — and illegal — lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees.”

The 161-page lawsuit also claims the former employees were “ostracized, belittled, and punished” for two key transgressions: “their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males.”

Damore also felt “pressured” to attend workshops meant to improve and talk about Google’s diversity, the suit alleges.

According to the company’s 2017 diversity report, 31 percent of all Google employees are women, while only 20 percent of its tech workers are women. Just nine percent of the company identifies as non-white or non-Asian.

Damore’s lawsuit also comes in the wake of another suit against Google, filed in September, by three female former employees. The class-action complaint alleges that the search engine behemoth systematically and knowingly underpays women, which is a violation of California law. The women’s lawsuit includes evidence from a Labor Department inquiry into Google, which found six to seven standard deviations between pay for men and women in nearly every job classification in 2015. There is a “one in a 100 million chance that the disparity is occurring randomly,” investigators wrote.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but in a Monday press conference, Damore didn’t rule out one day returning to his old employer.

“I would welcome the chance to go back to Google,” he said, “and I really do feel like I could improve things for everyone there.”