Summary: Two fired engineers are suing Google for discriminating against conservative, white men.
After being fired for his controversial manifesto, James Damore is suing Google for discrimination against conservative, white men. The engineer said that he was mocked and personally insulted before he was fired last August.
“Google executives and employees condemned Damore, his memo, and his views,” Damore’s lawsuit said.
The computer engineer filed his lawsuit in Santa Clara Superior Court. He and another fired engineer, David Gudeman, claimed that employees who did not believe in the company’s liberal mission statement were “mistreated.”
“Employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google’s employment policies and its business, such as ‘diversity’ hiring policies, ‘bias sensitivity,’ or ‘social justice,’ were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights,” the lawsuit stated.
In Damore’s viral memo from last summer, he suggested that women engineers were biologically inferior to their male counterparts and that diversity programs did not work.
The two plaintiffs hope that their lawsuit will become a class-action for white conservative men, according to The Verge.
The lawsuit said that Google is anti-conservative, and the plaintiffs submitted documentation as proof.
It is noted that a political party is not a federally protected class, but Damore’s lawyer Harmeet Dhillon said it is protected in California.
“Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males,” the lawsuit said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to Damore’s widely circulated memo after the engineer was fired.
“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” Pichai said.
In his memo, Damore said that women were naturally less-inclined to seek status like men were and therefore were not suited to be engineers. He said that Google’s mission to include more minorities and women was not beneficial for the company.
“In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females,” Damore stated. “As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of ‘grass being greener on the other side’; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is spent to water only one side of the lawn.”
Gudeman was terminated in 2016 for allegedly harassing a Muslim colleague. In the lawsuit, Gudeman said that Google overreacted to his comment that the FBI may be interested in his coworker after he had traveled to Pakistan. Google terminated Gudeman for his remark, saying they would not tolerate remarks linking terrorism to someone’s religious background.
Gudeman had also found himself in trouble with human resources before because he had compared a female manager’s advice to that of a slave owner to a slave.
Google told Reuters that they were looking forward to facing the lawsuit in court.
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