everyday sexism

White Tech Dude Finally Gets a Platform to Share His Ideas About Women

“Fired for Truth.” Photo: James Damore/Twitter

On Friday, James Damore – the former Google engineer who was fired this week after a memo suggesting that women are biologically ill-suited to working in tech went viral — was given the opportunity to further expand on those views in The Wall Street Journal. In an op-ed titled “Why I Was Fired from Google” Damore explains that his “moral preferences and beliefs” were just too out there for his totalitarian bosses and the leftist “mob” they cater to.

“My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s ‘ideological echo chamber,’” he explains.

He goes on, “In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.” According to Damore, that was too much for “those most zealously committed to the diversity creed — that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same.”

Ultimately, he says, his firing was the result of the outraged “mob” that descended upon him, as they would have upon “anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views.” In the end, he says, his managers were forced to give in.

He ends with a warning:

If Google continues to ignore the very real issues raised by its diversity policies and corporate culture, it will be walking blind into the future—unable to meet the needs of its remarkable employees and sure to disappoint its billions of users.

Interestingly, as Susan Fowler (who wrote a widely shared blog post about her sexist treatment at Uber and is credited with leading the company to investigate its toxic workplace culture) pointed out on Twitter, the piece seems to demolish the interpretation of Damore’s memo that his supporters had been using to defend him:

If only someone, somewhere would give him 3,000 more words to explain himself.

White Tech Dude Gets Platform to Share His Ideas About Women