Not everyone who works in tech marches in lockstep to the liberal left’s politically correct agenda–at least, according to a new poll.
56% of Google employees think that their employer was in the wrong, after they controversially fired an employee, James Damore, for speaking out against Google’s rigid, mandatory “pro-diversity” training.
What’s even more interesting is that the poll–which surveyed workers from a number of Silicon Valley giants–showed that even larger majorities of employees at other companies took offense with Google’s attempts to police thoughts.
64% of employees at Uber though Google was wrong for firing Damore, as did 60% of Yahoo employees, 57% of Microsoft employees, 56% of Facebook employees, and 54% of Amazon employees.
Damore had been fired, after a controversial document he wrote and posted to an internal employee message board in July began circulating the internet. Damore wrote the document, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” after being forced to attend a diversity training.
Damore’s document was slammed in the leftist media as an “anti-diversity” rant, but was in fact a much more thoughtful discussion about Google’s heavy-handed attempts to increase diversity, and whether or not Google was trying to ignore biology by forcing women into web development roles they might not be well-suited for.
In a later interview, Damore slammed Google’s diversity practices as “secretive” and “shameful.”
“I went to a diversity program at Google,” he told conservative YouTube personality, Stefan Molyneux. “It was… not recorded, totally secretive. I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions there. There was lots of just shaming and, ‘No you can’t say that — that’s sexist,’ and, ‘You can’t do this.’”
“There’s just so much hypocrisy in the things they are saying,” he added. “I decided to create the document to clarify my thoughts.”
72 hours after the document went viral, Damore was fired.
Google’s CEO Sunar Pichai publicly called the comments made in Damore’s document “offensive and not OK.”
Pichai added that a number of female Google employees had felt “judged based on their gender.”
“Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being ‘agreeable’ rather than ‘assertive,’ showing a ‘lower stress tolerance,’ or being ‘neurotic’,” he added.
Pichai also scheduled an all-hands meeting about the controversial document for Thursday, but it was later cancelled.
Damore, for his part, isn’t taking his firing sitting down: he’s already filed a lawsuit against his former employer, claiming wrongful termination. He also posted a photo of himself on his Twitter account, wearing a shirt that spoofed the Google logo, calling it “Goolag”–a reference to Joseph Stalin’s forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union.