Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech<br />Mr. Damore, who worked on infrastructure for Google’s search product, said he believed<br />that the company’s actions were illegal and that he would “likely be pursuing legal action.”<br />“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms<br />and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Mr. Damore said<br />In an email titled “Our Words Matter,” Mr. Pichai said<br />that he supported the right of employees to express themselves but that the memo had gone too far.<br />The memo, called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” angered many in Silicon Valley because it relied on certain gender stereotypes — like the notion<br />that women are less interested in high-stress jobs because they are more anxious — to rationalize the gender gap in the tech industry.<br />In a companywide email, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of the memo had violated the company’s code of conduct<br />and crossed the line “by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”<br />The memo put the company in a bind.<br />SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Monday fired a software engineer who wrote an internal memo<br />that questioned the company’s diversity efforts and argued that the low number of women in technical positions was a result of biological differences instead of discrimination.
