Google has fired an employee who wrote an “anti-diversity manifesto” over the weekend.
The employee’s dismissal followed an email earlier in the day from Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai to the company’s employees, saying that the memo writer violated company policy, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night. Parent Alphabet Inc. hasn’t named the employee.
The memo that rocked the tech company after it was shared with fellow employees criticized Google’s efforts to increase diversity, arguing that the program discriminated against some employees.
“We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it,” Pichai said in his email to staff.
“However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” he continued.
Pichai added that the code of conduct requires “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
On Friday, Motherboard reported that the senior software engineers sent out a revision to the company’s diversity initiatives, instead calling for and encouraging “ideological diversity.” The 10-page document is the employee’s personal opinion, and was sent to a company mailing list before going “internally viral,” according to Motherboard’s source inside Google.
The employee also said that men were generally better at engineering jobs than women and that a liberal bias among executives and many employees makes it difficult to discuss the issue at Google.