(Loic Venance — AFP PHOTO/Getty Images)
James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after distributing a memo questioning the company’s diversity policies, filed a class action lawsuit on Monday claiming racial discrimination by the technology giant.
The suit, filed in Santa Clara, Calif., alleged discrimination by Google against men, people of the “Caucasian race,” and people with perceived conservative political views. The suit alleges that Google employees who expressed views deviating from the majority at Google on politics or on employment practices including “diversity hiring policies, bias sensitivity, and social justice” were “singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google,” in violation of their legal rights.
Damore’s fellow plaintiff in the class action is another Google employee, a former software engineer named David Gudeman.
Google fired Damore after he wrote a 10-page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion.” Though initially circulated internally in July, it reached a wide audience in August when Motherboard published the memo, saying the “anti-diversity memo” had gone “internally viral” at the Mountain View-based technology company. The memo said that “genetic differences” may explain “why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”
The company, which called the memo “offensive” and “harmful,” soon fired Damore, further elevating him as a victim of what his supporters called an overreaching “political correctness” and ideology rigidity within the tech industry. Damore, who also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, appeared to embrace his rising political visibility, posing in a t-shirt with the word “Goolag” written in a multi-colored style that mimicked Google’s familiar logo.
Google did not immediately return a request for comment.