Silicon Valley giant Google has fired the male engineer at the centre of a gender diversity scandal, after he authored an internal memo last week asserting that there are biological causes behind the inequality in the tech industry.
The engineer, James Damore, confirmed his dismissal, saying in an email to Reuters that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes”.
Damore said he was exploring all possible legal remedies, and that before being fired, he had submitted a charge to the U.S. National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence.
“It’s illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge,” he wrote in the email.
Google reportedly said it could not talk about individual employee cases.
According to Reuters, the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in a note on Monday that portions of the anti-diversity memo “violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
It was not immediately clear what legal authority Damore could try to invoke. Non-union or “at will” employees, such as most tech workers, can be fired in the United States for a wide array of reasons that have nothing to do with performance.
The U.S. National Labor Relations Act guarantees workers, whether they are in a union or not, the right to engage in “concerted activities” for their “mutual aid or protection”.
This latest scandal follows the raging debate over the treatment of women in male-dominated tech companies which has gone on for months. Particular attention has focused on the persistent claims of sexual harassment at Uber, which has led to management shakeups at several venture capital firms.
Management at the largest tech firms, including Google, have publicly committed to diversifying their workforces, although the percentage of women in engineering and management roles remains low at many companies.
