Internet giant Google has fired the male engineer at the centre of an uproar in Silicon Valley over the past week after he authored an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.
James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal, saying in an email to Reuters on Monday 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 US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing the 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, a unit of Alphabet Inc based in Mountain View, California, said it could not talk about individual employee cases.
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 US 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”.
Damore, though, would likely face an uphill fight to seek that protection based on his memo, said Alison Morantz, a Stanford University law professor with expertise in labour law.
Debate over the treatment of women in the male-dominated tech industry has raged for months. Claims of persistent sexual harassment in the ranks of Uber Technologies Inc and of several venture capital firms led to management shakeups.
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.
Damore's memo attacked the idea that gender diversity should be a goal.
Google's vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown, sent a memo in response to the furor over the weekend, saying the engineer's essay “advanced incorrect assumptions about gender”.
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