Former Google employee James Damore, who was fired last year for circulating a memo arguing women were biologically less suited for tech jobs, is taking his legal complaint against Google into arbitration.
Damore sued Google early this year alongside fellow former employee David Gudeman, who is also moving into arbitration. The pair alleged that Google had “systematically punished and terminated” them for their political beliefs, and they sought class action status to represent conservative white male employees who had allegedly been discriminated against. The overall lawsuit will go forward, but it will involve two different men who joined the suit later.
Two Google job applicants who said they were unfairly rejected are still suing
This change narrows the scope of the lawsuit against Google. Damore and Gudeman were employees fired at different times for different reasons. The remaining two men — Stephen McPherson and Michael Burns — were both job applicants who claim they were denied positions for being conservative white men. They joined the suit in April alongside another former Google employee named Manuel Amador, who has opted to dismiss his charges. Google is further disputing the idea that “conservative” employees can be considered a class.
Damore separately filed a complaint about his firing with the US National Labor Relations Board, but the board found that Google had provided a legitimate reason for firing him.
The lawsuit’s remaining complaints bear some similarity to legal charges leveled against YouTube earlier this year when a recruiter claimed he’d been pressured to avoid hiring “non-diverse” candidates. Google has been struggling with internal political conflicts over the past several months, and unknown figures apparently inside the company have leaked documents and videos highlighting its attempts to grapple with American politics. Trump has baselessly accused it of “rigging” Google search against him, one of many claims that Google’s services are politically biased against conservatives.
At the same time, Google was also sued by an employee who said he was fired for expressing his liberal political beliefs at the company. Tim Chevalier, a former Google engineer, claimed he’d been called into meetings with HR and told he was engaging in too much “social activism,” among other complaints. Google said it was simply enforcing a “very standard expectation” that employees wouldn’t promote harmful stereotypes “without any regard to the employee’s political views.”
Damore’s case was an early sign of serious political conflict inside Google. He posted an internal memo called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which argued that the company’s attempts at recruiting more women were misguided because female biology made them naturally less interested in tech-oriented jobs. The document went “internally viral,” according to one employee, and it was later posted in full by Gizmodo and Motherboard. Damore was fired soon after the leak, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he had crossed the line between debate and “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misattributed a statement to Tim Chevalier; it has been removed.