Damore framed his memo as an appeal
for intellectual diversity, identifying his
reasoning as a conservative political posi-
tion silenced by Google’s “ideological echo
chamber.” “It’s a perspective that desperately
needs to be told at Google,” Damore wrote.
Plenty of Damore’s colleagues, how-
ever, had heard this perspective before. Ad
nauseam. “People would write stuff like
that every month,” says one former Google
executive. When the subject of diversifying
Google’s workforce comes up in big meet-
ings and internal forums, one black female
employee says, “you pretty much need
to wait about 10 seconds before someone
jumps in and says we’re lowering the bar.”
(After one diversity town hall in April 2015,
an employee wrote in an internal Google+
post that Google was “lowering the hiring
bar for minorities, or arranging events where
white men feel excluded.”) What’s more, the
debate kept coming up in a repetitive loop
because of the constant influx of young grad-
uates who were engaging in these discus-
sions for the first time. Google was hiring
at a breakneck pace at the time. Between
2015 and 2017, it added some 20,000 full-
time employees, about the same number as
Facebook’s entire workforce. (And even after
all that hiring, Google’s technical workforce
was 80 percent male, 56 percent white, and
41 percent Asian.)
Damore’s memo might have faded into
obscurity if a colleague hadn’t suggested
that he share it with some more receptive
audiences inside Google. On Wednesday,
August2, Damore posted his memo to an
internal mailing list called Skeptics. The next
day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list
for libertarians—one Damore hadn’t known
existed. By Friday, the tech blog Motherboard
was reporting that an “anti-diversity mani-
festo” had gone viral inside Google.
Pichai was on vacation when his dep-
uties told him that Google had better deal
with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai
agreed and asked to corral his full manage-
ment team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full
copy of Damore’s document had leaked to
Gizmodo. While Googlers waited for an offi-
cial response from the top, managers who
wanted to signal their support for women
loudly condemned the memo’s ideas on
internal Google+ posts.
To Liz Fong-Jones, a site reliability engi-
neer at Google, the memo’s arguments wereSoon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote a
10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why there
were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company’s attempts to
reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men. On average,
he wrote, women are more interested in people than things, more empathetic,
more neurotic, and less assertive. To support these claims about personality dif-
ferences, Damore cited two studies, three Wikipedia pages, and an article from
Quillette, a contrarian online magazine that often covers free speech on campus
and alleged links between genetics and IQ. In the memo, Damore wrote that hir-
ing practices aimed to increase diversity “can effectively lower the bar” at Google.
All through July, Damore tried to get Google’s management to pay attention
to his concerns. He sent his memo to the diversity summit’s organizers; he sent
it to Google’s human resources department; at the suggestion of a coworker, he
posted it in Coffee Beans, the internal listserv for discussions about diversity. He
made the same points in person at one of Google’s “Bias Busting” workshops,
where employees role-play how to identify unconscious bias against minorities.
(There, he later claimed, his coworkers laughed at him.)