Case
| HBS Case Collection
|
March 2018
(Revised March 2019)
Gender and Free Speech at Google (A)
Nien-hê Hsieh, Martha J. Crawford and Sarah Mehta
In August 2017, Google fired James Damore, a 28-year-old software engineer who had been employed by the company since 2013. The move came after Damore penned an internal company memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which posited that innate biological differences between men and women—as opposed to hiring biases, gender discrimination, or a hostile workforce—were at least partially responsible for the low numbers of women in tech. At the time, 20% of Google’s tech workforce, and 31% of its overall staff, was female. Damore also admonished Google for silencing opinions that challenged what he viewed as the company’s politically liberal belief system. Reactions to both the memo’s content and Google’s decision to fire Damore were swift and varied. Some praised the company for signaling intolerance of any marginalization of women. Others criticized Google for terminating an employee for a seemingly innocuous act of expression. Danielle Brown, Google’s new vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, hired just a few weeks before the memo was leaked to the public, must now advise Google’s top leadership team on dealing with the fallout.
Keywords: Free Speech;
Representation;
Diversity;
Gender;
Race;
Human Resources;
Employees;
Employee Relationship Management;
Recruitment;
Selection and Staffing;
Labor;
Employment;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Organizational Culture;
Technology Industry;
United States;
California;
