Who Is James Damore? Fired Google Engineer Sues For Discrimination Against Conservative White Men

The engineer fired by Google in August after he wrote a controversial memo about diversity in the workplace and the political climate at the tech giant has filed a lawsuit alleging discrimination against conservative white men.

James Damore’s class action lawsuit, filed Jan. 8 with the Santa Clara Superior Court in California, alleges that employees who fit that description were “singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google.”

A Google spokesperson told International Business Times, “We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore’s lawsuit in court.”

The memo that vaulted Damore into the headlines was posted on an internal message board and went viral through that network before being shared with the public. Included in the lengthy post were comments that men and women have different interests and abilities, affecting diversity in tech jobs and pay gaps. Damore also suggested that Google pushes a leftist agenda and silences conservative voices.

He was later identified as the author and fired.

Damore is being represented by the Dhillon Law Group and has teamed up on the suit with another former Google employee, software engineer David Gudeman, who says he was wrongfully terminated. The filing says the lawsuit is also meant to represent other Google workers who have allegedly been discriminated against in a similar way to Damore and Gudeman.

According to the lawsuit, people who “expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google’s employment policies and its business, such as ‘diversity’ hiring policies, ‘bias sensitivity’ or ‘social justice,’” were targets.

It goes on to say that these dissenters were internally blacklisted because of their views.

“Google’s open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender, barred by law,” the lawsuit alleges. “Google’s management goes to extreme — and illegal — lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees at Google. Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males. This is the essence of discrimination — Google formed opinions about and then treated plaintiffs not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in groups with assumed characteristics.”

The filing includes extensive screenshots of employees, with their names appearing adjacent, discussing these topics on message boards. Categories of those screenshots include “anti-Caucasian postings” and “Googler reactions to the Damore memo.”

This story was updated Jan. 9 with a comment from Google about the lawsuit.