James Damore loses NLRB claim against Google

James Damore is the former Google employee fired after he shared a memo addressing diversity issues at Google that was deemed not politically correct.

We covered the story in August 2017, Google Senior Engineer FIRED for diversity memo:

A Senior Software Engineer at Google wrote an internal memo questioning the assumption of discrimination as the explanation for why women are underrepresented in High Tech (which he defined as Software Engineering).

I noted that questioning the religious orthodoxy of diversity was dangerous to his career, Google Senior Engineer commits diversity heresy:

There is no religious doctrine as unassailable as the claim that differences in achievement in areas where women and/or racial/ethnic minorities are UNDERrepresented is caused by systemic sexism/racism etc.

That religious doctrine, however, never is applied to fields in which women and/or racial/ethnic minorities are OVERrepresented.

The claim that differences in outcome are caused by discrimination drives the “diversity” agenda on campuses and at companies. That one might support diversity as a goal, yet question whether the problem is systemic discrimination and whether MORE discrimination really is the answer, is considered heresy and is punishable by firing, harassment, and on campuses, being shouted down….

While the memo is being regularly described as “anti-diversity,” a plain reading of the document shows that is not accurate. The Senior Engineer does not question diversity as a goal, but does question the explanations given as to why it is not being achieved in High Tech….

… questioning the assumptions underlying diversity initiatives is so dangerous to employment — one stands at risk of being accused of violating company anti-discrimination policies merely by questioning whether there is in fact discrimination. That accusation could be a career ending. Which is why people just shut up.

This memo could be used as a launching point for an open and fact-based discussion of why some group succeed in the Software Engineering field (and some other high tech fields) more than others. If you can’t identify the actual problem, you can’t meaningfully discuss solutions.

I’m guessing that that Google Senior Engineer soon will be a former Google Senior Engineer, will be outed on the internet (he already has been, but I’m not using his name), will be mercilessly harassed and doxxed, and will be driven underground. Because that’s how diversity heretics are treated.

After his termination, Damore filed a Complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which never made sense to me tactically. That NLRB Complaint was separate from a class action in which Damore is a named plaintiff.

The NLRB just rejected his claim, as The Washington Examiner reports:

The federal labor enforcement agency said James Damore’s memo was not protected speech as Damore claimed but rather constituted sexual harassment, so the company was right to fire him.

“The charging party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the board found unprotected in these cases,” wrote NLRB Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir in a Jan. 16 advice memo recently made public. Sophir said the memo’s statements were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with ‘scientific’ references and analysis, and notwithstanding ‘not all women’ disclaimers.”

On Jan. 23, the board officially agreed with Sophir’s conclusions.

The legal opinion on which the NLRB relied is embedded below.

I presume there is both and administrative and ultimately judicial review process (though I claim no expertise in NLRB matters).

Nonetheless, the lesson for now is clear:

Shut Up

(if you want to keep your job in the uber-liberal high tech ideological echo chamber)

And also shut up on campus, because Antifa doesn’t want Damore there either, as a student reports:

I belong to Freethinkers of Portland State University, a skeptic student group. On Saturday we’re hosting a panel on diversity featuring James Damore, the Google employee who was fired last July for writing a memo expressing heterodox views about sex disparities in the company’s workforce.
We expected controversy. But we also got danger. The left-wing newspaper Willamette Week published an article with a false and inflammatory headline: “Tech Bro Fired from Google for Saying Women Are Biologically Unfit to Be Engineers Will Speak at PSU Next Month.” The subheadline inaccurately attributed to Mr. Damore the view that “women can’t do math.”

Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest.

PDX Women in Tech, a local activist group, proclaimed itself “disheartened and appalled” that we were “engaging in discourse without an opposing viewpoint.” If they’d asked us, they’d have known we invited every tenured and tenure-track professor from the women’s studies department and were rebuffed. Meantime, the administration and student government have organized three counterevents to challenge “the notion that women do not generate ideas”—something Mr. Damore has never claimed. Opponents also attempted to deny our event an audience by hoarding the free tickets and not using them.

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NLRB Damore v Google Advice Memorandum 1-16-2018 by Legal Insurrection on Scribd

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