And let me tell you, while you may not feel that this memo has created a hostile working environment, a lot of other people do. Google would drown in lawsuits if they let him stay on.
No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less successful because of their biology. [1]
> It is very unlikely a hostile work environment for not firing him based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.
Any employment lawyers want to chime in on this?
[1] "For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."
He never claimed that the women in tech are worse at tech than the men in tech. He just claimed that there would be fewer of them.
From my understanding, a hostile work environment is created when a reasonable person would interpret actions or speech as hostile, offensive, or intimidating, and such actions are not a one-time event, but frequent, severe, and pervasive, and they must be so serious as to change the conditions of your employment. Keeping in mind that terms like "reasonable person" are legal terms and we're not dealing in colloquialisms, it's hard to see how this memo could be interpreted by a judge as creating a hostile work environment.
Again, that's not to say people can't try to sue anyway, but in that case, there are plenty of people on the other side of the story Google should be worried about suing as well, since there appears to be some minority of (white, male) Google employees who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are persecuted due to their gender and race, and they also claim there are written communications at Google they interpret as denigrating them. I don't think they have much of a chance either.
FTFY to better reflect the fact that the memo was about distribution, not success.
Are men less successful in nursing or just less common?
I don't see how you can argue that a single guy who isn't in management writing a memo creates a "hostile work environment". Most of the people complaining wouldn't even be working with him at all. They can file lawsuits but would they hold water? After all, management could just tell the lawsuit filers to be more tolerant of others: it's not like Damore was attacking individuals.
So I don't see where Google's obligation to fire him comes from. Unpopularity with other employees does not make a legal obligation.
On the other hand, firing someone who is trying to raise possibly illegal conduct with management does have legal implications.
Employment law makes it very clear that person creating a hostile work environment doesn't have to be a manager. They can be a co-worker, a client, or a contractor.
