Case Study Memo: Google LLC-The Diversity Manifesto (Coursepack) Think about these questions as you write your memo: Was Google ju

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GOOGLE LLC: THE DIVERSITY MANIFESTO AND LEADER CANDOUR1

Raymond B. Chiu wrote this case under the supervision of Professor Fernando Olivera solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect confidentiality.

This publication may not be transmitted, photocopied, digitized, or otherwise reproduced in any form or by any means without the permission of the copyright holder. Reproduction of this material is not covered under authorization by any reproduction rights organization. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, contact Ivey Publishing, Ivey Business School, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, N6G 0N1; (t) 519.661.3208; (e) [email protected]; www.iveycases.com.

Copyright © 2018, Ivey Business School Foundation Version: 2018-11-05

It was a rude welcome for the newly hired vice-president of diversity, Danielle Brown, at Google LLC (Google). Just over a month into her new job, Brown was confronted by an internal memo, posted by Google engineer James Damore, espousing his views on the causes of gender disparities and problems with the company’s diversity programs. Damore’s memo was leaked to the public and he was fired two days later. The chain of events set off one of the most publicized controversies in the firm’s history. The incident brought chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai back from vacation and led to a high-level decision focused on protecting Google’s public image and employees’ well-being. Corporate communication with Damore was brief, and the unrest had a chilling effect on what would otherwise have been Brown’s impressive transition as an up-and-coming high-tech executive.

Damore’s memo provoked a dizzying array of viewpoints within the company and, once public, within the media. With the turmoil showing little sign of abating, Damore’s memo reminded many women of the hurt they had experienced from discrimination and harassment. The company’s reaction also left many employees who held unpopular views frightened that they too could be targeted. Brown had to find a way to move people past debates over Damore and his memo. It was an opportunity to demonstrate the candour and character that could help her team regain hope, set an example for others, and build trust in her and in the company. In a circumstance where communication and relationships had become fractured, her leadership would now be defined by how she chose her words in the wake of the crisis.

DANIELLE BROWN

Brown was appointed Google’s new vice-president of diversity, integrity, and governance in 2017. She arrived on the job just over a month before the Damore crisis broke in August 2017.2

In 2009, Brown was one of 15 master of business administration graduates nationwide who were accepted into the accelerated leadership program at Intel Corporation (Intel). Showing the versatility that allowed her to excel as a management consultant, sales manager, and product marketer in her early career, Brown rose to chief of staff of global human resources (HR) within four years, was appointed chief diversity and inclusion officer just a year later, then vice-president of global HR three years after that.3

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Although the Intel appointment was the first diversity and inclusion role in Brown’s career, she boasted a record that exceeded the company’s goals for diversity hiring. She had achieved stretch goals for hiring and retention, weekly reporting, transparent metrics, engagement of majority males, a complaint hotline, and confrontation of offenders.4 In 2015, when Brown had less than a year in the diversity role, Intel’s CEO announced an investment of US$300 million over five years in diversity efforts. Brown’s value proposition was a culture where a “diverse range of perspectives and views” enabled business success. Intel boasted an “open door policy” that encouraged dialogue between employees regardless of their respective levels, at times holding executives to account when they ignored concerns of others.5

JAMES DAMORE

James Damore was a senior software engineer in Google’s search division. He joined Google in 2013 with an extensive academic background in biology and computational biology and a reputation for competitive participation in chess and strategy games. He worked his way up to the project leader level, which merited him a salary in the US$300,000 range.6

In June 2017, after what he considered unpleasant experiences with Google’s internal culture and diversity programs, Damore began typing his thoughts during a long business flight to China. Titling his memo “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” Damore wrote in response to invitations from diversity program organizers to provide feedback. He submitted his memo in early July, eager to hear a response. When he did not receive a reply, Damore posted his memo through internal lists and forums.7

Early on August 5, 2017, online news outlets reported that Damore’s memo had gone “viral” among Google employees the day before. The same day, the memo was picked up and posted by a public website; labelled an “anti-diversity manifesto,” the memo immediately attracted widespread attention.8

Damore described his experience of diversity training as one in which he was shamed and restricted from voicing unwelcomed ideas.9 Google fired Damore on August 7, two days after the leak, with no apparent link between the decision to fire him and Brown’s responsibilities as diversity officer.

After he was fired, Damore attracted an instant following, gaining 35,000 followers on his Twitter Inc. account and inspiring an organization of protests across the country—which were later cancelled due to alleged terrorist threats. Damore first accepted online interviews with right-wing media outlets to avoid hostility from media unsympathetic to his views.10

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Damore complained about the lack of “open and honest discussion” and his experience that employees’ identities were wedded to the company “almost like a cult.” In online question-and-answer sessions, Damore expressed his disappointment over being “shamed” by his supervisor before the memo was leaked, and he emphasized that his intention was not to attack others but to improve Google’s culture. Damore did not apologize for his memo or for upsetting others, and he still believed his views were correct.11

MANIFESTO CONTENT

Damore prefaced his 10-page document with a statement affirming that he valued diversity and inclusion, recognized the existence of sexism, and disapproved of stereotyping individuals, emphasizing the need to stay focused on “population level differences in distributions.” In places throughout the memo, he also alluded to the possibility of bias and limitations in his perspective, and the need for “open and honest” discussion to address gender and ideological issues in the company.12

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Damore began his memo by suggesting that the left and right biases that may be hindering discussion at Google were the “result of deep moral preferences,” (a reference to Jonathan Haidt’s well-regarded research on moral foundations). He then proposed several non-socially constructed causes of the gender gap in technology (tech), specifically software engineering, focusing on differences in biological and personality traits. He covered a range of purported “non-bias [sic] causes,” including prenatal exposure to testosterone, differing interest in people versus things, levels of the personality traits extraversion and neuroticism (referred to by Damore as “higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance” and by psychologists in the positive sense as emotional stability), and differences in drive for status. Based on the differences he discussed, Damore concluded that “principled” and “optimizing” approaches to diversity were preferable to “arbitrary social engineering” (hiring quotas). He proceeded to list existing Google practices that he considered “discriminatory,” including programs exclusively for “a certain gender or race,” special queues and treatment for such candidates, scrutiny of insufficiently diverse groups, and any practices or goals that could result in inappropriate incentives or illegal double standards.13

In the next section of his memo, Damore reiterated the importance of recognizing ideological biases— possibly veiled left or Marxist-style biases—that he believed “increase race and gender tensions” because they affect how the social sciences are studied and maintain “myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap.” He identified other consequences of these biases as overprotection of females, dismissal of gender issues affecting men, and “extremely sensitive PC-[politically correct] authoritarians” who engage in “violence and shaming.”14

Damore proposed “non-discriminatory ways” to address the gender gap, including making software engineering more people-oriented, allowing co-operative behaviour to thrive, and reducing stress and increasing flexibility in tech and leadership work. With the overall goal of restoring psychological safety and stopping discriminatory practices, Damore ended his memo with a range of suggestions to reduce the level of intolerance, moralization, alienation, and hostility, including the reduction of over-empathetic support for the suffering and offences of select groups. He believed that discriminating merely to increase representation of women in tech was misguided and costly, causing the same poor outcome as failed attempts to address problems with “the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.”15

IMMEDIATE RESPONSE

Corporate Responses

Responses from numerous internal and external stakeholders poured in once Damore’s memo had been posted. Before the memo was leaked to the public, Ari Balogh, vice-president of engineering and Damore’s supervisor, wrote an internal memo stating that “Questioning our assumptions and sharing different perspectives” was an important part of Google's culture, but “one of the aspects of the post that troubled me deeply was the bias inherent in suggesting that most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.”16

The day Damore’s memo was leaked to the public, Brown responded in an internal memo to all staff (see Exhibit 1), saying,

Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.17

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The day after firing Damore, Pichai wrote to employees (see Exhibit 2), declaring,

We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.18

Co-Worker Responses

Co-worker responses to the memo were openly critical, calling for Damore to be fired. According to Damore, these were calls for “censorship, retaliation and atonement.” Various voices labelled the memo “screed,” “pure toxicity,” “garbage fire,” “bigoted,” “misogynist,” and “violently offensive.”19 Facilitated by Google’s collaborative communication platforms, attacks directed at Damore and open messages to Brown effectively put both on trial. Leaked posts revealed that many of these communications were from middle-level managers, using expletives to describe Damore and the memo, refusing to work with his department, questioning his competence to sit on hiring committees, blaming him for attrition of employees, and expressing intentions to silence and banish anyone sympathetic to Damore. Some posts openly disparaged Brown for not issuing a more severe criticism of the memo.20

Numerous women publicly expressed their disappointment and disgust with Damore’s memo, and some were motivated by the controversy to look for work elsewhere.21 One female employee expressed that the memo was not considerate of women’s views and feelings and that the public response was too focused on freedom of speech issues and a debate about reasons for termination. “To have us all lumped into one sort of category like that,” she said, “and to have such a baseless claim made about who we are, and to have it positioned as fact—as scientific fact—I don’t know how we could feel anything but attacked by that.”22

Using words like “unlawful” and “hostile,” Susan Wojcicki, CEO of Google’s YouTube, criticized the memo for perpetuating negative stereotypes and unfounded biases that would now be exposed to a new generation, hindering efforts to deal with a gender gap that existed in tech but not in other science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields. Expressing her alarm over what she believed were unacceptable comparisons between people, she posed the question, “What if the memo said that biological differences amongst black, Hispanic, or LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) employees explained their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles? Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo’s arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author?”23

Few media articles covered employees who supported Damore, due in part to the employees’ unwillingness to speak out except by leaking messages written by other employees who engaged in defamation and threatened to blacklist those they labelled as “anti-diversity.”24 However, one reporter who spoke to employees anonymously found a range of viewpoints, including some that agreed that the culture maintained its control by “shaming dissenters into silence.” The employees noted that the practice of shaming Damore publicly indicated that critics preferred to dominate the public discourse rather than to engage him in direct discussion. Through the anonymous corporate chat application, Blind, a Google employee complained about the “terrifying” discovery that “if someone is not ideologically aligned with the majority then he’s labelled as a ‘poor cultural fit’ and would not be hired/promoted.” Others applauded Damore’s courage and found it hypocritical to talk about diversity and inclusion and then exclude divergent opinions.25

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To shed light on Damore’s claim that “there were many women who were empowered and that agree with me,”26 Blind conducted a survey of 4,000 employees across Silicon Valley. The results showed that 44 per cent of Google respondents were in support of firing Damore, a result that placed the response from Google employees in the middle of similar responses from within other tech firms (see Exhibit 3).27

Public Responses

The negative response to Damore’s memo was unreserved. Megan Smith, formerly vice-president at Google and, at the time, a chief technology officer of the United States, was glad that Damore’s views were now out in the open to condemn. She called the memo “insidious . . . death by a thousand paper cuts . . . they are misguided, they’re destructive to their colleagues.” Former Google engineer Erica Baker criticized Google for allowing an environment in which “racists and sexists feel supported and safe in sharing these views in the company.”28 Angela Saini, science journalist and author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, argued that psychological studies showed the “tiniest gaps, if any, between the sexes, including areas such as mathematical ability and verbal fluency,” and said that brains could not be distinguished by sex.29 Cynthia Lee, computer science professor at Stanford University, believed that Damore’s “quasi-professional” but dangerously “beguiling” scientific arguments were a “red herring,” distracting attention away from the “glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities.”30

Multiple outlets expressed their disapproval of Damore’s dismissal. Their concerns were based on the view that he was mainly expressing an opinion about how diversity could be improved based on findings that were unquestioned among those who studied basic gender differences.31 A few female commentators were less alarmed by the gender differences in tech. Megan McArdle, a policy journalist and former technology consultant, found that her male co-workers showed a passion for technology that was not often shared by their female counterparts. McArdle was matter of fact about being in the minority around men even though the environment was naturally and regrettably less hospitable when representation was lopsided.32

A poll conducted by the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and The Harris Poll found that 55 per cent of respondents said Google was wrong to fire Damore. The respondents were divided within their political groups, with 50 per cent of Democrats, 56 per cent of independents, and 61 per cent of Republicans indicating they were opposed to Damore’s dismissal.33

Scientific Responses

Shortly after Damore was fired, scholars responded vigorously, many with lengthy, impassioned arguments. Gina Rippon, the chair of cognitive brain imaging at Aston University, stated that something biological could be overcome with practise and that the biological gender differences were “so tiny that there’s no way that they can explain the kind of gender gap that’s apparent at Google.”34 Janet Hyde, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, concluded that “there’s every reason to think these gender differences in interests are caused by socialisation factors.” Rosalind Barnett, senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and Caryl Rivers, journalism professor at Boston University, cited several scientists in their conclusion that there was little biological evidence for sex differences, and that the “anxiety gap” existed not because of biology, but because competent women were seen as bitchy, judged more harshly, and given less credit.35 Suzanne Sadedin, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University, called Damore’s memo “despicable trash,” criticizing it for being intellectually dishonest about its attacks on female inferiority, misrepresenting research on sex differences, and failing to provide evidence of influences on performance in tech.36

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Cordelia Fine, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, thought that the memo “made many dubious assumptions and ignored vast swaths of research that show pervasive discrimination against women.” Nonetheless, she felt sorry for Damore because his points were “very familiar to me as part of my day-to-day research, and are not seen as especially controversial.”37 Similarly, some scholars focused on the validity of the research on gender differences without addressing the effect that science has on perpetuating stereotypes about careers suitable for women. Lee Jussim, professor of social psychology at Rutgers University, said that the memo got “nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right” and was “certainly not a rant. And it stands in sharp contrast to most of the comments [criticisms], which are little more than snarky modern slurs.” Geoffrey Miller, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, stated that “almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately.”38 Debra Soh, a sexual neuroscientist, called the memo “fair and factually accurate,” arguing that there were “sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.” Agreeing with Damore, Soh noted that “gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone—higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood.”39

Responses from scholars cited by Damore in the memo were mixed. Richard Lippa, psychology professor at California State University, called Damore’s summary of psychological differences “reasonably accurate,” and Michael Wiederman, psychology professor at the University of South Carolina, believed that Damore made “reasoned arguments” about why men could be more keen than women to climb the corporate ladder. Catherine Hakim, sociologist at the think tank Civitas, believed that it was “nonsense” to link career outcomes to psychological gender differences. Jüri Allik, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Tartu, said that Damore’s extrapolations of personality research to career outcomes were “risky” and that gender differences in his research were “very, very small.”40 David Schmitt, psychology professor at Bradley University and founding director of the International Sexuality Description Project, affirmed Damore’s conclusions drawing from cross-cultural data on personality differences; however, he was hesitant to link personality directly to occupational differences between sexes. Schmitt did emphasize that occupational differences were quite large and that nations that treated women more equally saw larger, not smaller, differences in personality traits and occupational preferences.41

DIVERSITY IN TECHNOLOGY

Diversity at Google

Google had grown to more than 75,000 employees by 2017.42 Women made up 30.8 per cent of Google’s overall workforce in 2017; only 2.5 per cent of the company’s employees were black and only 3.6 per cent were Hispanic or Latinx. Though the percentage of women in Google’s workforce had changed little since 2014 (when it was 30.6 per cent), the percentage of women in leadership and tech roles improved between 2014 and 2017, going from 20.8 to 24.5 per cent in leadership and from 16.6 to 20.2 per cent in tech, compared with 48.1 to 48.4 per cent in non-tech roles (e.g., HR, marketing, and accounting). Attrition among women was lower than for men, but gains in female representation were being made mainly among white and Asian women.43 These figures compared unflatteringly to figures from the tech industry and the private sector as a whole; female representation was 36 per cent in tech and 48 per cent in the private workforce overall. Black employees represented 7.4 per cent of tech staff and 14.4 per cent of the overall workforce, and Hispanic and Latinx employees represented 8.0 per cent and 13.9 per cent, respectively.44

In view of the relatively flat trends in the overall workforce, it was unclear where Google could make improvements, whether by addressing internal biases or processes, or by working further upstream at the sources of female candidates. Such trends did not seem to accord with the substantial sum of

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US$265 million it had spent on diversity programs over 2014 and 2015. The company eventually stopped divulging its spending figures.45

In the wake of Damore’s memo, female employees became vocal about the nature of their experiences. Wojcicki, one of Google’s first employees, shared her experiences in Fortune, which had named her the 16th most powerful woman in 2016:46

I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt.47

Another woman expressed hurt and frustration over years of getting caught up in internal discussion threads “where men were louder than women on gender-bias and discrimination issues.” She attributed the problem with “discrimination, harassment, and mental violence” to hiring for a certain male stereotype that was not compatible with a hospitable environment for women.48

As a federal contractor required to conform to equal opportunity requirements, Google had been involved in a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Labor that alleged that Google was underpaying women. The day Damore was fired, a representative of the Department of Labor testified in court about the ongoing investigation into Google. The department had found “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce” at Google and “compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.” Within a month, Google was served with a class-action lawsuit launched by three underpaid women who said that they were placed at lower job levels and denied promotions and moves that c

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