News and Commentary

Fired Google Engineer James Damore Dropped His Lawsuit Against Company

   DailyWire.com
James Damore, a former Google employee who wrote a controversial diversity memo, appears alongside attorney Harmeet Dhillon during a press conference Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif., announcing a lawsuit against his former employer.
Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group via Getty Images

James Damore, the Google engineer fired in 2017 for his views on gender diversity, has agreed to drop his lawsuit against the company.

The dropping of the lawsuit, which Damore filed in 2018 and rattled Silicon Valley, went largely unnoticed last week. Bloomberg and just a few other outlets had the story, a far cry from the media attention Damore received when he was fired and when he filed the lawsuit.

Bloomberg reported that Damore and three other men, who either worked for or applied for jobs at Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, asked a court to dismiss their class-action lawsuit in a joint written request with Google.

Harmeet Dhillon, who represented the men, told Bloomberg that neither she nor the men could say anything about the situation as part of their agreement with Google. When asked by The Daily Wire why the word “settlement” was missing from news reports about the dismissal, Dhillon said “that language was negotiated between the parties and that is what I can say. And what they are permitted to say.”

Damore was fired after writing an internal memo critical of Google’s gender diversity hiring policies, suggesting that biological differences between men and women may keep women from entering the tech world. His private company memo was leaked to the media, which characterized it as sexist, misogynist, and bigoted, rather than addressing the scientific inquiries Damore discussed. Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro explained back in 2017 several differences between what was actually written in the memo and how the media portrayed it.

Damore alleged in his lawsuit that “employees 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/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights.”

As The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti previously reported, Damore insisted in his lawsuit that Google encourages bias against conservatives, mandating employees act in the “Googly way” by adhering to behavioral restrictions and policies allegedly meant to cut down on bias.

“He also suggests that Google employees demonstrated a clear ‘anti-conservative bias,’ and along with his complaint, he’s filed a list of emails that allegedly include evidence of Google’s cultural derision toward libertarian ideals,” Zanotti wrote.

The lawsuit eventually became a class action, though a judge wrote that the group was unlikely to prevail on the “novel” theory that the company was biased against “political conservatives,” Bloomberg reported. Google claimed the label was too vague.

Dhillon told Bloomberg that the lawsuit still had an impact, causing Silicon Valley companies to add protections for workers with differing viewpoints. Still, Dhillon doubted Google has changed its ideas about conservatives.

“I think the bullies pretty much run the shop over there,” she told Bloomberg. “Google has the most brutal ‘Lord of the Flies’ workplace for people who don’t fit it.”

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member 

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