In the days since James Damore’s now-infamous anti-diversity memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” went viral, we’ve learned quite a bit about the once-anonymous engineer.
Damore’s name first appeared in early this week, when he confirmed that he had in fact been fired by Google for publishing the memo, which questions the company’s pro-diversity policies and suggests that biological differences between men and women contribute to the gender gap in the tech industry.
Here’s a look at what we know about him so far:
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1. He’s planning to take “legal action” against Google. He submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board before shortly before he was fired Monday; he told the New York Times that Google’s upper management was “misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.” Legal opinions are mixed, but the bottom line, according to three legal experts interviewed by Coins2Day, is that he has an “uphill, but not impossible case.”
2. He gave his first interview to an anti-feminist. In an interview with right-wing YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux (recent videos include “Why Feminists Hate Men: What They Won’t Tell You“), Damore described going to a diversity training session at his employer shortly before writing his memo. “I went to a diversity program at Google. It was … not recorded, totally secretive. I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions there. There was lots of just shaming and, ‘No you can’t say that — that’s sexist,’ and, ‘You can’t do this.'”
3. Julian Assange offered him a job. The WikiLeaks founder tweeted Tuesday that “censorship is for losers.”
1/ Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore. Https://t.co/tmrflE72p3
— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) August 8, 2017
4. He allegedly misrepresented his education on his LinkedIn profile. Business Insider reports that Damore changed his professional footprint yesterday, downgrading his Harvard doctorate degree in systems biology to master of science. A Harvard spokesperson confirmed to the publication that while Damore was enrolled in the PhD program, he hasn’t completed the degree.
5. But that’s not to say he hasn’t spent a lot of time at universities. Before Harvard, Damore spent time as a researcher at Princeton, Harvard & MIT, according to his CV. He finished undergrad at the University of Illinois.
6. He’s not the biggest fan of talking to people. In a Facebook post from a few years ago, Damore wrote: “I try not to interact with other people, but when I do I keep to a minimum of three conversations at once: two spoken languages and sign language.” He’s also not one for pleasantries and advises his social network to “Start all phone conversations with “Talk to me.” End all real life conversations by sprinting away without time-wasting pleasantries like “bye,” or the vapid waste of another precious syllable in “goodbye.”
