On Friday night, Vice’s Motherboard reported that a controversial internal memo written by a concerned Google employee was going viral within the company. The memo, titled “PC Considered Harmful” and since dubbed “the Google manifesto” on social media, argued two points: first, that Google has become an ideological echo chamber where anyone with centrist or right-of-center views fears to speak their mind. Second, that part of the tech industry’s gender gap can be attributed to biological differences between men and women.
This news caused an immediate and lasting uproar, both within Google and on public discussion forums like Twitter. The dismay and outrage — and then the inevitable counter-outrage in response to the initial outrage — heated up further when Gizmodo released the full text of the open letter. Critics have primarily focused on the author’s implication that women are less prevalent in software engineering and leadership roles due to the unequal distribution of innate characteristics like spatial reasoning and neuroticism.
Within Google, a few sympathetic employees were dismayed to see the manifesto’s author so vehemently criticized by their colleagues. In a poll distributed on a mailing list dedicated to discussing the manifesto, opinion broke down differently than it did in non-anonymous internal Google Plus posts:
Within Google, the contentious discussion revived a concern dating back to 2015: An unknown number of Google managers evidently keep blacklists of employees who they say they will not work with. The blacklists are based on personal experience with colleagues, including any views they may have expressed on politics, social justice matters, or Google’s diversity operations.
Inc. reviewed screenshots documenting several managers attesting to this practice, explicitly using the term “blacklist,” both in the past and in response to the recent controversy. The screenshots were provided to Inc. by a Google employee who requested anonymity due to having signed an NDA. In the screenshots, one employee declared his intent to quit if the manifesto’s author were not fired, and another said he would refuse to work with the manifesto’s author in any capacity.
A Google spokesperson told Inc. that the practice of keeping blacklists is not condoned by upper management, and that Google employees who discriminate against members of protected classes will be terminated. But it’s not clear whether the threat carries any weight in this circumstance. Although political affiliation is a protected class according to California labor law, the views expressed by the manifesto author and others who oppose political correctness may not qualify.
For the purposes of employment law, the manifesto doesn’t unambiguously qualify as political speech, according to Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, an experienced business and labor lawyer. Rather, it’s what she called “controversial speech.” She added, “These are not insane views that he’s extolling here — they’re [just] out of the mainstream. He’s entitled to hold views that are inconsistent with the mainstream.”
“The question is whether he’s acting on those views in a way that violates discrimination law,” Dhillon explained. Although California has stronger labor protections than most other states, she said, “the cases involving political speech are much more cut-and-dried,” involving conventional political activities like voting for a candidate or running for office.
In other words, the law seems to be of little use in helping Google figure out how to deal with the roiling dissent within its workforce. The company is on its own.