【2000 Archives】

James Damore000 Archives a fired Google engineer famous for penning a memo that argued lack of diversity in tech is in part because women are biologically inferior to men, has sued his former employer.

Damore was one of two plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit filed on Monday to Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California by Dhillon Law Group. The other plaintiff is David Gudeman, another former Google who worked at the company until December 2016.

As a class action lawsuit, the suit welcomes all former or current Google employee who have been discriminated against due to being white, male, or having "unpopular political views" to join.

Damore was fired days after his controversial memo was leaked, spurring a fierce debate across Silicon Valley and more widely on whether or not Google's response to fire Damore was right course of action.

"I agree that there is an ideological echo chamber inside Google (I’m a SWE there)," one self-identified Google engineer, called Ida, wrote in a blog post on Y Combinator. "As someone who is generally on the 'correct' side of this liberal echo chamber, it hasn’t affected me much, but I think the vehemence of the reaction to his document proves this point right."

While many have argued there's a bubble in Silicon Valley that contributes to a lack of acceptance of people of color and women, this lawsuit use similar language to focus on discrimination by companies of political viewpoints.

A section of the lawsuit reads:

"Google employees and managers strongly preferred to hear the same orthodoxopinions regurgitated repeatedly, producing an ideological echo chamber, a protected, distorted bubble of groupthink. When Plaintiffs challenged Google’s illegal employment practices, they were openly threatened and subjected to harassment and retaliation from Google. Google created anenvironment of protecting employees who harassed individuals who spoke out against Google’s viewor the “Googley way,” as it is sometimes known internally."

The lawsuit also alleges Google's hiring practices includes "illegal hiring quotas" that favor women and other minority candidates. That practice is "openly denigrating male and Caucasian employees as less favored than others," the lawsuit claimed.

The lawsuit is seeking monetary and non-monetary damages.

UPDATE: Jan. 8, 2018, 5:24 p.m. EST Google issued a statement later on Monday. "We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court," a Google spokesperson wrote in an email to Mashable.