Harmeet Dhillon, James Damore Appear on FBN’s ‘Cavuto: Coast to Coast’ To Discuss NLRB’s Ruling on Google Discrimination Lawsuit
According to Damore:
It was partly just the shaming within the culture, and also discriminatory practices in hiring. There were many instances of shaming within our culture. If you look through the lawsuit there is hundreds of pages of this just repeated over and over. I wasn’t an isolated incident. Recent surveys suggest about 80% of conservatives feel like they can’t bring up social issues at work in Silicon Valley. It is really unclear what exactly you can or can’t say which adds to the chilling effect.
I simply used the psychological research to explain why there may be fewer women interested in current tech jobs and how we could change the jobs more welcoming to more women. This is a well-founded finding in psychology that women report higher levels of stress on surveys and Google was using that as evidence that women were being discriminated against. I simply wanted to show that women tend to experience more stress and if we make the job just less stressful, less 80-hour weeks we can make it just more appealing to more women.
I actually had many one-on-one conversations [and] a manager suggested that I spread it further. So, it wasn’t clear that this was wrong at all. It was only once it became viral that the company started responding and deannouncing me. They didn’t think long and hard about this. They fired me Monday right after the memo went viral. I repeat over and over in the document we shouldn’t stereotype people and there is large distributions but this is really important in just hearing out why we see certain trends. Google can have their own opinion on this but I think that this is well-founded psychological research and it really should be used if we want to improve the workplace for women.
According to Dhillon:
There’s no denying that there are differences between men and women. So I think that is a legitimate point. A lot of social justice warriors in the work place and outside don’t want to accept that now the question is how do companies deal with it? James was trying to provide constructive solutions. What Google does, what many companies do, is employ quotas mandate hiring of women, despite the fact that only 20% women come out of our engineering institutions. We need to change that as society if we want more women to have those jobs. Quotas are illegal under employment laws. While Google may prefer and have what they call moral imperative, they must abide by the law. There are employment discrimination laws that protect the rights of workers to comment about these issues and to not be discriminated against on the basis of their gender, their race, their sexual orientation, or their viewpoint.
The National Labor Relations Act has a limited scope. What is covered there was a concept called Protected Concerted Activity. In our lawsuit we talk about equal employment norms not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Longstanding precedent in the National Labor Relations Act is that conduct like James’ was protected. At a regional level in San Francisco area, the National Labor Relations Board decided to who have forward with James’s case. We had one lawyer in the National Labor Relations Board who wrote this memo, it is an advice memo, not a ruling, there was no evidence taken, there was in hearing, nobody was sworn. It’s interesting they released the thing month after they wrote it. It was odd and gratuitous for them to do that. James doesn’t have a case in front of the National Labor Relations Board anymore. We withdrew that charge and focused on the class action lawsuit. Google didn’t lobby them to restrict worker rights.
