Update 8/7/17 9:55 PM: Google software engineer James Damore has been fired, according to report from Bloomberg. Damore told Bloomberg that his termination was the result of “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” Motherboard reached out to Google for confirmation of his firing, but was told that Google could not “comment on individual employee cases.”
Saturday morning, we reported the existence of an anti-diversity memo written by a Google software engineer that was shared widely within the company. Later that day, Gizmodo published the full text of the document, though the hyperlinks and charts were missing.
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Motherboard has obtained the full document with all charts and hyperlinks intact. The entire memo including its sourcing and charts are presented in full later in this article.
The complete document, which is presented as the thoughts of James Damore, a software engineer at the company, offers a fuller picture of how the author sourced his arguments.
The author used Wikipedia entries, blog posts, academic research, and links to discussion boards and other internal threads available to Google employees (which Motherboard could not gain access to) in order to source his memo. The author also used news articles from outlets like The Wall Street Journal , The Atlantic and The New Yorker , as well as smaller publications like libertarian magazine Quillette .
The document also uses this graph, which is not explicitly sourced or explained:
It also includes this chart:
The document also linked to a Google Group called “coffee beans.” Motherboard confirmed with a current Google employee that this is a group that’s used to internally discuss diversity hiring.
Motherboard received several copies of the document from multiple sources in our SecureDrop. The documents we received vary slightly because of the method or time they were scraped from the original Google Doc document. For instance, one of the copies we received did not have footnotes, another had extra hyperlinks. We are publishing the most comprehensive version we received in PDF form. Motherboard has recreated the document from scratch in order to strip the document’s metadata; it has otherwise been unaltered. The links may not work depending on what browser you are using—if you download the full PDF, they should work.
Motherboard cross-checked the document we are posting with sources within Google, who confirmed that it is the same one that has been widely circulated inside the company. Employees at Google also confirmed that James Damore, the name signed in the document, continued to discuss the themes contained within the document on internal discussion boards at the company through at least Sunday. These sources agreed to speak to Motherboard on the condition of anonymity, because Google has a notoriously strict confidentiality agreement.
The original document, posted on Google Docs, contains comments from Damore as well as other Google employees. It’s possible that the document has continued to be edited since we have received it. Motherboard has not been able to access the comments in the original Google Doc document.
Motherboard emailed Damore for comment five times over the weekend and before publication on Monday. He did not return any of our emails in time for publication. We asked Google about how it plans to address internal backlash to the document and Damore. We were directed to Saturday’s statement from Danielle Brown, VP of Diversity, Integrity and Governance at Google, which said the document “advanced incorrect assumptions about gender,” but that part of Google’s plans for building an open environment involve “including different political views.”
Motherboard has a SecureDrop and its reporters are on Signal and other secure communication platforms.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai contributed reporting.
