The culture war rages on at Google. James Damore, who penned the infamous anti-diversity memo, finally slapped Google with a lawsuit last month. Now, another former engineer, Tim Chevalier, is suing Google, accusing the tech giant of firing him for advocating for diversity efforts and criticizing Damore’s memo.
Chevalier, who identifies as queer and transgender, reportedly called the memo “misogynistic” on internal message boards and offered “politically liberal views to the ongoing political debates between Googlers.” In fact, many of Chevalier’s posts made appearances in Damore’s suit, wielded as evidence that Google discriminated against white men.
In Chevalier’s suit, he claims an HR worker at Google met with him in September to raise concerns over his internal posts; six weeks later, Chevalier was fired. One of the posts questioned by the HR representative was an internal Google+ post in which Chevalier criticized Republicans for “affiliating themselves” with the white supremacists at the Charlottesville protest. In another post, he criticized “white boys” for expecting privilege and was told that might be “perceived as a generalization about race and gender.”
“It is a cruel irony,” Chevalier said in a statement, “that Google attempted to justify firing me by claiming that my social networking posts showed bias against my harassers.” Google, of course, argued that while “lively debate” is important to the company, “that doesn’t mean anything goes.” Indeed.
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