Former Google engineer sues over diversity

In the latest development in a litigious battle over diversity and speech at Google, a former engineer has filed a lawsuit alleging that he was fired for speaking out against James Damore’s controversial memo about gender. According to a report in The Guardian, Tim Chevalier, a site reliability engineer who worked for Google until November 2017, sued his former employer in California state court this week. Chevalier, who identifies as queer, disabled and transgender, alleges that Google fired him over posts he made on internal forums advocating for diversity at Google and criticising Damore. Damore was fired for ‘advancing harmful gender stereotypes’ in August 2017 after the memo, in which he posited that psychological differences between men and women explained the gaping gender imbalance at Google, was leaked and went viral. Damore’s firing became a flashpoint for conservatives, and in January he filed a class action suit alleging that Google discriminated against white male conservatives. The Damore lawsuit included nearly 100 pages of screen shots of internal communications at Google which the suit alleged demonstrated widespread hostility against conservative viewpoints. Google failed to prevent employees from using the internal platforms to discriminate against marginalised groups, Chevalier's suit alleged, allowing Google employees to call LGBT co-workers ‘immoral’ and post statements such as: ‘If we have fewer black and Latin@ people here, doesn’t that mean they’re not as good?’