The Lessons of James Damore
James Damore was just a shy Google engineer who excelled at his job when he made media headlines for writing what has been referred to as the “Google memo” in July 2017. He wrote the memo after attending diversity programs at Google and learning the organizers solicited feedback. In the ten-page document, which he shared on an internal mailing list, he objected to the company’s core assumptions behind its diversity initiatives and its left-leaning bias, titling the memo “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” According to Damore, Google presented itself as being genuinely very open to feedback, and he drafted and shared the memo in good faith. “I really thought that there were elements of the culture that were harming Google, and I wanted to improve it,” he told me in a recent conversation.
One of the areas of the memo to get the strongest attention was Damore’s claim that men were better represented in tech than women due to biological differences — namely, that “more men may like coding because it requires systemizing” and “women, on average, have more . . . openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas.” He added that women also tend to have more interest in people than things and thus “prefer jobs in social and artistic areas” and that they are “more prone to anxiety” and thus, on average, may be less likely to perform well in stressful tech jobs. He suggested that the workplace can be better adapted to these differences, such as by making positions less stressful, without having to engage in what is popularly called reverse discrimination. Among the practices Damore found discriminatory were those that led to the favoring of people with a certain gender or race, whether in mentoring programs or in hiring practices.
Damore didn’t anticipate the reaction that ensued. “I knew that there would be some people that would disagree as [they do] with nearly everything, and [because my memo] was against the status quo, but I definitely didn’t anticipate it growing into what it was.” When a version of the memo was published by Gizmodo and traveled across social media, controversy and public criticism ensued. Although some praised his arguments — including some academics — Google quickly released a statement saying that the memo advanced a viewpoint that the company did not endorse, promote, or encourage and eventually fired Damore for violating its code of conduct. In turn, Damore filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board but later withdrew it. He then filed a class action lawsuit but ultimately ended up pursuing private arbitration against Google. Ultimately, “both parties agreed to end the case,” says Damore. “Read into that as you will.”
What’s particularly interesting is that the lens through which Damore’s case was seen was so extreme. Either he was vilified as a misogynistic hater of women, or he was standing up to Google and was absolutely correct. There wasn’t much room for nuance or a rational conversation — and the whole incident seemed far more controversial than it perhaps needed to be.
“Part of that, I think, is just the Internet and social media and how it has transformed how we think about people from certain political affiliations,” says Damore. “If you say, ‘Oh, yeah, I think this part was right, or this part was wrong,’ then you’re automatically ceding ground to the other side, and you are seen as a traitor, and there’s just this amalgamation of different traits that we associate with the other side. And so, I think that part of it was that it was seen as sort of a battle that needs to be won rather than something where the truth needs to be determined.”
In the media coverage, there was a lot of oversimplification and incorrect parsing of Damore’s argument. Some had claimed that he had said that women are not as biologically suited for coding jobs as men — which is not exactly an accurate depiction of his words. “I think there are definitely inaccuracies,” he says. “Part of that is that it was a complicated subject, and people wanted to quickly write articles, and so there was a lot of copy and pasting and just using the same quotes.” Sometimes, he’d notice that an article would quote his memo incorrectly, and then another article on a different website would have that same quote wrong. It was the Internet’s version of broken telephone. “I’d see whole paragraphs kind of copy and pasted,” he says, “and I think that once there is a certain narrative, then it’s easier to build on that rather than trying to create your own.”
Another part of it is that there’s something in certain people that makes them want to have villains out there. “People who are fighting for a certain cause want there to be villains to fight against,” he says. “So they are not necessarily going to look too deeply into whether he is really that bad or evil, [or] what was the context of this quote. What was his intention in saying this?” It’s easier to have the villain uncomplicated — just bad.
Knowing what he knows now, does Damore regret writing the memo and being shoved into the media circus that ensued? “Oh, it’s hard to regret things because so much of my life would be different,” he says.
He did enjoy his time at Google, though. He got to learn, was paid well, and worked on interesting problems. But the whole experience taught him some valuable lessons. “At the very least,” he says, “[it] pushed me out of my comfort zone.”
He does think that, in retrospect, he probably would have added some things and removed others from the memo — and there’s always the lingering potential of not doing it at all, but then he wouldn’t be living the life that he is now and wouldn’t know the new people in his life.
He attributes his lack of reluctance to write the memo in the first place to his own social naivety. As someone on the autism spectrum, he did not fully understand office politics. And as someone with a scientific background and an obsessive mind, he approached the subject analytically, he says, rooting himself in academic literature to help find a solution to the two questions at the heart of the problem — specifically, why is there a gap in representation in tech and what, if anything, can help narrow this gap? These two questions, in turn, led him to consider a third question that had been gnawing at him: how could these problems be solved without Google resorting to anything illegal or discriminatory?
Based on the prevailing culture at Google, this question weighed heavily on Damore. At the most basic level, he simply wanted to have an open discussion about the issue of representation, which required calling attention to Google’s own biases.
What did he learn from his experience? “Just seeing how some of the media works, getting to hear from so many people, and I guess maybe gain some modesty from it all too — the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know things.” Unlike some who have faced a very public media backlash, Damore, who has always pretty much spoken his mind, didn’t really lose friends during the ordeal. “Anyone that knew me knew who I was and that I’m not like whatever they’re painting me as. If you know me, then you also read the whole thing in a different light.”
He recalls someone in the media telling him in the midst of the uproar that once people saw him, they’d get a completely different picture of the whole controversy — simply because the way he was being painted was so inaccurate. Damore is soft-spoken and polite, nothing like the arrogant “tech bro” image that might come to mind for someone relying on media depictions.
Although Google fired Damore rather quickly and he didn’t get to witness the aftermath at the company directly, he did get many private messages of support. Part of what made Google such a convenient home for an ideological echo chamber, says Damore, is that they have a lot of young people who are often recruited right out of colleges where the culture has been shifting dramatically. “They have grown in power very recently, and so there’s not necessarily a set tradition on how the company or employees should act. So it may just set the landscape to have them try to lay their own ground, and perhaps pursue moral goals more readily than a more established business because they don’t need to be so profit-focused.”
According to Damore, Google didn’t have to focus so much on business goals when he was there because they didn’t have much in the way of competition, so instead, it focused on moralistic goals. Meanwhile, if you take “a random grocery store or something, they have a ton of competition, and what they care most about is just the profit margin. While [Google is] just printing money.” This choice on Google’s part wasn’t necessarily a poor strategy. It gave Google an advantage when it came to recruitment. Indeed, it is not uncommon for companies to see this alignment of morals and commerce as a recruiting tool. This was even a consideration for Damore himself.
“I did not want to join a lot of different tech companies because I felt like they were a net negative to the world,” he says. “I found Google was contributing, and I really liked their motto of just making the world’s information universally accessible. There’s a lot of talented people that will take a pay cut to join a company with conditions that they believe in.”
Another contributing factor that led to the monoculture at Google is that, like many tech companies, it has its own internal social media. This means that it’s much easier for echo chambers to be magnified within the company and to cause adverse effects across the company. “I do think that it was a negative for the culture to be so silencing and harassing of particular sections of the company,” he says.
The silencing of anyone who questioned the company’s particular moral approach was enabled, in large part, by the company’s internal social media. When mobs can so easily be formed within companies, many employees with differing opinions might hesitate to speak up altogether. That means that the companies won’t hear any counters to their policies. Employees won’t question anything. “And you really do need people to question what’s happening because . . . somewhat ironically, the diversity things totally backfire in situations where you can’t speak your mind. People need to be able to feel safe and work across differences. If they can’t, if they’re constantly walking on eggshells, they can’t effectively work with others—especially others that they see as potentially different.”
This can also lead to a more superficial, distanced work environment among colleagues since everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. “I remember seeing articles where it [listed] things you can and cannot say in the office,” recalls Damore. “And it was being totally serious.” The articles essentially said that you can’t ask anyone about their personal life or share anything personal. “And it’s like, okay, wow, you just never get to know anyone.”
One of Google’s justifications for firing Damore was that, through his words, he had contributed to creating a culture that was not “work safe,” particularly for women, so it was necessary to fire him to protect Google’s employees. Of course, any given individual can consider anything unsafe when it comes to words. For Damore, a safe work environment doesn’t imply that a company must protect people from words but rather the opposite. “I think one necessary ingredient is the feeling that you can speak your mind without being unfairly judged and where your failures aren’t seen as inherent flaws in yourself. Rather, just failures that can be learned from.”
When people are afraid to speak their minds, the ideas and attitudes found in the echo chambers that arise, especially those found on social media, do not align with the ideas and attitudes of the broader public. “I never meet people in real life that are like what I see online,” says Damore. Within Google’s own social media echo chamber, Damore would often see the same five or six people posting the same things and commenting on their own posts. “It was really weird to see that those five people represent so much of the volume of what was online within the company.”
Damore also believes that a lot of the counterproductive behavior that we see online is much less common in person and that having more difficult conversations in person might be a better approach: “I think that there’s likely techniques to deescalate a conversation, make it less of a battle and more of a discussion. And I think also just asking yourself why you’re having a conversation: Is it to try to prove them wrong or is it to understand them better? Is it to change their mind?”
After Damore was fired so publicly from Google, he looked for other work opportunities. He partook in over twenty anonymous interviews, and he passed every single one of them. “But as soon as I got to the stage where I had to give them my name, they wouldn’t talk to me at all.” Some employment websites even deleted his account. He had to move out of California. He landed at a startup for a while and has been spending time working on game design, learning Spanish, and dabbling in AI. He has some financial independence at this point, and it has afforded him freedom that many do not have. But it’s important to remember that he could have just as easily ended up with no means of support.
Since his firing, Damore has been asked to speak on various panels. While participating on a panel at Portland State University with evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, philosopher Peter Boghossian, and cultural writer Helen Pluckrose, a protester literally attempted to pull the plug on the event by pulling cables on the sound system and breaking an antenna. But Damore has more compassion for the protester than one might think. “If they don’t feel like they have a voice, and if they think that I am causing harm and that this is the way to reduce that, in some ways, it’s brave of them to do that because they probably got in trouble for doing it. Obviously, I would have preferred them to discuss what they disagreed about, but I think that is also burdening some people with being able to fight the battle on my terms.”
What he means by this is that some people aren’t going to be as skilled or comfortable at debating as others, especially if they are going up against someone who is an expert in their field or someone with a lot of public speaking experience. He’s not saying that the protester’s approach is necessarily correct, but at the same time, he understands their reasons for doing what they did. “I think it’s useful to try to see it from their side.” He uses a more extreme example. What if you were at one of Hitler’s rallies and had the opportunity to sabotage equipment so that he could not give his speech? “In retrospect, many people would see that as the morally correct thing to do,” he says. “There’s no way of debating him or anything.” He adds: “No one really sees themselves as Hitler, but [some] may see [others] as something like that.”
That’s an understatement when hearing many of the accusations that have been thrown rather lightly in today’s environment — not just at Damore but at many others, including those who shared the panel stage with him in Portland. It’s not uncommon for words like “white supremacist” and “Nazi” to be applied rather loosely. “I think we’ve built these narratives of being the oppressed group in some way; anyone can identify with some way of being the underdog. And it’s that power differential that causes you to try to not play fair, potentially, because there’s no way to win if you’re the underdog and you’re playing fair.”
There is certainly a sense that many people see themselves not as underdogs who can persevere no matter the circumstances but rather as victims who can acquire power through their underdog status. “It also releases you from responsibility,” says Damore. “Because then there’s the implication that you don’t have agency in your situation.” You are where you are, and you do what you do because you have no other choice.
For his part, Damore is just trying to keep himself honest and curious. His experience has exposed him to a lot of random “culture war” content that he hadn’t really paid attention to in the past. He certainly views the media differently, as perhaps anyone who looked deeply into the controversy would, but he doesn’t quite see himself as part of the culture war himself and says he feels like the same person he has always been: “It’s hard to say how I’ve really changed. I’m not sure that people necessarily change that much.” He got on Twitter (now X) right after the dramatic events of the Google memo unfolded, but “I’ve kind of backed away from that,” he admits. “I don’t see it as very productive.”
He finds the incentives around the online battles to be unhealthy. For example, if you use X enough, you’ll quickly get a sense of which posts will get more interactions — those around controversial topics do well, not the nuanced ones. “It’s the ones where you make some strong statement that is uncompromising and aligns with what your followers want. But [that’s] not really what I’m going after. I don’t think that’s improving the world.” Not only does it mean that you’re only reaching those who are already on your own side — the converted — but it’s also worse than that. “Other people will see that tweet, and they’ll just see how uncompromising and simple-minded you’re being. [There] will be a backfire effect on anyone whose mind you would be trying to change.”
Still, Damore holds some hope for the future: “I don’t think it needs to hit rock bottom to get better. I think things can just incrementally improve. It’s possible.”
This essay is adapted from No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage—Lessons for the Silenced Majority, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Katherine Brodsky is a commentator and writer who has contributed to publications such as Newsweek, Variety, WIRED, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Esquire, CNN.com, Vulture, Playboy, the Independent, and many others— covering a diverse range of topics ranging from culture to tech. She also writes on her Substack, Random Minds, and can be found on X @mysteriouskat.
July 2024