Unless the fine/settlement is cheaper than keeping him, which it likely will be unless it results in some larger investigation or monitoring program.

If somebody elects to break the law because it was cheaper (even if caught), the law has to change to make it more expensive. Also, if it is perceived widely that Google broke the law, "do no evil" is out the window. That would cost them dearly.

Damore can claim he was protecting the company, but if the effect of what he said in his memo is causing the opposite of that, then it can be a fire-able offense, regardless of what he said he was trying to do.

It's not about whether Damore was trying to protect the company, it's about whether Damore was communicating with his coworkers about ways to improve working conditions. It is illegal to fire someone for doing so. Damore presents several ideas about improving working conditions, claiming this would also increase diversity. If I was paranoid I'd say he wrote the memo with the possibility of being illegally fired in mind, because it appears to have been written carefully with that angle in mind.

If you are trying to improve working conditions, and in doing so creating a hostile working environment, your employer is obligated to fire you. If they don't, they can be sued by other employees.

And let me tell you, while you may not feel that this memo has created a hostile working environment, a lot of other people do. Google would drown in lawsuits if they let him stay on.

But would such lawsuits succeed?

I don't see how you can argue that a single guy who isn't in management writing a memo creates a "hostile work environment". Most of the people complaining wouldn't even be working with him at all. They can file lawsuits but would they hold water? After all, management could just tell the lawsuit filers to be more tolerant of others: it's not like Damore was attacking individuals.

So I don't see where Google's obligation to fire him comes from. Unpopularity with other employees does not make a legal obligation.

On the other hand, firing someone who is trying to raise possibly illegal conduct with management does have legal implications.

> I don't see how you can argue that a single guy who isn't in management writing a memo creates a "hostile work environment".

Employment law makes it very clear that person creating a hostile work environment doesn't have to be a manager. They can be a co-worker, a client, or a contractor.

If you are correct, and I am not saying you're wrong, the term is so vague that more or less any disagreement that gets a bit personal could be considered creating a hostile work environment. No company would be able to operate in a situation where any disagreement could be leveraged to get the other person instantly fired, regardless of level or what the comments were about.

The legal definitions of a hostile work environment is not simply based on how something makes you feel. It is very unlikely a hostile work environment suit for not firing Damore based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.

> The legal definitions of a hostile work environment is not simply based on how something makes you feel.

No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less successful because of their biology. [1]

> It is very unlikely a hostile work environment for not firing him based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.

Any employment lawyers want to chime in on this?

[1] "For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."

> No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less successful because of their biology

He never claimed that the women in tech are worse at tech than the men in tech. He just claimed that there would be fewer of them.

I am not a lawyer. I'm just a guy who takes my employment rights seriously and has always tried to be up-to-date and understand them.

From my understanding, a hostile work environment is created when a reasonable person would interpret actions or speech as hostile, offensive, or intimidating, and such actions are not a one-time event, but frequent, severe, and pervasive, and they must be so serious as to change the conditions of your employment. Keeping in mind that terms like "reasonable person" are legal terms and we're not dealing in colloquialisms, it's hard to see how this memo could be interpreted by a judge as creating a hostile work environment.

Again, that's not to say people can't try to sue anyway, but in that case, there are plenty of people on the other side of the story Google should be worried about suing as well, since there appears to be some minority of (white, male) Google employees who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are persecuted due to their gender and race, and they also claim there are written communications at Google they interpret as denigrating them. I don't think they have much of a chance either.

> No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less common in tech because of their biology

FTFY to better reflect the fact that the memo was about distribution, not success.

Are men less successful in nursing or just less common?