A former Google employee sued the Alphabet-owned company on Wednesday over alleged discrimination, retaliation, harassment, and wrongful termination. One Tim Chevalier claims he was laid off for internally speaking out against sexism and racism within the firm’s ranks following the controversy sparked by a diversity memo authored by one James Damore last year. The plaintiff who identifies as transgender and queer is accusing Google of not protecting its LGBTQ and other minority employees from being harassed on the company’s internal forums yet promptly sanctioning those who drew attention to such issues.
Chevalier was fired by the Mountain View, California-based tech giant last November after spending two years with the firm’s San Francisco division, having worked as a Software Engineer for Site Reliability Engineering since December of 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile. Gizmodo reports three other Googlers were disciplined for their efforts to internally draw attention to the issue of discrimination within the company’s ranks after its HR officials are said to have deemed their actions discriminatory toward white men. Some such incidents are said to have occurred even before Damore’s memo was leaked last summer but the ordeal surrounding the controversial document that argued women are biologically less likely to succeed in engineering positions than men is understood to have prompted a more aggressive crackdown on employees getting actively involved in the debate, regardless of their beliefs.
In response to Gizmodo’s report, a Google spokesperson said the company values debate but requires all employees to communicate in accordance with its code of conduct, adding that it handles related transgressions regardless of the political views of policy violators. Chevalier previously authored a blog post criticizing Damore’s memo and comparing it to manifestos authored by domestic abusers and mass killers such as Eliot Rodger. Google is reportedly still struggling with enabling a healthy debate on such issues, as suggested by the newly emerged lawsuit. The litigation was filed with San Francisco-based Superior Court of the State of California and has yet to be reviewed by the judicial body. Chevalier is suing for reinstatement and various damages, as well as a court prohibition of further discrimination or retaliation on Google’s part.