Google employees are up in arms after a senior engineer at the company penned an anti-diversity manifesto that has spread through the company like wildfire.
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A senior engineer at Google wrote a manifesto against diversity and employees are furious (GOOG, GOOGL)
The document, which was shared widely within the company, reportedly said biological differences are responsible for the lack of women in the tech workforce.
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The manifesto criticizes company initiatives aimed at increasing gender and racial diversity and argues that Google should instead focus on "ideological diversity," according to a report by Vice's Motherboard, which first reported the news late on Friday. The 10-page treatise also claims that biological difference between men and women are responsible for the underrepresentation of women in the tech industry.
News of the document has sparked widespread outrage on the internet, including by several Google employees who took to Twitter to denounce it.
The controversy comes at a time when Silicon Valley's treatment of women has been in the spotlight, following a string of allegations of harassment and discrimination at large companies such as Uber and at several high-profile venture capital firms. Google is also embroiled in a legal dispute with the Department of Labor, which has accused Google of "systemic compensation disparities" between men and women.
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At the same time, the incident comes against a backdrop of heightened discord throughout the country as once-marginalized views of the so-called alt-right, which decry "political correctness," have been amplified and championed by many supporters of President Trump.
Indeed, the Google engineer wrote that the company must "stop alienating conservatives."
"In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves," the author goes on to say.
The Motherboard report did not identify the author of the controversial document but said that it was written by a senior software engineer and shared on an internal Google mailing list.
A Google spokesperson referred Business Insider to internal memos posted by Google's head of diverisity, Danielle Brown, as well as to an internal post by Ari Balogh, a Google VP of engineering.
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