Fired Engineer Thinks Being Conservative Is The Same As Being Gay In The 1950's

James Damore, the software engineer who recent lost his job at Google over a controversial memo, this week compared being a conservative at the tech giant to “being gay in the 1950s.”

Damore told Business Insider that conservatives at Google are forced to “stay in the closet” and that he was fired for “wrong-think.”

“I was simply trying to fix the culture in many ways. And really help a lot of people who are currently marginalized at Google by pointing out these huge biases that we have in this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves. Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s,” he said.

“These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that's a huge problem because there's open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative.”

In his 10-page memo, Damore claims that the gender gap in the tech sector is due to biological differences between men and women, not discrimination.

Google said that Damore was fired because he violated the company's Code of Conduct.

“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees. “It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”

Damore said that he was fired because he holds minority views.

“There is a dominant ideology at Google, and anyone who dissents against that is either shamed or ostracized. And when it became apparent that I wasn't backing down to the shame, they had to fire me,” he said.

Out tech journalist Kara Swisher, the executive editor of Recode.com, fired back on Twitter: “Were you forced into electroshock therapy? No? Were you thrown out of your family? No? Did you lose custody of kids? No? Beaten?”

“It's like comparing yourself to a political prisoner when you get arrested for jaywalking,” she added in a separate tweet.