Google’s co-lead of Ethical AI team says she was fired for sending an email
Megan Rose Dickey
The email in question, obtained by Casey Newton, discussed how Gebru was disappointed in how her organization had, “After all this talk,” only hired 14% or so women this year, she wrote. She pointed to how Samy Bengio, who leads a group of researchers inside the Google Brain team, hired 39% women but that there is no incentive for him to do so. She added:
What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. Because there is zero accountability. There is no incentive to hire 39% women: your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to give you good ratings during calibration. There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.
Gebru says no one explicitly told her she was fired, but that she received an email from one of her boss’s reports, saying:
“Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation.”
That email, according to Gebru, went on to say that “certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/03/googles-co-lead-of-ethical-ai-team-says-she-was-fired-for-sending-an-email/Remember if fifty percent of the population is female then fifty percent of programmers must also be female. The same holds true for minorities and all job functions. Big tech make it so.
I look forward to more incidents like this as big tech becomes more diversified.
