In a letter posted on LinkedIn on January 5, David W. Baker, director of engineering at Google who worked with confidence and security, wrote that he was leaving the company on January 19, after more than 16 years. Gebru’s departure, Baker wrote, “extinguished my desire to continue as a googler.” Likewise, Vinesh Kannan, a software engineer,
published on twitter
Wednesday he left Google this month “because of the mistreatment” of Gebru and April Curley, a black former Google diversity recruiter who in December
tweeted that she had been fired after retaliating because she repeatedly advocated that the company hire qualified black graduates.
Kannan did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with CNN Business, Baker said he reached the point of exhaustion when trying to improve the company’s culture.
“Someone as incredible as Timnit should be working at Google. It is important that she is there, ”he said. “And Google was unable to keep you employed, period.”
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on Kannan or Baker’s layoffs, that were first reported by Reuters. She pointed to an earlier response from the company regarding Curley who said that Google does not “agree with the way April describes his resignation, but it is not appropriate for us to provide a comment on his allegations”.
Until early December, when she abruptly left the company, Gebru was the co-leader of the Google AI team. A pioneer in AI prejudice and inequality research, she was also one of the few black employees in the company at large (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the company’s annual diversity report in 2020) – more in your AI division. The researcher is also a co-founder of the Black in AI group, which aims to increase the representation of black people in the area.
Gebru initially tweeted that she had been “immediately fired” for an email she recently sent to Google’s internal Brain Women and Allies mailing list. In the email, she expressed dismay at the continued lack of diversity in the company and frustration with an internal process related to the review of an unpublished research article of her co-authorship.
In subsequent tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly said she was fired. Instead, she said that Google would not meet a number of her conditions for returning and accepted her resignation immediately because she felt her email reflected “behavior inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager”.
Gebru’s sudden departure sparked anger among many Google employees and others in the technology industry, which continues to boil months later. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo to Google (GOOG)soon after she left that the company would investigate what happened.
Kannan tweeted on Wednesday that the two women’s exits “crossed a personal red line” that he wrote when he started working at Google – the red line, he wrote, was “retaliation against a teammate who stands for something I believe in. “.
“I know I gained a lot from Google, but I also gained a lot from their work, and they were wronged,” he wrote.
Baker wrote: “I joined a company of a few thousand people, who recognized that we had a diversity problem. And despite hiring over 100,000 new faces, we remain a company with a diversity problem.”
As Curley and Gebru talked on Twitter about their experiences at Google, HBCU 20×20, a network of jobs for historically black college and university graduates, canceled a partnership with Google. Last week, leaders of five HBCUs met with Pichai to talk about the company’s relationship with these schools.
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