A Radioactive Lawsuit?

James Damore wrote a memo while employed at Google suggesting that perhaps the reason there wasn’t more diversity among the firm’s employees was that women and minorities were less likely to be geeks who love to code. For this reasonable supposition he was fired and publicly shamed.

Now, Megan McArdle writes for Bloomberg View:

He’s joined with a conservative lawyer to bring a class action against the company, accusing it of discriminating against conservatives, Caucasians and men.

There are expensive, time-consuming, exasperating lawsuits, and then there are radioactive lawsuits that poison everyone who comes within a mile of them. And this lawsuit almost certainly falls into the latter category.

Perhaps Google thinks its market position is so strong that it doesn’t have to worry about piddly things like whether its employees spend a great deal of time using internal systems to slander half the company’s American customer base. 

McArdle’s whole article is worth your time, if bias in Silicon Valley interests you.