Google cancels all-hands diversity meeting over safety concerns
Google feared questioners would face threats if their names leaked online.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has abruptly canceled a company-wide meeting, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, that was intended to address employee questions about the company's diversity policies.
Questions submitted by employees on the company's internal network "appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in an e-mail announcing the cancellation. "Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be 'outed' publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall."
It's the latest PR headache for a company that has been caught in a no-win situation since a controversial internal memo written by mid-level Google engineer James Damore surfaced over the weekend.
The memo argued that biological differences partly explain the lopsided gender ratio in technology and management positions at Google. Google officials quickly distanced themselves from the memo before firing Damore. That won praise from some liberals, but it also created a backlash among more conservative employees at Google as well as from so-called "alt-right" activists outside the company.
Google employees hold a wide range of political views. "There are people of all political stripes, and there's outrage at the extreme of both ends of the spectrum and more sanity in the middle," one Googler told the Journal.
Thursday's all-hands meeting was intended to be an opportunity to calm the furor within the company by giving management a chance to address common questions and concerns. Employees were given a chance to submit questions and to vote on which questions should be put to Google executives. The questions were wide-ranging, with some challenging Google on its underwhelming diversity record while others questioned the justification for Damore's firing.
Google leadership hoped that "sanity in the middle" would prevail once leadership had a chance to explain its policies to rank-and-file employees. But now the meeting has been cancelled due to fears that participants would face harassment from outside the company.
Here's Google CEO Sundar Pichai's full memo to Google employees announcing the cancellation:
