In a letter posted on LinkedIn on January 5, David W. Baker, Google’s director of engineering and security, wrote that he was leaving the company on January 19 after more than 16 years. Gebru’s departure, Baker writes, “dulled my desire to continue as Googler.” Similarly, Vinesh Kannan, a software engineer,
mailed on Twitter
Wednesday that he left Google this month “due to Google’s abuse” of Gebru and April Curley, a black former Google diversity recruiter who left in December
tweeted that she was fired after experiencing retaliation for repeatedly pleading for the company to hire qualified black college graduates.
Kannan did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with CNN Business, Baker said he had reached a point of exhaustion to improve the company’s culture.
“Someone as amazing as Timnit should work at Google. It’s important that she be there,” he said. “And Google could not employ her, period.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment on Kannan or Baker’s resignations, which was first reported by Reuters. She pointed to a previous response from Curley, who said that Google “does not agree with the way April describes her termination, but it is not appropriate for us to comment on her allegations.”
Until early December, when she abruptly left the company, Gebru was the co-leader of Google’s Ethical AI team. She was a pioneer in researching bias and inequality in AI, and was also one of the few black employees at the company (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the 2020 annual diversity report) – which is still too says in the AI section. The research scientist is also co-founder of the group Black in AI, which aims to increase the representation of black people in the field.
Gebru initially tweeted that she was “immediately fired” for an email she recently sent to Google’s internal mailing list of Brain Women and Allies. In the email, she expressed dismay at the ongoing lack of diversity at the company and frustration over an internal process related to the revision of a research article she has not yet published.
In later tweets, Gebru explained that no one at Google had explicitly told her she was fired. On the contrary, she said that Google would not meet some of her conditions for return, and accepted her resignation immediately because she believed that her email’s reflects behavior that is not in line with Google’s expectations. -manager ‘.
Gebru’s sudden exit has sparked outrage among many Google employees and others in the tech industry, which is still simmering months later. Sundar Pichai, CEO, in a memo to Google (GOOG)employees shortly after she left that the company would investigate what happened.
Kannan tweeted on Wednesday that the outcomes of both women crossed a ‘personal red line’ he wrote down when he started working at Google. The red line, he wrote, was’ retaliation against a teammate who stands up for something I believe in. ‘
“I know I got a lot from Google, but I also earned a lot from both of their jobs, and they were wronged,” he wrote.
Baker writes: ‘I have joined a few thousand people, one who acknowledges that we have a diversity problem. And despite employing more than a hundred thousand new faces, we remain a business with a diversity problem. ‘
As Curley and Gebru commented on Twitter about their experiences at Google, HBCU 20×20, a work network for graduates of historic black colleges and universities, has canceled a partnership with Google. Last week, leaders from five HBCUs met with Pichai to talk about the company’s relationship with these schools.
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