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On Friday night, Vice's Motherboard reported that a controversial internal memo written by a concerned Google employee was going viral within the company. The memo, titled "PC Considered Harmful" and since dubbed "the Google manifesto" on social media, argued two points: First, that Google has become an ideological echo chamber where anyone with centrist or right-of-center views fears to speak his or her mind. Second, that part of the tech industry's gender gap can be attributed to biological differences between men and women.
This news caused an immediate and lasting uproar, both within Google and on public discussion forums like Twitter. The dismay and outrage -- and then the inevitable counter-outrage in response to the initial outrage -- heated up further when Gizmodo released the full text of the open letter. Critics have primarily focused on author James Damore's implication that women are less prevalent in software engineering and leadership roles because of the unequal distribution of innate characteristics like spatial reasoning and neuroticism.
Update: Damore has since been fired, Bloomberg reported.
Within Google, a few sympathetic employees were dismayed to see Damore so vehemently criticized by their colleagues. In a poll distributed on a mailing list dedicated to discussing the manifesto, opinion broke down differently than it did in non-anonymous Google Plus posts:
Comment: Dr. Jordan Peterson interviews James Damore: