In a January 5 letter on LinkedIn, David W. Baker, a Google technical director working on trust and security, wrote that he would be leaving the company on January 19 after more than 16 years. Gebru’s departure, Baker wrote, “destroyed my desire to continue as a Googler.” Likewise Vinesh Kannan, a software engineer, Posted on TwitterOn Wednesday, he left Google this month ‘because of Google’s mistreatment’ of Gebru and April Curley, a black ex-Google diversity recruiter who joined Google in December. tweeted that she had been fired for retaliation for repeatedly advocating for the company to hire qualified graduates from black universities.
Kannan did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with CNN Business, Baker said he was reaching a point of exhaustion to improve the corporate culture.
“Someone as great as Timnit should work at Google. It’s important that she’s there,” he said. “And Google didn’t keep her, period.”
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the dismissal of Kannan or Baker, which were first reported by Reuters. She pointed to a previous response from the company regarding Curley, stating that Google “disagrees with April’s description of its termination, but it is inappropriate for us to comment on its claims.”
Until early December, when she abruptly left the company, Gebru was the co-leader of Google’s Ethical AI team. A pioneer in researching bias and inequality in AI, she was also one of the few black employees at the company overall (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the company’s 2020 annual diversity report) – let alone in the AI division. The research scientist is also a 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 “fired immediately” because of an email she recently sent to Google Brain Women and Allies internal mailing list. In the email, she expressed her dismay at the ongoing lack of diversity within the company and her frustration with an internal process involving the assessment of an unpublished research paper that she was co-authored.
In later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly told her she had been fired. She previously said Google would not meet some of her conditions to return and immediately accepted her resignation because she felt her email reflected “ behavior inconsistent with a Google manager’s expectations. ”
Gebru’s sudden exit sparked anger among many Google employees and others in the tech industry, which continues to simmer months later. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo to Google (GOOG)employees shortly after they left that the company would investigate what happened.
Kannan tweeted Wednesday that the exits of both women “crossed a personal red line,” he wrote 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 gained a lot with Google, but I also gained a lot with both their work and they were wronged,” he wrote.
Baker wrote, “I joined a company of a few thousand people, a company that recognized we had a diversity problem. And despite hiring more than a hundred thousand new faces, we remain a company with a diversity problem.”
Since Curley and Gebru spoke on Twitter about their experience at Google, HBCU 20×20, a job network for graduates of historically black colleges and universities, has canceled a partnership with Google. Last week, leaders of five HBCUs met with Pichai to discuss the company’s relationship with these schools.
