Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday canceled an internal city council to address gender discrimination after employees’ questions to management began filtering online from the company’s internal messaging service.
Pichai said in an e-mail to staff that several Google employees became fearful about their security and grew up worried about being discovered by talking in the city hall.
He said the company will aim to create several other forums “where people can feel comfortable talking freely.” Pichai’s email was sent approximately one hour before the event began on Thursday afternoon.
The City Council intended to hear complaints from employees about a fire that Google has consumed for much of the week. It began last weekend after engineer James Damore circulated a memo stating that biological gender differences helped explain why women are underrepresented in the company.
Google fired Damore on Monday. The engineer has stated that he had the right to express his concerns about the conditions of the workplace and filed a complaint with the labor relations board before being dismissed.
Google’s internal “Dory” system allows employees to ask questions and then vote on questions raised by other employees so that managers can address the most pressing questions. Wired magazine posted some of the questions literally online on Thursday. The screenshots of the questions with names attached had been leaked, though none with names had been posted since Thursday afternoon, a Google spokeswoman said.
Meanwhile, a chart made up of Twitter profiles of several Google employees who were homosexual, lesbian or transgender began to circulate online, assisted by conservative commentators like former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos. That graph drew hundreds of negative comments about the people and the company.
