In a letter sent to LinkedIn on January 5, David W. Baker, a Google engineering director who worked on trust and security, wrote that he would leave the company on January 19 after more than 16 years. Gebru’s departure, Baker wrote, “extinguished my desire to continue as a Google.” Similarly, Vinesh Kannan, a software engineer,
published on Twitter
On Wednesday he left Google this month “because of the abuse” of Gebru and April Curley, a former black diversity recruiter from Google who in December
he tweeted who had been fired after retaliating for repeatedly advocating for the company to hire qualified black college graduates.
Kannan did not respond to any requests for comment. In an interview with CNN Business, Baker said he reached a point of exhaustion in trying to improve the company’s culture.
“Someone as amazing as Timnit should work at Google. It’s important to be there,” he said. “And Google couldn’t keep it busy, period.”
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on Kannan or Baker’s resignations, which were first reported by Reuters. He noted a previous response from the company about Curley who said Google “does not agree with the way April describes its completion, but we should not comment on its claims.”
Until early December, when he abruptly left the company, Gebru was the co-director of Google’s ethical AI team. A pioneer in the research of bias and inequality in AI, she was also one of the few black employees in the company as a whole (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the company’s 2020 annual diversity report ), and even less so in its AI division. The research scientist is also a co-founder of the Black in AI group, which aims to increase the representation of black people in the field.
Gebru initially tweeted that she had been “fired immediately” by an email she recently sent to Google’s internal Brain Women and Allies mailing list. In the email, she expressed dismay at the lack of diversity in the company and frustration at an internal process related to the review of a research paper that has not yet been published that she co-authored.
In later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one from Google explicitly told her she was fired. Rather, he said Google would not meet a number of his conditions for a return and accepted the waiver immediately because he considered his email to reflect “behavior inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”
Gebru’s sudden departure sparked anger among many Google employees and others in the tech industry that continues to boil over months later. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to Google (GOOG)employees shortly after leaving the company would investigate what happened.
Kannan tweeted Wednesday that the outbursts of both women “crossed a personal red line” he wrote when he began working at Google: the red line, he wrote, was “retaliation against a teammate defending some something I believe in. “
“I know I gained a lot from Google, but I also gained a lot from their work, and it hurt them,” he wrote.
Baker wrote, “I joined a company of a few thousand people, which recognized that we had a diversity issue. And despite hiring more than a hundred thousand new faces, we are still a company with diversity issues.”
Ever since Curley and Gebru spoke on Twitter about their experiences at Google, HBCU 20×20, a network of work for historically black college and university graduates, has canceled a partnership with Google. Last week, five HBCU leaders met with Pichai to discuss the company’s relationship with these schools.
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