1,500 Google Employees Sign Petition After Black Employee Is Fired For Raising Concerns About Diversity

Employees at Google are speaking out against the company after one of their Black co-workers was fired for raising concerns about the company’s diversity protocols.

Timnit Gebru, an AI ethicist and scientist, claims she was fired by Google last week after voicing her concerns about its diversity.

Now more than 1,500 Google employees and 2,000 academic and civil society supporters have signed a petition protesting Gebru’s firing.

“We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Dr. Timnit Gebru, who was terminated from her position as Staff Research Scientist and Co-Lead of Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) team at Google, following unprecedented research censorship,” the petition says.

“We call on Google Research to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to unequivocally commit to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Google’s AI Principles,” it added.

Gebru’s firing happened after she sent an email to a group of women and allies working in the artificial intelligent unit about the lack of diversity initiatives at Google.

In the email, according to Gizmo, she wrote, “Your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, you start making the other leaders upset. There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything.”

According to Reuters, Gebru sent the email after an incident in November. A Google senior manager told her to take her name off a paper she co-authored about tech companies not doing enough to make sure AI doesn’t use gender bias.