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Nearly 800 Google employees have joined a solidarity campaign for one of the company’s greatest female leaders, a known industry diversity advocate who said she was fired after what her boss said. described as a dispute over a research paper.
The executive, Timnit Gebru, co-technical director of Google’s ethical artificial intelligence team, announced on Twitter Wednesday evening that she had been fired after sending an email to colleagues claiming that the company’s management had forced her to withdraw an article focusing on ethics. issues involving the type of artificial intelligence systems used to understand human language, including the one that powers Google’s search engine.
The email also detailed his frustration with the company’s efforts to create a more inclusive workspace. She said she felt “constantly dehumanized” at Google.
Google did not comment on Gebru’s dismissal, but pointed to an email from Google research chief Jeff Dean to employees, published by technology newsletter Platformer, in which it said that Gebru had resigned.
The #ISupportTimnit campaign, started by Google employees and posted on Medium, accuses Google of “unprecedented search censorship” and calls for transparency on why the document was rejected and for engagement from the company in favor of “research integrity and academic freedom”.
Gebru was also known to be concerned about how Google handled diversity issues. Gebru is a co-founder of Black in AI, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of black researchers in artificial intelligence. She also co-authored a high-profile study on racial bias in facial recognition technology, which found that major facial recognition systems had much higher error rates when identifying people with skin. darker.
“Instead of being embraced by Google as an exceptionally talented and prolific contributor, Dr Gebru was faced with defensiveness, racism, gas fires, research censorship, and now retaliatory dismissal.” , indicates the declaration of solidarity.
The campaign invites people from academia, civil society groups and industry to add their names to the declaration of solidarity. Within 30 minutes of going live Thursday afternoon, the letter garnered more than 100 signatures from Google employees alone.
As of Friday morning, 794 Google employees and 1,136 representatives from academia and civil society collected the signatures.
Wider issues
Gebru’s announcement fanned the flames of frustration among some Google employees, concerned that the company had spent years talking about its commitment to diversity and inclusion, while failing to do so. that gradual progress in hiring more women, black and Latino employees to its workforce, according to the company’s annual diversity reports.
In the past two years, the company has cut some diversity training programs and staff members dedicated to improving diversity in the company, according to current and former employees who spoke to NBC News. in May. At the time, Google said it had changed its approach to training, but denied that its work on diversity had been cut back.
The tech industry – and the field of artificial intelligence in particular – has long been known to be dominated by white males. A 2019 study by the AI Now Institute at New York University found that only 10% of AI researchers at Google were women. At Facebook, only 15% of AI researchers were women. At Google, black women make up just 0.7% of its technical workforce, according to the company’s 2020 Diversity Report.
Gebru has publicly shared his frustrations with the company over diversity. In the email, sent last week to an internal employee group called Google Brain Women and Allies, she noted that Google’s search division was only 14% female in 2020.
“There is no incentive to hire 39% women: your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people,” Gebru wrote. “You start to make other leaders angry when they don’t want to give you good grades on calibration.”
She called the company’s latest move to withdraw the article, which was submitted to an academic conference, as an example of “silencing marginalized voices.”
Dean said in the email distributed to Google employees that Gebru’s search did not “meet the publish bar” and that after its rejection she wrote an email demanding a number of conditions to be met. to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of people who provided comments on his research, as well as comments provided.
“Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these requirements, she would quit Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect his decision to quit Google, ”Dean said, adding that“ we all genuinely share Timnit’s passion to make AI more equitable and inclusive. “
Gebru did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News. But Gebru posted on Twitter Wednesday: “Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email [to] my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t quit – I asked for simple terms first and said I would respond when I returned from vacation. But I guess she decided for me.
Rallying cry
In addition to launching a solidarity campaign, some of Gebru’s Google colleagues have publicly expressed their shock and anger at Gebru’s exit on Twitter.
Alex Hanna, sociologist who works in Google’s AI ethics team and was led by Gebru, tweeted that Gebru was receiving “disrespect and gas lighting” from the company.
“Google could be one of the leaders in researching the social implications of AI and technology. But they choose to go the other way, ”she wrote Wednesday night.
Dylan Baker, also a member of the Ethical AI team, added: “Even before being my manager, Timnit fought for me and supported me relentlessly and unequivocally. The dynamic of her team has the most psychological security, motivation, support and autonomy that I have ever had in a work environment. I am furious.
The wider community of artificial intelligence ethics researchers also expressed outrage, pointing to the fact that Gebru was one of the few black women to hold a leadership position in her field.
“It looks like we are seeing a pattern in which people who take diversity and equity work seriously are kicked out of Google because Google doesn’t really want that work to be effective,” Meredith said. Whittaker, a former Google researcher and co-founder of the AI Now Institute, which studies the social implications of artificial intelligence.
On the same day Gebru announced his dismissal, the National Labor Relations Board said Google had violated labor law last year by sacking two workers, Kathryn Spiers and Laurence Berland, involved in the efforts of labor organizations. Other Google employees and labor organizers who were fired last year have also filed complaints with the NLRB. But their layoffs were not deemed illegal.
“We are confident in our decision and our legal position,” Google said in a statement. “The actions taken by the employees in question constituted a serious violation of our policies and an unacceptable violation of a trust responsibility.”
“When a cis-white man gives critical feedback on Google’s diversity and inclusion programs and expresses how they need to change to be effective, it becomes a motive for promotion and is seen as a show of leadership,” he said. Berland said about Gebru’s departure. “When a black woman who is one of the top researchers in her field does the exact same thing, she is considered inappropriate and she is fired.”
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