[freyr]

None of that disputes what I said or excuses her behavior. The “resonant” email is public, we can’t pretend it was in any way professional or appropriate.

Vanishingly few people can get away with acting like that at work without getting fired. She thought she was an exception and she wasn’t.

[tlringer]

It was fine, unless you reach far enough to take it literally, which is quite obviously not what Timnit intended. The call to stop DEI work was a rhetorical device to highlight to an audience that presumably cares strongly about diversity that the current work is not meaningful without broader systemic change within Google. Plus an emotional plea to what should have been a sympathetic audience to understand how exhausting doing any real diversity work within Google is. This is true and resonant and so triggered a lot of said change after she was fired. The change is still ongoing.

Everyone who tries to actually enact real systemic change within Google Research to improve how women and people of color are treated, or the work environment in general, burns out or gets fired. It is only toeing the company line when it's officially your role to do so, taking extremely conservative actions while ignoring real issues like abuse, harassment, and discrimination, that lets you survive while doing DEI work at Google in Research without burning out or getting fired. The sole exception I know of right now is Kat Heller, god bless her.

The feeling of "none of this is worthwhile, what's the point of any of it" is something everyone who tries to do real diversity and culture work within Google Research or even within the computer science research community more broadly has felt, and a diversity mailing list ought to have been a safe place to share that feeling.

Instead it was used against her. Now nobody feels safe sharing these feelings anywhere within Google Research.

Jeff to his credit is now working on many of these things. As is the DEI committee. I hope they all succeed. But I don't think any of that would have happened without Timnit highlighting these very real issues. It's depressing that she was fired for it. She wanted to change things and keep her job and her team, not to be a martyr.

[freyr]

Timnit’s backpedaling regarding her email and her ultimatum was absurd. You seem completely unwilling to factor Timnit’s own behavior into the chain of events, so it doesn’t make sense to continue this. This elimination of personal responsibility when it’s inconvenient to the narrative has become endemic among the activist employees. To your credit, it seems like your heart is in the right place with wanting to help her and others.