A woman participating in a walkout of a presentation on a college campus by former Google software engineer James Damore over the weekend yanked wires out of the sound system, causing minor damage and disrupting the event for about 10 minutes, according to The College Fix.
Damore was taking part in a panel discussion called “We Need To Talk About Diversity” in Oregon, sponsored by a student group called Freethinkers of Portland State University.
Google fired Damore in August 2017 after he wrote a 10-page memo arguing that Google’s diversity program is unlikely to produce a 50-50 split between men and women among coders and in leadership positions in software engineering, because men and women have different interests and abilities and men are more likely to embrace impersonal tasks like coding.
Google executives called the memo sexist and said it created a hostile work environment. Damore in January sued Google, claiming the company discriminates against white conservative men.
During the panel discussion Saturday, Damore said his memo was wildly misrepresented.
“You see in the memo that I have multiple solutions to increasing women’s representation in tech, using what we know from psychology. And if we just have to deny that, and just say, ‘No, that’s all sexist, you can’t say that,’ then we can’t actually solve these problems. And it’ll just make it actually worse,” Damore said, according to video from KGW Channel 8 in Portland, Oregon.
The video also shows portions of the walkout. It shows one of the protesters with dark hair dyed blue walking by the sound system, and includes audio (but not video) of her pulling out wires.
The protester, who is not a current student at Portland State, told The College Fix that campus police issued her a citation for criminal mischief in the second degree and banned her from campus for two years.
A tweet from journalist Mike Bivins includes video that shows an unidentified protester (who appears to be the same woman) after the event apparently detained by campus police and berating a cop.
“I’m oppressed. He’s oppressed,” she says in the 14-second video, pointing to someone off camera. “That’s all you [expletive] do as cops, is [expletive] yell at people and overpolice the [expletive] out of people. You’re not special.”
