Google Cancels Town Hall Meeting Due To Safety Concerns Over Diversity Kerfuffle

With the recent debacle caused by former Google engineer James Damore’s diversity memo, the search engine company was meant to have a town hall meeting to address the issue. At the last minute, however, CEO Sundar Pichai chose to cancel the meeting due to safety concerns. Apparently, the names of employees were getting published and the questions got leaked.

As Business Insider notes, the town hall meeting was supposed to be held on Thursday, 4 p.m. PT. During the forum, Google executives would be answering questions that were submitted via an app called Dory. Unfortunately, the event had to be canceled because some of the employees who submitted their questions were afraid that they were going to be outed.

In the memo that Pichai sent out, he noted how the questions getting leaked to external platforms has opened the possibility of harassment. This makes a lot of sense since this debacle has shown how passionate both sides can be when defending their points of view.

“We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally. Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be “outed” publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall,” the memo reads.

WIRED actually got ahold of some of the questions submitted to Dory and they ranged from addressing the skewed perception of minority employees to the fear that conservative Googlers feel, which prevents them from expressing their views. The town hall was meant to address all of these issues as well as get feedback from employees in order to find the best way to deal with both diversity and ideology concerns. Its cancellation does not bode well regarding these problems.