Google hiring based on race or gender: Fired engineer

In a fresh onslaught on its former employer, James Damore, the engineer who was fired by Google over a memo criticising the company's diversity efforts, has said that the tech giant is discriminating in its hiring practices.

Damore on Monday told CNBC's TV programme "Closing Bell" that Google was "treating people differently based on race or gender".

"The company is pressing individual managers to increase diversity and is using race or gender to decide which workers are promoted and which teams job candidates are placed on," Damore was quoted as saying.

He also said that he was "pursuing legal remedies" against the company over his firing.

Earlier this week, Damore dubbed his former workplace a "cult".

In an op-ed titled "Why I Was Fired by Google" in the Wall Street Journal, Damore said: "Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work."

"Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost 'like a cult' with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of 'Don't be evil'," he wrote.

Damore argued that this created an environment where only certain opinions could be voiced and slammed the tech giant in its attempt to "silence open and honest discussion".

"How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument," he wrote.

Last week, Google's Indian-born CEO Sundar Pichai addressed a coding event for women on the sprawling campus at Mountain View, California, after Damore's manifesto claimed that "the representation gap between men and women in software engineering persists because of biological differences between the two sexes".

"There's a place for you at Google. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You belong here, and we need you," Pichai told woman innovators at the company.