Hiring

In response to a petition calling for an investigation into the hiring of Antonio García Martínez, Apple has now confirmed that he's no longer working at the company.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS:

Apple has fired Antonio García Martínez over comments in his book. 2,000+ Apple employees signed a petition calling for his firing. At Apple, women make up 40 percent of the workforce. Half of the workforce at Apple is white. 27 percent of Apple's workforce is Asian.

Apple fires Antonio García Martínez

The Verge has the story:

Shortly after the petition began circulating internally at Apple, Martínez’s Slack account was deactivated. The ad platforms team was called into an emergency meeting where it was confirmed Martínez would no longer be working at the company.

An Apple spokesperson said the following in a statement to the press:

At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.

García Martínez, Facebook's former ad executive, joined Apple's App Store and Apple News Advertising team just a few days ago.

Just a few hours after news broke of his hiring, Apple employees began to circulate a petition calling for an investigation into his hiring. At issue here is García Martínez's controversial book “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.”

In addition to covering his tenure at Facebook—where the author worked from 2011 to 2013 as a member of the company's ad product team—the book compares Silicon Valley to the “chaos monkeys” of society by using some strong racist, sexist language.

García Martínez's misogynistic book

In particular, the book spreads misogynistic viewpoints regarding women in San Francisco. In one of the book's passages, García Martínez calls women who live in the Bay Area “soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

In another paragraph, the author writes inexplicably that women in Silicon Valley “can’t make eye contact with a man while going down.”

Apple employees sign a petition

An Apple employee drew attention to the quote on Twitter by commenting that it’s so “exhausting” being a woman in tech, “sitting opposite men who think because of my gender, I am soft and weak and generally full of shit.”

https://twitter.com/devonbl/status/1392483508568788994

More than 2,000 Apple employees signed the petition calling for an investigation into the hiring of García Martínez before it made the news yesterday.

Here's an excerpt from the petition:

His hiring calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don’t share our inclusive values.

Women, for those wondering, make up 40 percent of the workforce at Apple but only 23 percent of the research and development teams.