Apple Parts With Executive Over Comments About Women --Update
May 13 2021 - 2:52PM
Dow Jones News
By Bradley Olson
Apple Inc. parted ways with a prominent advertising-technology
executive weeks after hiring him, following complaints about sexist
and misogynistic passages in a memoir he wrote about his time at
Facebook Inc.
Antonio García Martínez, who wrote the book "Chaos Monkeys"
about his experience working at Facebook, is no longer with Apple,
a spokesman said late Wednesday. Apple didn't disclose more details
about his departure.
"At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive,
welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted," an
Apple spokesman said. "Behavior that demeans or discriminates
against people for who they are has no place here."
Mr. García Martínez didn't respond to multiple messages seeking
comment late Wednesday. A LinkedIn page for him listed him as
working in "Product Engineering, Ads Platforms" at Apple, and says
he started there last month.
Apple has largely avoided the sort of public controversy among
employees over issues of gender and race that have shaken other big
tech companies in recent years. Chief Executive Tim Cook has made
it a pillar of his leadership at the company to publicly champion
diversity and equality.
Some Apple employees communicated their concern and anger
Tuesday over Mr. García Martínez's hiring on Slack messaging
groups, one Apple employee said. Several Apple employees complained
publicly Wednesday about the company's decision to hire Mr. García
Martínez, citing passages from his 2016 book. A group of employees
circulated a letter to Apple senior executive Eddy Cue, who
oversees internet software and services, asking for an
investigation into how Mr. García Martinez was hired, according to
one of the employees who signed it. Technology-news site the Verge
reported on the letter earlier Wednesday.
The letter described as misogynistic statements in Mr. García
Martínez's book that it said run counter to Apple's commitments to
inclusion and diversity, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall
Street Journal.
The letter highlighted the way in which a number of passages in
the book refer to women. In one, Mr. García Martínez wrote: "Most
women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite
their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit."
In other passages, he referred to women based on his attraction
to their bodies and said "most women" at Facebook and in the Bay
Area didn't know "how to dress." In another passage dealing with
fundraising, he said an "equity round is having to convince five
women to do a sixsome with you, " he wrote.
Tim Higgins contributed to this article.
Write to Bradley Olson at Bradley.Olson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 13, 2021 14:37 ET (18:37 GMT)
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