'There's a place for you at Google... We need you'

After reportedly cancelling a town hall meeting to allay fears over an anti-diversity manifesto, Google's Indian-born CEO Sundar Pichai finally addressed a coding event for girls on the sprawling campus at Mountain View, California

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO

After reportedly cancelling a town hall meeting to allay fears over an anti-diversity manifesto, Google's Indian-born CEO Sundar Pichai finally addressed a coding event for girls on the sprawling campus at Mountain View, California.

"I want you to know there's a place for you in this industry. There's a place for you at Google. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You belong here, and we need you," said a report in The Verge on Friday, quoting Pichai.

Pichai emphasised the importance of engineers "building products for everyone in the world". "I think to do that well we really need to have people internally who represent the world in totality. And that's how we think about it. So it's really important that more women and girls have the opportunity to participate in technology, to learn how to code, create, and innovate," Pichai told the audience.

His views are crucial at a time when an anti-diversity manifesto, written by a Google software engineer James Damore went viral claiming "the representation gap between men and women in software engineering persists because of biological differences between the two sexes". Damore has since been fired from Google.

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