Liz Fong-Jones (born 1987 (1987)) is a site reliability engineer and developer advocate known for labor activism with her contributions to the Never Again pledge and her role in leading Google worker organization efforts. She is the president of the board of directors of the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, which she seeded with her own money. She is Honeycomb's field chief technology officer.
Education Fong-Jones started attending college at the California Institute of Technology in 2005, then dropped out in 2007 when she realized she was not going to have enough money to finish school without going into debt. She later returned to school, graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2014.
Career and activism Fong-Jones started her career in technical support at a massively multi-player online game studio. She says that her career followed in the footsteps of her family members, who are mainly engineers.
Google (2008–2019)
2008–2016 In 2008, Fong-Jones joined Google, which she said is one of the best places for a transgender person to work, as a systems administrator in their Mountain View, California office, eventually becoming a software engineer in the field of site reliability at their Cambridge, Massachusetts office, followed by their New York City office. She says she began organizing within the company in 2010, focusing on "equity engineering" by working on fixing issues with products that adversely affected marginalized communities, like ensuring accessibility for customers who utilize assistive technology. She later expanded her advocacy to minority groups of employees within the company, like gender pay equity and transgender health care issues. In 2011, she began taking fellow employee concerns to management, starting when Google+ was about to launch. On behalf of her and her colleagues, she warned executives from requiring users to disclose their real names. Following public outrage, part of the Nymwars, she successfully negotiated a new policy, which she subsequently communicated directly to concerned employees, making her an unofficial "union representative" for workers. In 2016, Fong-Jones contributed to the codebase of the 2016 Never Again pledge, which made it easier to verify signatories' identities who pledged not to work on harmful projects.
"Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" memo (2017) Fong-Jones said that while the activism always created tension, it turned hostile in 2017 following James Damore's Google's Ideological Echo Chamber memo, which argued that the underrepresentation of women in tech was partially due to innate psychological differences between men and women rather than bias, using talking points from evolutionary psychology. The data and arguments of the essay were criticized by some Google employees and journalists for allegedly perpetuating sexist stereotypes. Damore was later terminated. On 10 August 2017, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Google's now-parent company, was set to answer employee questions about the controversy at the company's weekly all-hands, known as TGIF, but canceled it 45 minutes prior, citing the leak of the questions and fear of employee safety for "asking a question". Fong-Jones referred to it as an "excuse" to not answer questions like her own, like why they had let the Damore's memo stay on their servers for more than a month if it was grounds for termination, and that she felt it was "a triumph" for her harassers. After a Google+ conversation criticizing the memo was leaked to an alt-right blog, Vox Popoli, and picked up by public figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Fong-Jones became a public target for harassment, blaming her and seven other vocal Google employees for Damore's termination. The harassment included death threats and doxing by other employees on websites such as Breitbart News and 4chan. The targeted employees filed complaints, and said that the security teams were vigilant about physical threats to employee safety, including offering to put doxxed employees in a hotel for a night. Danielle Brown, the company's chief diversity officer at the time, who was also a target of the harassment, was supportive, however none of the complaints about individual employees involved were acted upon, and they were told the leaks may fall under the protection of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 as "protected concerted activity". Several activist employees who spoke internally about racism and sexism in the wake of the harassment were terminated, and subsequently sued Google. The terms used by some of the reprimanded employees included "white privilege" and "white boy", which Google said in a statement was grounds for termination under their policy that "Promoting harmful stereotypes based on race or gender is prohibited". In October 2017, Fong-Jones arranged for Coworker.org, a labor group that typically assists blue-collar workers in organizing, to give her colleagues a "know your rights" training. She said that when she and her coworkers felt that internal pressure had been fruitless, they wanted to understand what their legal rights were. They had understood that talking to the press was not allowed, due to the company's culture of secrecy. She said they quickly learned they had the right to talk to the press, and that using Google's social networks would not be legally protected. Fong-Jones helped start a petition, along with a statement about her and her colleagues decision to go to the press, demanding a safer working environment, including better moderation of mailing lists, and rules against doxing colleagues. The petition gathered 2,600 signatures.
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