EXCLUSIVE: A senior executive at Google subjected male employees to a "relentless campaign" of hostility and discrimination – systematically targeting men to be fired, denying them promotions, refusing to allow them to contribute in meetings and even distributing memberships to professional organizations that only served women as Christmas gifts -- a bombshell lawsuit alleges.
Marco Meier, a former German pro-basketball player, joined the tech giant in 2011 and worked on the ads team for nearly 13 years. He claims in a newly filed lawsuit that he was routinely passed over for promotions and ultimately fired under false pretenses by a discriminatory boss who said that male employees were "too aggressive and too competitive."
Meier was a "stellar employee," the lawsuit claims, and worked himself up to the role of Head of Google Marketable Products – Big 5 Agencies and secured one of the biggest ad sales deals in Google's history, but things took a turn for the worse when he began reporting to the executive, the lawsuit states.
Under the executive, male employees were interrupted in meetings, denied promotions and high-profile projects and frequently fired and replaced with women, the suit alleges. Meier claimed that while female employees were routinely promoted within two years, it took him five-and-a-half years to get promoted under the executive, despite a ringing endorsement from one of the most senior executives in the company.
"We need more leaders like Marco. I strongly endorse his promotion," Google Vice President Torrence Boone wrote in a 2021 email reviewed by Fox News Digital.
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In 2022, 14 people from Meier’s department received promotions to director positions, 13 of which were women, the lawsuit alleges. Fox News Digital reviewed an email announcing the promotions. A Google representative said the company always "hires the best people for the job."
When Meier began working under the executive in 2019, the team comprised seven male team leads and two female team leads. In four years, that number was completely flipped. The executive had fired all but two of the male team leads, Meier being one of the two that remained, according to the suit, and replaced them with women, in what the lawsuit alleges was "nefarious and systematic elimination." The executive allegedly said that male employees were "too aggressive and too competitive," court papers say.
"I was planning to spend my career at Google and I really enjoyed my career at the company until it was derailed," Meier told Fox News Digital.
The executive’s alleged discriminatory behavior even expressed itself in the Christmas presents she awarded her team. In a Dec. 2021 email reviewed by Fox News Digital, the executive announced she had signed her team up for the professional organization Step Up, which, according to its website, is "a mentorship nonprofit providing the structure for girls (and those who identify with girlhood)." This gift appeared to disregard Meier and the other remaining man on his team completely.
Meier filed an HR complaint about the gender discrimination he was allegedly experiencing in Nov. 2022, according to the lawsuit. Google allegedly failed to conduct a proper investigation into his claims, the lawsuit states, and Meier was subsequently moved to a different team.
During a transition meeting with his new supervisor, the executive allegedly lied about Meier’s record, claiming he didn’t meet his performance goals and "abandoned his employees," with the intent of establishing a paper trail to support his inevitable termination, according to the lawsuit. It goes on to claim the beleaguered employee was "stunned" by the allegations and left the meeting with "tears in his eyes."
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"I felt depressed and hopeless to be honest - I always gave my absolute best for my team… I felt that I was with my back against the wall," Meier told Fox News Digital.
Meier claimed to have evidence that he in fact had exceeded his performance goals. In a subsequent meeting, Meier alleges that the executive lashed out at him, and said that "the women on my team have better leadership skills and are better prepared." Meier filed a second HR complaint in August 2023 in response to these meetings and was let go eight months later while working under his new manager, who was a man.
Meier’s last day at Google was April 17, 2024. He was told that his position was being eliminated as part of a corporate restructuring, according to the suit. However, the lawsuit claims that his role was not eliminated and that he wound up being replaced by a woman who lacked the necessary experience.
"We looked into these allegations when they were first raised and found they are entirely without merit. We have a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination and retaliation, and are reviewing the lawsuit for any new claims," a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
A leaked January 2024 memo revealed that Google was laying off hundreds of members of its ad sales team as the company moved away from larger to more medium-sized clients. The larger customer sales team – where Meier worked -- seemed to be the primary target of the cuts, Business Insider reported.
A former Google employee familiar with the situation supported Meier’s claim that he was replaced by a woman, but said that his role had actually been divided in two with two female managers taking over his case. The source, who worked under Meier briefly during his 12-year tenure at the company, said that Meier’s ouster triggered a morale crisis on his former team.
"His team was taken, and it was divided into two different teams. The two leaders who came in have zero background of the role he was previously at. Under those two leaders, we had probably about 80% attrition," the source told Fox News Digital. "Marco had zero attrition. People were leaving without jobs. That’s how toxic the environment was."
Four of Marco’s direct reports resigned within the first ten weeks after he was let go, the lawsuit claims.
"When I went to the company, I thought I’d be going to the smartest people in the room, but I was working with the most insecure people in the room," the source said.
Another former Google employee, who worked at the company for roughly a decade, spoke to Fox News Digital on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional retaliation. They corroborated some of Meier’s accounts, and claimed he witnessed overt discrimination of his own.
"Thirteen out of the fourteen promotions [to director] were women, that’s statistically impossible. If it were the reverse, people would throw up their arms," the source said.
The source also said that the men who got axed from Marco’s team were "good people." In his telling, Marco’s troubles were the result of DEI policies that were installed in the company "from the top down" that "100 percent hurt the business." The search engine began dismantling their DEI programs in February, discontinuing their diversity hiring initiatives and ending their "equity and inclusion employee trainings."
"When I first got hired at Google it was much more merit-based, but it migrated left… soon at the beginning of every meeting someone had to apologize about something," they said.
The source said White men at the company began to feel that they were at a disadvantage within the company because they didn’t meet "intersectional" criteria, but whenever one would speak up about it, they’d be told "that’s the way everyone else used to feel."
"OK, two wrongs make a right I suppose," the source said. "I found the whole thing nauseating, but I knew I had to keep my mouth shut."
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