Apple’s newly hired executive fired over sexist book
Apple parted ways with Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook executive who recently joined the iPhone maker, after his hiring drew fire because of racist and sexist remarks he had made in the past.
Garcia Martinez, who was hired last month to work in product engineering on Apple’s advertising platform team, has departed after just a couple of weeks on the job, the company said in a statement.
“At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted,” an Apple spokesman told Bloomberg News. “Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”
More than 2,000 Apple employees have signed a petition complaining about the hiring of Garcia Martinez, citing comments he previously made and excerpts from his 2016 book, “Chaos Monkeys.”
In the petition, the employees expressed concern about García Martínez’s views on women and people of color. 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,” they write.
García Martínez, who has also written for Wired, was the product manager for Facebook’s ad targeting team from 2011 to 2013. Most of the things the Apple employees have expressed concern about come from Chaos Monkeys itself. (The book is dedicated to “all my enemies“).
One of the quotes referred to reads as follows:
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.
Moonshot News is an independent European news website for all IT, Media and Advertising professionals, powered by women and with a focus on driving the narrative for diversity, inclusion and gender equality in the industry.
Our mission is to provide top and unbiased information for all professionals and to make sure that women get their fair share of voice in the news and in the spotlight!
We produce original content, news articles, a curated calendar of industry events and a database of women IT, Media and Advertising associations.
