Apple fires Antonio Garcia Martinez after employee backlash

The newly hired engineer is "gone from Apple after employee backlash," the company confirmed to Bloomberg on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, Apple employees began circulating a petition that called for an investigation into Garcia Martinez's hiring.

"At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here," Apple said in a statement to Bloomberg.

In their petition to Eddy Cue, the Apple employees said that Antonio Garcia's 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."

Specifically, employees expressed concerns about Garcia Martinez's views about women and people of color. One passage from "Chaos Monkeys," which was circulated on Twitter, called women in the Bay Area "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit."

Apple had hired Garcia Martinez to work on its ad platforms product engineering team in April. The Cupertino-based division works on advertising systems within the App Store, Apple News, and elsewhere.

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