The departure of an advertising tech engineer from Apple comes weeks after his hiring and days after employees sent a petition to leaders containing statements he made about women.
Antonio García Martínez is no longer with Apple, The Verge and Wall Street Journal report May 13. He did not respond to the Journal's messages seeking comment at the time of publication.
Mr. Martínez's LinkedIn states he began working at Apple in product engineering and ad platform in April. He previously worked on Facebook's ad targeting team as a product manager and authored a book about Silicon Valley, Chaos Monkeys.
A letter circulated by Apple employees May 12 and signed by more than 2,000 associates demanded an investigation into Mr. Martínez's hiring and included a dozen excerpts from his book, published in 2016. (The Verge has published the letter in full here.)
"Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of sh-t," one excerpt reads. "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."
"It is concerning that the views Mr. García Martínez expresses in his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys were overlooked — or worse, excused — during his background check or hiring panel," the employees wrote, demanding an investigation from Apple into how his published views were missed or ignored and a plan of action to "prevent this from happening again."
An Apple spokesperson told the Journal and The Verge: "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."