38 Facts About Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones is the president of the board of directors of the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, which she seeded with her own money.

Liz Fong-Jones 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.

Liz Fong-Jones says that her career followed in the footsteps of her family members, who are mainly engineers.

In 2008, Liz 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.

Liz Fong-Jones 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.

Liz Fong-Jones later expanded her advocacy to minority groups of employees within the company, like gender pay equity and transgender health care issues.

In 2016, Liz 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.

Liz 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 due to innate psychological differences between men and women rather than bias, using talking points from evolutionary psychology.

Liz 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.

Liz Fong-Jones said that when she and her coworkers felt that internal pressure had been fruitless, they wanted to understand what their legal rights were.

Liz Fong-Jones 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.

Liz 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.

In February 2018, concerns about Project Maven, a Pentagon project, which Fong-Jones had previously heard about from a small group of engineers in August 2017 working under Dr Fei-Fei Li, the chief scientist for Artificial Intelligence on Google Cloud, materialized into an internal Google+ post by Fong-Jones.

Liz Fong-Jones, who had been solicited for comment by a journalist at the outlet, feared that management would feel backed into a corner and offered to help leadership catch "the leaker".

Liz Fong-Jones testified that they had no current plans to launch a search product in China.

On 29 November 2018, Liz Fong-Jones started a solidarity strike fund, consulting with Coworker.

Liz Fong-Jones told Fast Company she was seeking to start the fund for workers so that they "feel empowered to speak up about issues in the future", and later to Protocol, "I'm trying to use some of my financial privilege to help those who can't afford to be suddenly laid off".

At the time, Liz Fong-Jones noted that the pledges were not binding and that she would work with lawyers and labor organizations to set up a more formal fund.

Liz Fong-Jones threatened to resign if an employee was not appointed to the board of directors, one of the unmet demands from the walkout, by 1 February 2019.

Liz Fong-Jones voluntarily resigned from Google in early January 2019, saying she wanted to create a "more just world rather than exacerbating inequalities".

Liz Fong-Jones said she left a job where her compensation totaled about $800,000 in a year, and a half million in unvested restricted stock.

Liz Fong-Jones alleges that Google's Human Resources department tried to push her out prior to the end of her notice period, 1 February 2019, and filed a retaliation claim.

Liz Fong-Jones later accepted a stock grant from Google close to around $100,000 to leave early, which she later donated to other organizing workers.

Comments made on Blind are anonymous, but the comments Liz Fong-Jones shared were in the Google section, which requires a Google email address to be authenticated.

Liz Fong-Jones said that it was "scary" to know that they were written by some of her coworkers.

In February 2019, Liz Fong-Jones joined the startup named Honeycomb, a software observability service, as the company's first developer advocate.

Liz Fong-Jones said she is impressed by the company's commitment to diversity and corporate ethics, with a large number of its leadership roles held by women.

In 2021, Liz Fong-Jones spoke at Pulumi's Cloud Engineering Summit for Honeycomb.

Liz Fong-Jones has continued to publicly advocate for inclusion, equity, and diversity in the workplace.

Liz Fong-Jones has said that the most important thing companies can do is to involve employees in structural decision-making processes, pointing to European Works Councils as an example for American companies to follow.

In 2019, Liz Fong-Jones invested $200,000 into Tall Poppy, a startup online harassment protection and reputation management company named for the Roman metaphor.

Liz Fong-Jones joined the board as its president, along with Whittaker.

In May 2023, Liz Fong-Jones brought a defamation case against the Brisbane-based company Flow Chemical and its sole director, Vincent Zhen, who were associated with the IP range used by KiwiFarms.

In 2012, while residing in Massachusetts, Liz Fong-Jones rented her car out through RelayRides, a ridesharing company that allows users to rent their cars out peer-to-peer.

Liz Fong-Jones was contacted by her own insurance company, Commerce Insurance Group, and learned she could be liable to a lawsuit that exceeded Turo's coverage limits.

Liz Fong-Jones posted about the incident on Google+, which was later reported on.

Liz Fong-Jones said that she experienced dysphoria that she could not cope with when she was 15, leaving her no choice but to start transitioning.

Liz Fong-Jones said that her parents were not supportive, and that her biological father disowned her.