Alphabet's Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo that equated gender inequality in the technology industry to biological differences.

James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal saying that he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes," in an email to Reuters on Monday.

Damore said he is exploring all possible legal remedies.

Google said it could not talk about individual employee cases.

"Distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and… these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership," Damore wrote in an internal company memo last week.

"Portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace," Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said on Monday.

The memo stoked a heated debate over treatment of women in male-dominated Silicon Valley that has boiled for months following sexual harassment scandals at Uber and several venture capital firms.

Google's vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown, sent a memo in response to the furor, saying Damore's essay "advanced incorrect assumptions about gender".

In fact, it’s hard to find a single tech giant who hasn’t faced charges of sexual discrimination and gender bias in recent years.

In 2016, search giant Yahoo, which was run by female CEO Marissa Mayer, was sued by a former employee for gender discrimination. In the same year, Qualcomm announced that it had agreed to settle a gender discrimination class action suit, paying 19.5 million US dollars over discrimination in payment of male and female staff. One year later, Oracle was sued by the US Department of Labor for paying white men more than their female peers with the same job title.

(With inputs from Reuters)