"I resign if you don't do X."
"We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."
This is a resignation the way I understand it.
> "We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."
This approach from her managers can be criticized because it immediately closes the door on the possibility of her changing her mind and walking things back.
However, it sounds like she was causing a lot of internal problems so perhaps they were already working to get rid of her. Accepting the implied resignation may have just been expedient, and saved the company a bunch of severance money.
The George Costanza scenario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW78swzn_Bs
The real question for your framing is: Should Google have to say, “ok that’s it for real this time, no take-backsies”? I think that google should never have to say this any time someone says “or else I quit” because the threat of quitting tells us that they’re not willing to continue operating within Google. I honestly don’t see the reasoning behind drawing the line anywhere else.
Let’s think of a hypothetical. A student says “I’m going to quit eventually in order to attend classes” and the manager says “I accept your resignation, you are fired”. This generally seems more like a firing because somebody was going to resign, more than it seems like a resignation no?
In the Gebru case, Gebru didn’t express WHEN she was going to resign, and that’s google’s issue. Maybe Gebru was, for all Google knew, threatening to quit in a month or a year or in 10 years. Gebru never actually made the time of her proposed resignation clear. As such, the law doesn’t consider to actually have made a legally binding resignation.