He argued to change their diversity goals and implementation, with an intention to do a better job of getting a _more_ not less diverse company, including more woman and minorities. He did not argue to end all diversity goals outright, again that appears to be a mischaracterization.
No time was spent exploring inherent biases in history or how they may affecting things today. This is why those policies were put into place so why not make it the meat of the discussion.
Though the implication may be that his approach will create a setup in which there will be more diversity that is highly debatable... again the reason why these policies are there in the first place. I don't feel the argument was so strong.
Does he have other examples in history when a minority group allowed the free market to dictate things after a long period of bias and things quickly adjusted overnight?
From the memo: I hope it’s clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority.
He's saying that the inability to get to a 50/50% split on gender lines may be unrealistic. He makes no comment on if the 20/80 split that currently exists is fair or not. Just because he doesn't go into the history of all bias that did exist in the past, doesn't mean he discounts it and unworthy to be addressed. Further, at what point does a society atone for past biases? If you are even trying to correct the injustice in the past, should you not have an idea on what normalization might be like? Perhaps and this is his question, an exact 50/50 is not what a idealistic lack of bias would create in the first place. And the thesis is that it would not be created in that fashion because women self-select to enter different professions for biologically based reasons. Now all those items might be false - its a hypothesis, not a universal truth - but it appears the research from social psychologists backs up his claims as valid. Now perhaps they still want to argue between themselves, and fine I'm ok with that go for it - but it appears he's done with with good faith.
And even if you think his arguments are poor, or he's naive, or anything else, that's fine too. The problem is - and this is where my main issue and the root of all of this - is that he should not have been fired for this. This appears to be a betrayal of liberal free speech values that many people claim to support.
Sure that's fair. I say that as a woman - I have no expectation to reach 50/50. However it's debatable if these policies are not useful yet. My mothers generation had some crazy stories to tell and that wasn't that long ago.
"And the thesis is that it would not be created in that fashion because women self-select to enter different professions for biologically based reasons."
This may be partly true but I disagree that it forms a substantial influence given my personal experience. I would give it a 1% weight anecdotally but much more if you count that many women want to be full time mothers.
The much bigger picture in my personal experience is a slew of other things including poor information, societal and parental expectations and visions for their daughters, engrained belief systems, intimidation due to biases, sticking to comfort zones or what is more familiar and so on.
I totally agree this is a discussion worth having and at some point this policies will need to be phased out. I think here the channel in which it was broadcast to the entire company was pretty uncomfortable given its such a touchy and controversial topic.
Thanks for the discussion
