Google’s diversity drama calls for more listening
In one of my favorite scenes in HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” a comedy series about the world of computer engineers, a male engineer injects himself into a meeting between two female investors to explain, of all things, “something called ‘mansplaining,’ ladies .... ”
They view him with silent, chilly bemusement as his condescending and patronizing manner unintentionally demonstrates “mansplaining,” a term invented by a woman, even as he tries to explain it.That scene came to mind amid Google’s recent diversity drama in its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters in the real Silicon Valley.
Quite frankly, I wish Google had not fired computer engineer James Damore last week for writing an internal memo. The memo argued that the notorious gender gap at Google, where techs are 80 percent male despite Google’s liberal diversity policies, and other computer-age firms might be explained by biology.
You may have heard through some of the news coverage that he wrote a 10-page, 3,000-word “screed” of an argument against the notion that women are not as qualified as men. He didn’t. Quite the opposite, his critique of Google’s diversity policy cites various research into male-female differences and argues that maybe women simply aren’t as interested in tech, engineering or leadership positions as men are. He takes studies that found, for example, that men are more interested in things and how they work while women are more interested in people and relationships. He cites studies that found women as a group to be more social and artistic and less tolerant of the stress that comes with high-pressure jobs.
His research was too thin to sufficiently support his questionable and inflammatory conclusion. He walks out on some thin ice, for example, to suppose that women are more prone to “neuroticism,” or higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance for competitive, high-pressure jobs. Exceptions to that scenario are plentiful.
For example, Damore’s memo omits evidence that bias, conscious and unconscious, still holds women back in the tech fields. A study by university computer students last year, for example, looked at 3 million “pull requests” for computer code at GitHub, an open-source repository of codes with which users can build software. The study found that “code written by women was requested at a higher rate (78.6 percent) than code written by men (74.6 percent),” according to The Guardian, as long as the gender of the woman was not revealed. When the code author’s gender was revealed, the acceptance rate dropped to about the same as men. That study hardly settles every argument, but it does offer evidence of how women can, as a group, receive less reward for the same or superior effort. Firing Damore makes a martyr of him. To figures of the “alt-right” movement (a rebranding of new-Nazis, in my humble opinion), he became an instant hero, another sacrificial white male victim of liberal, pro-diversity “Social Justice Warriors,” the altright label for those of us who think our society benefits from its diversity. We Americans can find even more ways to make diversity work for us, not against us, as a society. But first we need to talk. ...We need to listen — and maybe learn to be better explainers.
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times hired me as a columnist. That was great news (for me). But the best part was when Barbra Streisand canceled her subscription in protest.
Her real complaint wasn’t so much that the Times had hired me, but that it had dropped Robert Scheer, an old-style, left-wing writer, in the same editorial shakeup. “The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity, but demands it,” Streisand wrote in an “open letter” to the newspaper. “Your decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community.”
“It seems that your new leadership ... is entirely out of touch with your readers and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. So although the number of contributors to your Op-Ed pages may have increased, in firing Scheer and hiring columnists such as Jonah Goldberg, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted.”
Without intending to, Streisand actually managed to synthesize the problem with diversity mania. You see, by bringing me and some other writers aboard, the Times did diversify its editorial fare. In theory, Streisand touted the importance of presenting readers with diverse views (stretched paradigms and all that). But in reality, she wanted to read only views she agreed with. Not only was Scheer a friend of hers, she was his biggest fan. Scheer did not “stretch” her paradigms; he confirmed them.
Moreover, ethnically Scheer and I are almost indistinguishable. We’re also both white males. The only meaningful difference between us, besides age, is that I’m a conservative. When Streisand talked about diversity, she meant a diversity of attributes — sex, ethnicity, skin color, etc. — but not viewpoints.
The Streisand episode came to mind while I was watching the ridiculous media feeding frenzy over a memo written by a since-fired Google employee, James Damore, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” In it, he extolled diversity and praised many of the company’s efforts to hire more women. But he argued that many of these efforts were counterproductive and at odds with other forms of diversity.
His real “crime,” however, was his suggestion that the obsession with hiring more female engineers ran into some structural problems that could not be solved with ever more aggressive outreach. Whether for reasons of culture or biology (or both), women are more reluctant than men to pursue degrees in engineering and computer science.
The data are on his side. More than 80 percent of computer science and engineering majors are male, while women receive about 60 percent of biology degrees and 75 percent of psychology degrees.
Sexist bigots in medicine, law, journalism, the clergy (!) and almost every other field saw the light. But the He-Man Woman Haters Club that is engineering raised the drawbridge to prevent women from designing drawbridges?
No doubt there are real injustices out there. The demands of motherhood and the culture of Silicon Valley surely pose challenges. But these disparities are nonetheless a sign of great social progress. Women are choosing the careers they want. The issue here isn’t diversity, but conformity.