Contentious Google memo hits a nerve
“It started as an anti-diversity memo on Google’s internal mailing list,” said McGirt in Fortune.com. Written by one of the search giant’s software engineers, the 10-page manifesto dismissed Google’s diversity initiatives as a waste of time and accused the company of being an “ideological echo chamber.” The fact that women are less likely to be hired for engineering and leadership positions, the author wrote, could be because men and women tend to have different abilities. Women have a “stronger interest in people rather than things,” the memo read, which could explain why fewer of them are coders. “I’m not saying that diversity is bad,” the author continued, but deciding whether to hire or promote people based on their gender or race is “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.” The document went viral inside Google and was soon leaked to the media, “setting off a firestorm of outrage,” said Aja Romano in Vox.com. Within days, the author was outed as James Damore and fired, and Google, which has long been criticized for having an engineering workforce that is 80 percent male and majority white, was left to grapple with its persistent “diversity problem.”
Google has a diversity problem, all right—it apparently requires that all of its employees “think exactly alike,” said Elaine Ou in Bloomberg.com. Google executives’ reaction to the memo was “swift and brutal,” with numerous higher-ups issuing pointed denunciations; the backlash on social media was even worse. Yet if people would bother to read past the outraged headlines—or better yet, sought out the memo itself—they’d see it has “a wellintentioned goal.” Damore expressly says he is not opposed to closing the gender gap at Google; what he is against are the current policies the company uses to get there, like mentoring and targeted hiring practices that he alleges end up being discriminatory. Is it really so controversial to say that men and women are different? asked Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. Or that, given those differences, it’s foolhardy to “expect 50/50 gender parity in professional life”? Damore wrote that Google’s leftleaning culture silences anyone with different ideas. “The witless and inflamed reaction to his document underlines his point.”
What’s shocking is how much traction this “sexist manifesto” got inside one of the world’s top companies, said April Glaser in Slate.com. On internal message boards, some Googlers called Damore “brave.” At a firm where peer reviews are essential to advancement, it’s incredible that Damore felt comfortable “sharing his plainly bigoted views.” It’s more incredible that he was fired for saying people should be judged by their skills, not their gender, said David Harsanyi in TheFederalist.com. The fact that you believe he shouldn’t be allowed to air such views proves his larger point: Google has become a place where people can no longer honestly discuss conservative ideas for fear of being branded bigots. The same is true of too many “close-minded institutions, including most of the news media and many universities.” The idea that men and women excel at different things is “well within the boundaries of legitimate debate. Or it used to be.”