Diversity debate divides Silicon Valley
Google engineer’s online manifesto goes viral, dragging a silent backlash out into the open
Despite a veneer SAN FRANCIS CO of California cool, the sharp dichotomy between progressive and conservative voices nationwide is just as present in Silicon Valley as anywhere else. But here it plays out in debates over why so few women and minorities fill crucial — and powerful — technical and leadership positions in some of the nation’s richest and most influential companies.
In an area where embracing diversity is seen as a social good, the debate often takes place offline or behind closed doors.
But it crashed out into the open Saturday with the release of an online manifesto, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” in which an unnamed male Google software engineer strongly suggests that the company encourage “ideological” rather than gender diversity. The author contends women don’t make up 50% of the company’s tech and leadership positions because of differences in their preferences and abilities, not sexism.
By early Sunday, the memo had gone viral.
The sentiment of the 10-page memo underscores the views of many at tech companies who don’t agree with the diversity mandate adopted by their employers. Yet few will publicly discuss the topic.
They have argued for years that Silicon Valley is based on
meritocracy, where brilliance and talent are consistently rewarded above all else.
Those who haven’t reaped the same benefits counter that the industry’s hiring practices preferentially benefit those who are young, white and Asian and male — often to the detriment of women, blacks, Latinos and others. Tech companies have been at the forefront of introducing “unconscious bias” training to try to eliminate such issues from the workplace and have funded multiple initiatives to encourage young girls and minorities to study coding. Proponents of the measures say they are necessary to bring diversity to the tech industry.
A recent study on elementary school students shows dominant players — in this case, white males — feel threatened when everyone is treated equally. The same applies in the business world, says Columbia Business School Professor Rita McGrath.
“There is almost a knee-jerk reaction: Your company is spending money on diversity, so what am I getting out of it?” she says.
Nancy Lee, Google’s former head of diversity, underscored the challenges it faces in converting employees to value diversity. She said the company had identified roughly a third of employees who warmly embrace initiatives and a third that have not signed on to the diversity mandate.
“We often talk about how we have the crusaders and the resisters, and then there is an entire swath in between that are somewhat indifferent,” Lee told USA TODAY in April 2015. Google, she said, was trying to bring aboard more women and people of color, to reach a “tipping point where we have the critical mass to shift a culture. That’s what we are trying to do.”
GOOGLE AN EARLY LEADER
Silicon Valley’s lack of diversity has long been an issue, but discussions about it began to crest in 2014. It was then that Google openly published its diversity figures, breaking ranks with other tech companies that had long argued such revelations would cause them competitive harm.
That tide has since turned, and today many tech companies issue their quarterly workforce numbers, hire diversity coordinators and engage in multi-pronged efforts to bring more women, African Americans and Hispanics into their ranks.
The push has created a divide among tech workers, some embracing the effort as positive and helpful to creating teams and products for a diverse, global market while others deride it as being a type of reverse discrimi- nation that pushes unqualified candidates into positions they cannot capably fill.
Google was quick to say Saturday that it supported its employees’ rights to express their opinions, even if the company didn’t agree with them.
“Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions,” Danielle Brown, Google’s newly appointed vice president of diversity, wrote in a memo to employees Saturday.
STRONG REACTIONS
By Sunday, many in the tech world were weighing in on the statements made by the manifesto’s author, and most were not supportive.
One of the strongest came from recently departed Google engineer Jonatan Zunger, who wrote on Medium that the author was not only clueless about biology but also about how any senior staffer functions in a large company.
By publishing an essay arguing that some large fraction of his colleagues were basically not good enough to do their jobs and were allowed to stay in them only because of political ideas, he created “a textbook hostile workplace environment.”
“Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you?” he wrote, and had this person been one of his direct reports, he would no longer be working there because he could no longer work in teams.
The issue broke over the weekend, perhaps catching Google senior staff off-guard. But to deal with it, Nicole Sanchez,CQ CEO of Vaya Consulting sees only one way forward.
“Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai needs to come out strong and clear on Monday morning saying that diversity is a non-negotiable at Google.”
“There is almost a knee-jerk reaction: Your company is spending money on diversity, so what am I getting out of it?” Rita McGrath, Columbia Business School