I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

> Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go.

This is one of the most disturbing thing's I've ever read in an article proclaiming to promote change in the tech gender gap.

What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women? This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company.

This woman is NOT someone we should be listening to when it comes to closing the gender gap in software engineering.

> And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women?

Because men and women have entirely different brains. They have entirely different strengths and weaknesses. Hate to break that to you.

The rise of "lets pretend everyone is equal even though they're obviously not" is one of the worst things going on right now.

You don't sound curious, you sound angry, as if you somehow already KNOW the answers to your questions. Do you feel highly certain that she is lying?

To understand one's mind, you should observe it.

>What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people?

Yeah, it's annoying that she's forcing readers to interpret that. I would guess that she means that they weren't able to perform their job responsibilities adequately, and others had to pick up the slack.

Maybe you can address the issues instead of playing armchair psychologist.

Why are you so mad about it? The answer is completely obvious: if her startup is offering below market rates to guys and they join anyway, they are apparently passionate about what the company does or motivated more by the promise of future wealth than day to day salary. These people will naturally have more energy because they believe if they put in 110% they'll get back 200%.

Almost without question the interview process was also eliminating men who did not seem energetic or interested in the company.

But she wanted to hire women. So, the women were hired at market rate or higher. Without question they were willing to make an offer even if they had doubts about the woman's energy or passion or commitment to the company. After all it's hard enough to make an offer if you have standards, let alone make an offer to a woman, so the last thing you want is a technically capable woman being rejected because she seemed a bit tired in the interview. These women may have joined simply because the wages were good, without any particular belief or care about the future of the firm. They will work exactly as much as needed to earn their salary and no more.

There's nothing wrong with such workers, it's a fallacy to believe all employees must be passionate. However if your process is selecting for passion except when the candidate is a woman, then the women will seem low energy in comparison. And their "I don't care, why do you care" attitude will probably rub off on the rest of the team too.

She clarifies in the comments. She says that she didn't mean to imply that this was because they were women. And I think she should have gone into more detail because this is the anecdote that defends the title of her post, and this snippet sounds terrible without context.

But my take is basically she says when she was confronted with an overwhelmingly male pipeline she tried increasing diversity by increasing the acceptance rate of female candidates. She then tells a story of how this backfired and increased negative stereotypes about female engineers. I don't think she believes women in general lack or drain energy, just the few she hired for her start up.

About what I would have expected.

> What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women?

Absolutely mystified.

> This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company.

Suddenly, no longer mystified at all.

Not that I particularly care, but this is why I have very little respect for hardcore advocates, they see themselves as completely objective while in reality their bias is obvious. The confidence of youth I guess, but this energy would be better expended on actually doing something towards achieving success rather than complaining that someone hasn't delivered it to your doorstep.

In the medium/long term, this is all the distractions of a childish culture. While we bicker dishonestly among ourselves like self-entitled children, China is quietly working its ass off and will soon eat all of our lunches.

I assume it means they didn't want to work the hours and/or play games at work with their co-workers.

I love that this is getting down-voted. Because the liberal agenda is more important than scientific biological facts to some people :)

You're violating the guidelines by complaining about being downvoted for violating the guidelines. Please stop doing this and (re-)read them.

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>they didn't want to work the hours

Sadly, that could still fall under what I said.

Please don't add new text to your comment after submitting it, it comes off as disingenuous and warps the discussion.

> And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women?

Who said it is? It's a woman who wrote that, after all. And right after what you quoted comes this:

> That said, I’m proud to say that our freelance journalists on UrbanAMA are predominantly women and are kicking butt on the AMAs they are hosting.

Oh god how horribly disturbing.

All of this kiddo shit is the result of not listening to Camille Paglia. Close the intellectual honesty gap before you worry yourself further.

What discussion? Like, you would have responded, but now you can't? That's just more of the same.

I noted the person sounded angry, was called out for it, so added additional descriptive text. And I'm being disingenuous?

This whole discussion is basically one side accusing the other of being a bully/thief/exploiter, that side asking how so, and the other saying no, prove to me that you're not!

And the accusers wonder why they're not achieving a lot of success in the real world. It is truly something to behold.