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

She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against?

This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.

She could have gone with the stats: in a pool of candidates, you have 3% of very good people. And in that same pool of candidates, you have 90% of men. Given that there is not really any compelling reason that would explain why women would be better or worse than men at engineering, only 0.3% of your candidate pool are very good women. Plus given that pretty much every company out there will try to retain their exceptional women worker (in the name of diversity), exceptional women engineers are a rare sighting in the job market. Hence the diversity issue cannot be solved by forcing people to hire women.

No need to involve personal stories about how teenage girls are more interested in clothes than in assembly programming...

If "subliminal biases" is a reference to "Implicit association" and the IAT-- IAT has lost it's scientific footing. The problem with it is that: Just because people have Implicit Associations doesn't predict that they will act in biased way.

Scott Alexander (penname for a psychiatrist) wrote about it here. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psycholo...

> Implicit association tests probably don’t work (1, 2, 3, 4). That is, people who have “implicit racial biases” according to the tests are not more racist in everyday life than people who don’t. If this were true – and if it reflected a general failure of implicit racial biases to affect explicit actions – it’s hard to overestimate how much it would change psychology. We wouldn’t have to worry about how the wrong character on TV would accidentally bias people toward having certain stereotypes. We wouldn’t have to worry about subconscious racism affecting hiring decisions even among people who are trying hard to be fair and neutral.

(All PDF downloads) - 1 http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/reassessingpredictiv... - 2 http://www.academia.edu/download/41431928/Reassessing_the_pr... - 3 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public... - 4 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstra...

> She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against?

> This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.

She stated literally what happened. No need for her to editorialize.

Well 'lacking energy' and 'draining energy from others' is not exactly factual...

I think you mean that it is not easily quantifiable or provable with evidence. That does not mean the statement is not true and accurate.

No I mean it's a subjective view from the boss that doesn't mean anything.

She could have said that they were procrastinating, or could have said that they were consistently tired and whiny about it. Or maybe these particular women did not want to work all their weekends away and complained about it. Or it could mean they weren't cheering at the beer pong event. Who knows?

I'm just saying that 'women I hired lacked energy' is the kind of blanket statement that overgeneralizes and that fans the vicious circle she described as damaging below.