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

I worked at Google, and Alan Eustace, Google's most emphatic champion of gender diversity when I worked there, repeatedly emphasized that Google couldn't lower its hiring bar for women candidates, because that would hurt the reputation of women already there

The main forms of gender-diversity outreach that I remember Google engaging in were 1) programs for young girls, to introduce them to programming, 2) programs for women in college, to advocate for their studying computer science, and 3) the grace hopper conference for women who are engineers now. All those seem in line with the author's suggestions.

This article (and the letter last week, and similar rhetoric) really feel like they're attacking a strawman to me. I left a while ago, but have things changed that much?

Wouldn't it violate US equal-opportunity laws to lower the hiring bar for women?

Nope. Affirmative action towards historically marginalized groups is explicitly permitted by the law, and in some instances there's even a duty to do so (for .gov stuff mostly). There are some complexities and details to all this, but generally speaking, affirmative action is legal in the US.

Exactly. The author says we shouldn't check boxes to fill quotas... and then doesn't accuse anyone of doing so. She tosses that strawman out there, getting people to nod their heads in vigorous agreement, but she never makes any claims that any particular company is engaging in the behavior she criticizes.

Of course, the implication is that Google is doing so. But if Google was doing so, they wouldn't have the poor diversity stats they've been accused of having.

You can't have it both ways! Either Google is lowering the bar to achieve satisfactory diversity stats... or they are failing to achieve satisfactory diversity stats.