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

I see some good points on both sides of the discussion here but one thing occurs to me about the current diversity-pushback that I'm seeing(I'm not going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-meaning or at least not explicitly hateful).

We've surprisingly quickly moved from periods where it was common to simply refuse to even consider minorities or women in many fields to a time when many people see political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism as a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

I'm glad to see people being very thoughtful about fairness and equality, but I have an honest question: Before quotas and social justice warriors, were you thinking about fairness and equality when the status quo potentially benefited you and excluded others not on their merit but race and gender? I'm asking honestly, not trying to point fingers but I would like to know because this community, while left-leaning on many issues (I think) tends more towards libertarian on issues of race and gender and seems especially defensive when it comes to the tech industry (especially when the term "privilege" is used, it turns downright hostile).

If you were active in supporting equality and diversity (by resisting arbitrarily exclusionary practices) when it wasn't popular to do so and now you are seeing the negative aspects of a push for artificial diversity I would like to know that.

If you have never even considered diversity issues until recently when seeing hiring practices that could negatively affect you I would like to know that too. Do you believe any specific action needs to be taken to promote diversity or will the problem solve itself, or does the problem even exist at all?

I'm not long enough in the workforce to have experienced open discrimination, so I don't feel qualified to comment on your overall question, i.e. on how my consideration of equality has changed due to the change in social climate.

I still want to reply to your question because your opening sentence reflects my feelings on the topics well: Both sides have good points - the debate is not as black and white as it is portrayed and is valuable to have [1].

> I'm not going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-meaning or at least not explicitly hateful

Thanks for this, seriously. I'm happy to see openness to discussion rather than the (perceived) omnipresent downright dismissal of the opposing side :).

To still kinda answer your question: I think it's good discrimination has been brought to everyone's attention and that we are working on solutions as a society. I disagree with the diversity-push side on how we should go about it.

In a non-perfect world where we don't know the exact amount of discrimination/bias suffered [2], we can't use discrimination in the form of affirmative action or the like to correct for it without potentially discriminating the opposing group rather than just correcting for their privilege.

We should help individuals do what they want to do, so I'm all for breaking down any roles or whatever that prevent people from doing that. Forcing our idea of freedom of choice / equality is just not the way to do that. Especially when we forbid questioning it [3].

We should keep striving to become a better, fairer society. I don't know the solution, I just know that this way - no matter how well intentioned - is not it.

[1] only if we have an actual debate and try to understand the opposing side rather than dismissing valid points out of offense - both sides mostly do the latter right now as far as i can tell.

[2] Could be that e.g. the representation gap is 100% due to discrimination, could be that it's just 10% due to discrimination. The point is we don't know yet.

[3] the google manifesto was not scientifically debated and dismissed but attacked as sexist. If an hypothesis is not allowed we are not being scientific. And we really shouldn't turn our back to the scientific method.