Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

I am not sure I follow exactly. Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company? I don't find the memo offers any evidence. If evidence, even anecdotal evidence, were provided of that harm and of the ideological intolerance I might find the memo more compelling. As it stands, it seems like a book report.

I see it as honest call for discussion but everyone is treating this as some malicious attempt to exercise sexism. We are all educated and civil people please have some dignity and apply Hanlon's razor to these kind of things: "Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Here's one example. Google has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity efforts in the last 3 years, and has barely moved the needle in terms of diversity in their workforce [0].

Some of that can be explained by long-term efforts that will take more than 3 years to show dividends, but not all of it, and given the lack of results, you'd think that it's worth considering if current efforts are addressing the actual problem or if they're just throwing money in the wrong direction.

You can't do that without questioning the current methods and examining other ideas, but when the reaction to questioning current methods and examining other ideas is to stifle discussion and say 'no, this is right, you are wrong, and btw you're fired', then you may well find you keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars, for little to no result.

You could argue that a quarter of a billion dollars is pocket change to Google (and it is) and therefore doesn't represent any real harm, but it's still a lot of money to throw around on something that might not actually solve the problem.

0: https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...

Most companies would - right or not - try to keep their dirty laundry indoors and the right way to deal with such stuff is to first try to take it up the chain and if you are ignored you can decide if you're brave enough to become a whistle blower with all the fine consequences that tends to have, one of the most likely results of which is that you will find yourself suddenly unemployed and if you're unlucky also unemployable.

Also: regardless of the actual outcome, going to court is not a guarantee either way.

That's right, but what's the cause of that?

Is it solely down to sexism and discrimination, or are there other causes?

For example, studies have shown that the more egalitarian a society becomes, the greater the difference in personality between genders is, which affects things like job and career selection. This makes sense because in an egalitarian society, men and women are more free to choose careers based on interest rather than on preordained acceptable roles based on gender [0].

I'm not saying this is what's happening in tech, but there's enough research around it that it's a plausible explanation for some of it. And if you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars but are not in any way interested in investigating (or even contemplating) whether this might be one of several factors leading to a decline in women entering software engineering, then that's probably a problem.

0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

He didn't widely share his memo. Someone else inside Google leaked it to Gizmodo, which widely misrepresented it and started this shitstorm.

Who gets the blame in such scenarios? Is it still fair to fire the original author?

So, tip for future memo writers: stay in control of the narrative. That's easier said than done.

> Is it still fair to fire the original author?

That's a moot point, companies do not like political activism within their ranks whether or not it spreads to the outside world and affects the image of the company in a negative way or not. But when and if it does you can be pretty sure heads will roll.

Second tip: If you do wish to write that memo try to get buy-in from your higher ups (and in writing) before releasing your memo to your peers.

Third tip: don't do it. Unless your position is absolutely ironclad and you don't care about your future employment writing memos will probably not make a difference in a positive way and there is plenty of downside with the memo writer holding the bag in almost all cases, especially when such memos target controversial subjects, they will almost certainly end up being used for political football.