Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.

Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast through their entire workplace, and not have that person be creating a hostile work environment for African Americans. If that person says "I don't mean in general, I mean inferior just for this occupation, I don't mean inferior, just 'differently talented, they've got great rhythm'", it doesn't matter, if that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable. That person is done, that person should be done.

It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.

If you look carefully at some of the comments from female Googlers after the memo was leaked, they talk about fears of being perceived as less capable based on their biology.

See the memo itself isn't only dangerous, it is what it could lead to.

But that isn't at all what the memo said.

You're just saying "He couched the point well-enough", he didn't say they were worse engineers, he just said they weren't naturally inclined to work with things. Sure that doesn't literally state that women as worse, it just casts an equivalent shadow on a woman wanting to be an engineer.