Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...others in the face of racism or sexism have to work a hell of a lot more. That's not necessarily true. Everyone has a different story. For all you know, the author was an orphan, was wrongfully convicted of a felony, has a disability, and survived three kinds of cancer.
Yes but this is looking from the micro-POV. The point is to look beyond your own achievements, since in the grand-scale they are really only yours. You should be proud of overcoming your challenges because YOU overcame THEM rather than evaluating them on the merit of their relative differences between other people. This allows you to maintain a sense of self-worth while recognizing that IN GENERAL people like "you" h…
The problem with this is the legitimacy of the framework for who counts as "like you" and "like them".
If you were born Amish and deaf, you wouldn't see a Manhattan native as being like you at all. But according to the prevailing framework, you're assumed to be more privileged than the Caucasian daughter of a Columbia professor who attended a STEM magnet high school.
It's worth pointing out that generally progressive logic is very pro-self-identification. Except here.
> The micro-scale achievement is not invalidated by the macro-scale injustice.
This point is well taken. Though it misses the point from the article, that people do invalidate and have explicit preferences on the micro scale based on the prevailing framework.
> There doesn't have to be a hierarchy.
Again, I think the objection is that prevailing logic in big corps, including Google apparently, does presume there's hierarchy.
> An insistence on maintaining the status quo, would only maintain what is already a flawed situation for many people.
I haven't seen anyone arguing for the status quo, including the author of the original post. Everyone would love to see more women in tech. The question is what the best way to go about it is and when we know we're done addressing the imbalance.