About This Googler's Manifesto

Are you okay with people questioning your questioning of gender differences? Obviously there are differences. It is frustrating to continually have to explain how irrelevant they are to performance in 99.9% of business functions.

1. The cohesiveness of the organization is more important than any particular individual.

2. Men have greater variance in many skills than women do, so there are more men on the high end and low end of the talent spectrum.

3. On average we are the same, and there are enough humans around today that few of us exist in a zone with no significant overlap.

4. The genetic and developmental formation of men exposes us to greater mutation rates than women. The mutations that add the extra variance in talent can have chaotic and deleterious effects in other aspects (for instance diminished social awareness, autism, aggression).

5. Socially aware individuals are more likely to seek and form stronger teams. A talented individual has a high productivity relative to other individuals, but teams can multiply in ways individuals can't.

6. High individual talent can be abrasive and egotistical. Egos are toxic on teams and in business because they prevent you from seeing the wider picture. A wide perspective is vital to obtaining a competitive edge. Abrasion over time causes other team members to burn out, causing loss of intellectual capital and a bad brand in the talent market. (Not all talented individuals are abrasive).

7. Without a solid team you have no chance at accomplishing anything worthwhile.

8. Empathetic individuals keep the team emotionally secure and are able to design organizational structures that best leverage existing resources.

9. Organizational diversity has been shown to positively impact collective performance. Every new perspective is an edge over the competition, an insight into a new set of consumers.

10. Gender balances out in the end. We are all taking our own roads through life and each of us has a unique skill set that we are using to make ourselves happier in this weird imbalanced society. In a hierarchical organization, one can leverage their skills to obtain higher posts even if they are not exactly the same skills of their predecessors. It all contributes.

It's simple. The argument is pointless. The only reason I'm posting this is because Yonatan put himself on the front lines of this particular fight and he didn't have to. He's going to have to argue his point down to meaningless details to convince those absurdly stubborn people who refuse to get their heads out of the sand.

Yes, we are different. That's a good thing.

>This guy clearly thinks less of the women he works with

Can you cite the part of the manifesto which made you reach this conclusion?

>I doubt women at Google would feel pleased about that

Why? I didn't see anything insulting or disrespectful in the article. Perhaps your mind filled in things not said?

For example: I openly admit that I suck at empathy. I am socially awkward, I have hard time relating to other people. I may have EDD.

Not only do I recognize that women are better at it I prefer female managers to male managers because all my female managers innately understood psychological safety. And fostered such culture.

Is it anecdotal? Yes. But it is consistent with the author's observations that we are different. It is consistent with the Big Five personality trait studies in psychology.

So I think shutting down this line of reasoning is effectively an attempt to block attempts at better understanding of what makes us different.

And yet if we actually understand each person's strengths AND weaknesses we will be able to build better organisations!

This is not a disagreement on political positions, this is a belief that women are inherently less capable than men at software engineering. It's a direct attack on the legitimacy and humanity of his coworkers. A disagreement over political positions would be if the author wrote a manifesto about the efficacy of sin taxes or nuclear treaties, not that his teammate Sandra is biologically inferior at her job and undeserving of it.

>No one is "lowering standards" for diverse hires. No one. Why are you even implying this?

Without wading into the general content of the manifesto, I haven't had the time to read it, and while not directly regarding hiring, there is at least one good example where the quest for a more diverse pool has lead to differing standards being applied, namely university entrance. From the stats I've seen, Asians in the US are fairly strongly penalized with regards to the grades and test scores they need to achieve in order to gain entrance to top universities when compared to their White, African American, or Hispanic counterparts. It certainly seems to me that the standards have been lowered for non-Asians in this area, and while I make no claim of this also occurring in the hiring process, I also don't think it's an unfair question to ask seeing as it seems quite widespread in university admittance.

The article isn't saying there is no discrimination though. It's just saying we shouldn't assume discrimination is the only factor we don't have 50% 50% representation in engineering. The author very much believes that we have cultural issues going on as well. This fact seems to be either misunderstood or deliberately ignored by a lot of people. But I can understand why.