Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai

> The guy who was fired was way out of line, far beyond any reasonable limits to topics of discussion.

What did the author say that was "out of line"? Can you please cite a section of the essay and explain?

Note: Please see this response to the memo from four scientists who study the field of psychology: http://archive.is/z6xxP

The reason given by Google for the author's termination was "advancing harmful gender stereotypes". I didn't see any evidence in the memo of "advancing harmful gender stereotypes". Where are the stereotypes? Where's the evidence that they're harmful? Is the author really advancing them? The author appears to be referencing scientific research into the topics that he mentioned. Scientific research into sex differences is not "harmful stereotypes".

The way in which the Google CEO's reply is worded gives me the impression that they don't even understand that the author's claims are scientific ones. For example:

> Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”

These terms -- agreeableness, neurotic -- are personality traits in the field of psychology. There is a significant amount of research into how men and women differ in these traits. See Wikipedia for sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism#Sex_differences

> This paper investigates gender differences in personality traits, both at the level of the Big Five and at the sublevel of two aspects within each Big Five domain. Replicating previous findings, women reported higher Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores than men.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

The author's mention of terms like "neuroticism" and "agreeableness" are statements of personality trait trends established by scientific research, not personal views or stereotypes. The message from Google's CEO seems to interpret them as personal insults, thereby missing the point of the essay.

The original memo raises points like: women tend to have higher neuroticism on average (low stress tolerance) than men. If some tech jobs have high stress, then is it possible fewer women than men seek those jobs? That seems like a reasonable question to explore, to me, and a question that's grounded in existing scientific research, not the promulgation of a stereotype.

The author also cited other research such as "Women, careers, and work-life preferences": https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...

Quotes below are from your link:

> But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm.

> Again, though, most of these sex differences are moderate in size and in my view are unlikely to be all that relevant to the Google workplace (accounting for, perhaps, a few percentage points of the variability between men’s and women’s performances). Sex differences in occupational interests, personal values, and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), but most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway

> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex.

That the empirical claims are accurate doesn't mean that they are relevant to the (memo) author's motive for writing it, whatever that is.

A lot of what he said was on-point and I agree with it. However, it also puts forth a lot of inappropriate generalizations, and in many places presents absurdisms as valid points. I think his "manifesto" would have been a lot more compelling and less divisive if he had presented it much differently.

What a shitty example

A lot of comments already misunderstanding the excellent response by Sundar Pichai in the article.

You obviously can't say anything you like at work.

Google is offering diversity of opinion but there are things you can say that are just stupid and will get you fired.

If you replace women in his essay with African American there would have been about 1 second between it being posted and it being taken down, with an escort out of the building and rightly so.

I loved this talk from Sheryl Sandberg that touches on a lot of these issues, particularly the "joke" near the end, 39 minutes:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/sheryl-sandberg-develo...