Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai

- men grow more muscle faster and that used to be important

- childbirth used to be (and in many places still is) very dangerous for women

Consequently most societies defined gender roles in similar ways, leading to similar effects across them.

Or you can go even simpler and say they're more neurotic because their odds of being raped by a man are terrifyingly high. Or they get paid less than men and charged more for things like health care, car loans and mortgages so they carry a higher financial stress burden. Or their health plans are inadequate and they're worried about what will happen if that matters. Or they're being harassed in the workplace.

Or you can dispute the premise entirely and say the standard for "neuroticism" was based on a culture created and still dominated by men.

---

A lot of people are saying things like, "he didn't really write anything that was sexist or misogynistic", but women and people of color are far too familiar with fucked up policies justified by "biological differences". There are real, deep, life and death social problems right now caused by misogyny and they all stem from the fundamental idea that women have their role and men have theirs.

What does this lead to? Health care policies that cost women more and don't even meet all their needs. Health care systems that service women less effectively than men (stroke symptoms are often missed in women, childbirth mortality rates in less progressive parts of the US, etc.), jobs that pay women less than men, laws that ignore or oppress women, etc. etc. etc. etc. And every time, it's justified with "women are just biologically different than men".

Why can't you express such an opinion in the workplace? Because that opinion is responsible for the oppression of billions of women throughout the entire history of humanity. It's not at all like arguing for wind over solar, or honestly other political debates over private vs. public health care or whatever. When you're talking about social issues, you're talking about systems that have oppressed, brutalized and murdered unbelievable numbers of people, and continue to oppress people that you work with and see each and every day. They're not idle thought experiments or a curious hobbies. Treat them with the sensitivity they deserve.

OP didn't say he would quit because one of his colleagues held a (in his example) racist opinion, but would do so if the company just turned around and said that black employees should just be "more open-minded" to those opinions.

You can separately debate whether the original memo was as bad as OP's racist example, but in the context of OP's example I think he'd be perfectly in his rights to leave if the company was supporting such an opinion.

I have been involved in the hiring process at more than one tech company and it was apparent that there were far, far fewer women in the pipeline than men. Even if we hired every single person who applied the balance would still lean very heavily toward men. Again, this is just in my personal experience.

I don't believe it is the job tech companies to do extra work to hire more of any underrepresented group in the industry until the problem in the pipeline is addressed.

I think the argument that there is something biological about women that makes them less interested in tech comes from what amounts to pseudoscience at best and that argument shouldn't be validated because it gets in the way of solving the problem with the pipeline.

I have never (and would never) advocated for any group of people to be given "extra marks to pass" in a situation where their ability to do a job is important.

I don't think the author of that memo at Google should have been fired. Though I do understand how from a corporate standpoint they felt that they had to.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the "person interested in equal opportunity would not do..." I didn't do those things. I'm not blind to anything and I think all I did in my comment was ask a pretty simple question that you didn't even attempt to answer.