> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo? They are re-iterating misconceptions based on Gizmodos original story, where Gizmodo deliberately gave a misleading report, removed sources and incorrectly presented an internal memo for internal discussion as an "anti-diversity manifesto". Even a cursory glance of the ac…
Everything after that is handwaving and ipse dixit. Egregiously, the memo takes it for granted that software is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented." That defies reality. Software development is far more collaborative and social than, say, being a historian (a field where women receive 45% of the PhDs).
The memo also asserts, without proof, that these observed differences are stable across cultures. That's just false. Take education, for example. In India, men are overrepresented in teaching (80% of teachers are men).[1] And gender representation in STEM majors varies dramatically between different countries. Women are 40% of the STEM workforce in China. Over a third of the USSR's engineers were women, even in the 1960s.
In short, the reasoning in the article is so flimsy I'd be embarassed to be that sloppy in an HN post, much less in a company-wide memo. Which brings me to sexism. I have a hard time believing that anyone smart enough to work at Google actually finds such sloppy reasoning convincing. Instead, the memo smacks of the sort of grasping at straws rationalization used to justify existing prejudices.
[1] The underlying study also makes egregious assumptions about whether professions are "people oriented" versus "thing oriented." Figure 1 depicts a people-things axis and an ideas-data axis. It puts "teacher" at the far end of the "people" axis, and characterizes that as a feminine profession. The study also characterizes "biologist" on the masculine side of the column, even though a significant majority of biology majors in the U.S. are women.