Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

Maybe he felt very strongly. Nobody thanked Rosa Parks when she made a big hubbub on the bus, but she believed in something, and history eventually proved her right.

Regardless of whether you agree with the author, he risked his career standing up for what he believes in.

>if there is proof that diverse companies perform better then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.

Absolutely not true. There are many other possible reasons for such a correlation. A few examples:

It's possible better-performing companies could attract more non-white applicants.

Or, that better-performing companies could be have extra resources, which they then spend on diversity initiatives, where poor-performing companies are desperate to survive.

Or the independent variable: Being in the Valley makes companies perform better, and also makes them want to hire more non-whites, but these are both independent outcomes simply caused by being in the Valley. In this scenario, it's even possible that diversity harms performance, but the effect is more than compensated for by being in the Valley.

Or, it could be random chance; outcomes are dominated by a few high-performing companies, which just happen to be genetically diverse.

Or any of many other possible connections and confounders. This is really basic stuff.

> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar

As an Asian male who once upon a time had to apply to colleges, I'd like to see some evidence for that assertion.

To be clear, I (and hopefully many other people commenting here) have no problem with outreach, anti-harrassment, and other such workplace training initiatives. It's unfortunate that we can't all achieve a baseline level of civility that abstracts away a person's biological character.

But I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place. This tends disturbingly towards institutionalized stereotyping (e.g. "all Asians are nerdy and softspoken, so we're going to lump them into the same cohort and exert an implicit negative bias against them"). It's also particularly vacuous in that our notion of 'diversity' is thereby premised chiefly on superficial appearances - 'you look different, therefore you must be the kind of different we need'.

One would think the more equitable philosophy would be to strive towards a world in which we stop making exactly those kinds of distinctions and instead judge people on the content of their character and the value they can create.

I find it highly reductionist to conflate people challenging biased hiring practices with people challenging diversity more generally. There are likely some in the tech world who are genuinely bigoted and misogynist. I would hope, however, that a larger share are simply perplexed that hiring practices in engineering would be predicated on anything other than an assessment of raw merit.

My final point is this: as long as we continue to perpetuate diversity practices that emphasize sex and race in any way, some classes of people are going to be harmed. Sometimes that's more obvious to the Asian male who grew up in a tough part of NYC under difficult circumstances than it is to the affluent Black female who grew up in a world willing to bias opportunities unfairly in her favor (when some other less fortunate Black female really needed the leg up).

Here's the writing on the wall that I think is being ignored: google has thousands of employees, with all types of opinions. I guarantee you some of those people have controversial opinions, and some of those people share those controversial opinions.

Everybody blames the author for creating a disturbance, but you can't create a disturbance without people being interested in what you say. The fact that it was so widely circulated (instead of ignored like 99% of blog posts) suggests to me that a number of people at the company feel like he had some really good points.

It's scary to me that the "safe space" crowd gets to define what views are offensive, and inherently make it an unsafe (even firable) place for those who disagree to express who they are and what they believe.

> Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization

This argument only work is every woman can only see themselves as part of the group and are incapable of seeing themselves as individuals.

I would be willing to bet that there are women (and other diversity hires) at Google that know they are capable of doing their jobs and deserving of being hired. Some of those people might object to being lumped in with the whole and not being seen as individuals.