Wow. I've not seen this amount of heat, light, sound and fury directed towards
a minority group since a fat man broke wind loudly over Nagasaki. [I've heard
of good taste, and want no part of it.]
Anyone in Silicon Valley tech industry who hasn't been living under a rock has seen the
frothing
rage
on
Twitter about
a Google employee penning an internal-shared personal doc about their perspective on
the company's hiring and training priorities relating to women and "minorities" (which
in Silicon Valley almost always refers to Black and 'Latinx' - apparently, very few
"woke" people are really interested in the experiences of Native Americans, Koreans,
Filipinos or South Americans.) My Twitter tech timeline has exploded in the
past 24 hours, almost universally with people demanding the author's head - mostly
metaphorically.
Tech site Gizmodo today obtained
the text of the document in question. I've read through it, and assuming it's an accurate representation
of the original, I can understand the furore - but it has been flagrantly misrepresented.
A summary of the author's points is:
- Google is big on removing unconscious bias, but a lot of Google has a strong leftwards political bias;
- Left and right political leanings have their own biases; neither are correct, you need both to make a company work well;
- If you're not a leftist, expressing your opinions at work can be a severely career-limiting move;
- On average, men and women have behavioural differences which are (list); but these are only averages and don't tell you squat about an individual person;
- Given those average women's interest, you're going to struggle to get a 50% representation of women in tech, particularly in the higher career and stress levels because of (reasons based on the above list)
- Doing arbitrary social engineering to achieve this 50% as an end in itself is a bad idea;
- Google does various things to improve gender and race representation, some of which I think aren't appropriate and might lower the bar [Ed: this was the point I thought least well argued in this doc]
- Overcoming inbuilt biases is hard; this applies to both sides of the spectrum;
- The internal climate alienates and suppresses viewpoints of people of a conservative political nature, and this is a bad thing;
- We should have a more open discussion about what our diversity programs achieve and what do they cost (in a wide sense); make it less uncomfortable to hold and express opinions against the orthodoxy;
- Indoctrinating people who determine promotion about bias might not have unalloyed benefit for the firm's long-term interests.
Very little of this seems, on the face of it, obviously incorrect or sociopathic. I think the author
strayed into moderately unjustified territory on point 7, but otherwise they seemed to be quite reasonable
in their arguments and moderate in their conclusions.
I've particularly enjoyed reading tweets and posts from tech woman flaming the original poster for
blatant sexism. Really ladies, you should read the post more carefully. He described a contrast of
the average male and female behaviors, and took particular pains to point out that this did not
say anything about any particular woman's (or man's) effectiveness in a tech role. The behavior biases
he described seemed bang on in my experience - and I've met women matching the male biases, and men
matching the female biases, but on average the skew is as he has described.
It's almost as if many of the women responding to his post have more bias towards describing their
feelings about the ideas, rather than ideas themselves; looking at the "big picture" rather than
carefully analysing the detail of what he said. Perish the thought that this reflects the gender
biases he described...
Of course, if you challenge the Silicon Valley orthodoxy like this - even if you originally intended for it
to be for an internal-only debate - you can expect a certain amount of kick-back. And oh boy, did they get it.
I've seen public calls for them to be fired and beaten up, and that was from people using social media accounts
associated with their real names. The prevailing theme seemed to be that anyone expressing - or even holding -
opinions like this in Silicon Valley was inherently poisonous to the work environment and should be fired
forthwith. For goodness' sake, this was one person's opinion, quite mildly expressed. Alphabet
(Google's parent company) has 75,000
people. You'd think that an isolated instance of crimethink would not be a big deal, but apparently
you'd be very wrong.
Google has just acquired a new Head of Diversity, Danielle Brown from Intel. I don't know if they
had one previously, or if this is a new slot, but my goodness this is quite the baptism of fire.
She's posted an internal memo which has, inevitably, leaked:
Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.
But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.
This probably wasn't a bad holding action - it would piss off the conservatives defending every point that
the original poster made (because it was hinted as contradictory to equal employment), and it would piss off
the outraged mob because it wasn't along the lines of "we threw this person out of the company so fast that
his backside made scorch marks along Amphitheater Parkway". You could reasonably call it even-handed. The
difference is that the conservatives within Google won't be calling publicly for Ms Brown to reconsider her
approach or risk riots in the streets.
I asked a San Francisco based Google engineer buddy what he thought about this.
"Are you [censored] kidding me? I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole" was
a reasonable summary of his reaction. He did note that the author's name was widely known
internally and that he viewed it as inevitable that their name would leak,
but he'd be damned if he was going to be the one to leak it.
It's also not a little ironic that this comes on the heels of the US Department of
Labor accusing Google of discriminating by gender in salaries. If the original author's claims are taken at
face value - which is a big "if", to be fair - Google is actually trying to discriminate in
favour of women.
For extra points, it's instructive to note the reaction to this in conjunction with President Trump's proposed ban on
transgendered troops serving in the military. [Bear with me, I have a point I promise.]
One of the grounds for this ban was transgender people
having a much higher rate of mental instability (depression, self-harm, suicide attempts) which is not
what you want in a front-line military unit where there are plenty of intrinsic causes of instability.
We see one bloke in Google writes a document, and every trans blogger I know of explodes in a frenzy of
rage and demands for his head - despite the fact that he didn't mention transgender issues at all
in the manifesto. One can only imagine what would happen if the author had drawn attention to the
relatively high proportion of male-to-female trans people among the female engineering population and
ask what it meant...
The modern day lynch mob is alive and well, and it seems to be driven by dyed-in-the-wool Democratic voters
against anyone daring to express an opinion contrary to today's right-think on gender and racial issues.
Plus ça change, plus la même chose.
