“(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.”
Except the author is talking about biological sex, not gender and traits that biologists accept are more common to either sex. The author also has a masters in systems biology.
“(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.”
“All of these traits which the manifesto described as “female” are the core traits which make someone successful at engineering.”
Except the memo cites evidence which shows that women actively empathise (“feel”) while men still understand/systematise (“think about”) the feelings, concerns and views of others. This would mean both sexes have the same core skills required in engineering (based on your own arguments) but use different mechanisms to achieve the result. Again, author has a masters in the subject he is discussing here — I’m going to treat his expertise in the field of biology with the respect it deserves.
As an IT engineer who works primarily in security/support, who also needs to do a moderate amount of programming on the side, I personally find that understanding what the client/customer actually needs, rather than analysing what they say or how they feel — leads to a far better solution. Empathy has its place in helping to understand a presented problem/issue, but it’s not a core trait for success. People don’t know what they want, but they often do know what they *dont want*.
“What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas.”
Are you reading the same document that I am reading? The document I am reading is here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf
Nowhere in that document is the author saying that people are not good enough to do their jobs. He is citing scientific papers and other sources to explain why Google is not doing a good enough job at helping women. He clearly wants a better workplace for everyone, both men and women.
Interestingly enough, scientists are coming out of the woodwork in agreement with this man’s citations of mainstream scientific literature. His comments are not considered controversial from a scientific perspective, only from a political perspective. Surely, that’s worth strongly considering before making a judgement as to what he actually did here. If his claims meet scientific scrutiny, maybe… just maybe… he is right!
As an aside, he has clearly listed a bunch of improvements, which should be implemented as they will help everyone:
- We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration.
[Why not, it’s claimed that code can be written more securely this way. Everything you do gets instant scrutiny!]
- Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive.
[Not everyone should try to lead or take charge. Some people should follow the wise instructions of others and still be rewarded for doing a good job!]
- Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
[If you can find an argument against this, you’re clearly not human!]
- Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
[This has to happen, companies like Google are killing full-time work through automation. All work should be part-time anyway, why do we still work 37.5 hour weeks as standard?]
I see no issues with anything posted by this man, and I hope he lands a job with a company that doesn’t discriminate against people for their views.
Having seen the evidence of how Google treats senior employees, if Google offered me a job tomorrow, I would decline.
