Unwrapping #GoogleManifesto issues

Dominique Bashizi
Aug 9, 2017 · 6 min read

An engineer at Google wrote a lengthy memo on why Google’s diversity efforts are misguided and used women’s (supposed) predisposed weakness at engineering-related things to support his case.

It didn’t go so well for him, as he fairly prompted got fired.

The web cheered Google. The web chastised Google. The web is divided — who knew?

There are several issues with the manifesto that I want to unpack, because they’re all somewhat related to one another and they are important to understand in order to consider why it was important for Google to take the action that it did, and why it will be important for Google (and others) to hold steadfast in their efforts to increase diversity in their workforce.


Incoherent Argument

If I follow the memo’s author’s reasoning and project a world where the views he espouses have been translated into policies, we’d have something like this:

Woman dresses as a man and walks into an interview for an engineering position. Things go well until she somehow discloses that she is, in fact, a woman (gasp!). She is promptly dismissed from the interview, because, you know … boobs and vagina.
In other words, half the population is shut out of specific career options (not a specific job, mind you — entire career options at many different companies) because of their gender.
This is supposed to be OK.

On the other hand, our manly man engineer friend *chooses* to express a view he *chose* to espouse. This view informs us about how he would work with various other people infinitely more than whether he is a man or a woman, black or white, gay or straight.
Based on this view he chose to express, his *one* employer makes the decision that he doesn’t fit well within the environment they want to promote for their workplace.
This is supposed to be “not OK”.

In other words, the camp who wants to dismiss half the population based on nothing other than gender is up and arms because one person is dismissed based on an opinion he freely chose to adopt and freely chose to express.

That’s logically incoherent at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst.


Lack of diversity isn’t accidental

Why are there so few minorities in Congress, C-suites, …? Because all those minorities happen to share the same genetic characteristics that make them less capable for those positions than the overwhelming majority of white males who hold them now? No …

It’s because minorities of all kinds have been discriminated against for *generations*. If you want to dispute that fact, you might as well stop reading now — we don’t have anything to talk about.

If you had a plant that you had been watering diligently for weeks and weeks and it was doing well, and you had another plant you had been neglecting for the same period of time, and it was doing poorly. Would you just say that that plant is “bad”. Or would it make sense to say “let me give this other plant some attention so it has a chance to thrive as well”.

When something has been done *intentionally* to produce a specific effect (put down specific classes of people), it is foolish to expect the results of these intentional actions to fade away on their own.

If you want to get rid of the heritage of discrimination, which for simplicity here I’ll label “lack of diversity”, then it follows that you need to do *something* about it. Not just sit around and expect the dying plant to suddenly start thriving.

If you recognize that generational abuse against minorities requires explicit action to rectify, then you shouldn’t assume that efforts to take action are “reverse racism”. Paying extra attention to the dying plant is not out of hatred or neglect for the beautiful plant — it’s out of care that the dying plant *not die* and actually get better!

I’m not claiming that Google’s diversity efforts are all perfect and cannot be improved, but coming at it from the perspective that the “idea” of specific programs targeted at minorities constitutes something akin to “reverse racism” is misunderstanding the issue of lack of diversity in the first place.


Morality matters in Science

Are men, on average, physically stronger than women? Yes … Is that a useful fact when evaluating an individual for a specific task or job? For some, yes … (some things to debate here as well, but I can concede the point for the purpose of this conversation)

Are there other useful conclusions we could potentially reach from the genetic differences between men and women? Possibly … but to what end?

History tells us that humans are very good at taking massive cognitive shortcuts to justify discriminating against one another based on various characteristics. Do we really want to devote significant scientific resources to come up with more data to tear us apart? Have we not learned anything from our abuse of eugenics, from our morally unjustifiable, yet pseudo-science justified enslavement of entire races, from our systematic extermination of entire cultures?

As we are barely (on a civilization scale) starting to make progress towards a more merit-based society, is now really the time to go back to the well for renewed arguments for the superiority of one gender over the other, one race over another, or whatever other genetic traits you want to use?

Morality matters here. It matters what kind of society we’re trying to build. And it matters what science we support as a result.

Nuclear weapons are not good. Discrimination weapons are worse.

So forget about whether or not the science agrees with the author of this manifesto. Forget about whether he’s completely wrong about the role of empathy and collaboration in software, and therefore (based on his reasoning) how well suited women are for the profession.
Whether the conclusions would lead to discrimination again men or against women, the cost is too high. The risk that someone will co-opt these supposed results to achieve a hateful agenda is too high.

There is no research that I’ve seen, and certainly none that the author shared, that is so conclusive about women’s ability to handle engineering jobs that it would be worth cutting them out completely. And if it’s not that conclusive, then I say we have a moral obligation to give each individual a chance to shine on their own, and not prejudge them based on whether they have a penis or a vagina.


I hope it’s clear that I’m not endorsing the notion that men are superior to women in their ability to handle engineering tasks.

Actually, I’m not interested in any science that endeavors to demonstrate either gender’s intellectual superiority or inferiority. I believe a) it’s not possible to do so in any useful way, simply based on gender (too many other factors coming into play for all real-life scenarios, including engineering), b) whatever snippets of data we can derive will be abused by people like they were in this memo and c) humans don’t need additional ammunition to discriminate against one another.

In addition to treading on historically dangerous grounds without addressing the risks, the author of the memo also makes a fundamentally incoherent argument and betrays a deep misunderstanding of “diversity efforts” and why they are necessary in the first place.

So, no, he didn’t get fired because he wasn’t PC or disagreed with a left-leaning agenda. He got fired because he went out of his way to make it very clear to the leadership of his company what kind of coworker he could be expected to be. And I am glad that Google decided that they didn’t want to impose this kind of person on their workforce. I’m glad that Google decided to stand for its diversity efforts, and that we can count of them to continue to actively address an issue that has taken many generations of abuse to develop.

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Life is hard — let’s think about it and discuss together. My framework is open mindedness, rational thinking, logical reasoning and empathy.

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