Shibboleth
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Your post reflects a total misunderstanding of what the author was saying. At no point was it said or implied that women weren’t designed or capable of doing the work. That line of thinking is a wild exaggeration of his actual points, a clear straw man. His point was that there are plausible explanations for the disparity in gender representation in tech other than discrimination, and that biological sex differences may play a role in it. It tied in with his critique of Google being a leftist echo chamber in attempting to provide some counter to the prevailing narrative of sexist discrimination.

Noting that women or men in general tend to have certain proclivities or gravitate towards this or that interest in no way represents a claim that any individual woman or man can or cannot do xyz. The author was explicit about this.

I don’t know…what if his manifesto said that minorities were biologically not designed to be engineers…in mind it is the same thing.

This is not a proper analogy, because again this claim was not made. A more appropriate analogy would be something like “what if the manifesto said that X minority is underrepresented in some area because that group tends to be less interested in that thing, and that there may be at least some biological component to this?” Would you still consider that racist?

There is a time, place and way of doing things. Releasing it company wide is not how you handle those things. Even if you are right it is destructive to you, your team and the company. Nobody wins.

I dunno, one can argue that in attempting to address a company-wide culture that this was exactly the way to publish. Echo chambers can stand a little destruction.

    Shibboleth

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