San Francisco: A document written by an unnamed senior
software engineer at Google suggesting the company encourage
"ideological" rather than gender diversity, is generating anger
within the company and in Silicon Valley.
Titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", the
male author wrote that women don't make up 50 per cent of the company's tech
and leadership positions not because of sexism but because of differences in
their preferences and abilities.
He also writes that the company's focus on diversity tends
to alienate conservatives, which he believes is bad for business as
conservatives tend to be more conscientious, a trait that is required for
"much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature
company".
The essay comes as Google is engaged in an ongoing effort to
try to get more women and minorities into technical and leadership jobs, and as
the Mountain View-based company is being investigated by the US Labor
Department over allegations that it does not pay men and women equally.
Just a month ago Google hired Danielle Brown, the former
head of diversity at Intel, to be its vice president of diversity.
In the past several years as staffing data has come out,
Silicon Valley firms have been shown to hire a high proportion of white and
Asian men, but fewer women and other minorities. Increased efforts to deal with
the lack of diversity have also created a backlash against such initiatives.
The 10-page manifesto against Google's diversity initiatives
appears to have first been circulated internally at the company on Friday. It was
initially reported by Motherboard, before Gizmodo published the full document,
prompting a flood of angry tweets and some supporting the writer's right to
free speech.
he overall tone of the essay is calm. The author
acknowledges that there is bias that holds women back in tech and leadership.
He doesn't suggest that women aren't capable of doing technical work but rather
that the differences between men and women should be acknowledged.
He states that women tend to be more interested in people
rather than things, "empathising vs systemising," whereas men have a
higher driver for status and so tend to end up in leadership positions.
He also says that on average, women have more
"neuroticism," as defined as "higher anxiety, lower stress
tolerance".
The author doesn't believe that Google should engage in
social engineering just to make its jobs equally appealing to men and women,
calling "discriminatory" programs at the company available only to
women and minorities.
Google didn't appear to have any plans to discipline the
staffer, though Ms Brown, the vice president for diversity, did say that the
views expressed in the essay were not endorsed, promoted or encouraged by the
company.
In a memo to employees on Saturday, she wrote, "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."
