Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature.
There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.
Another thing is people are outraged that the engineer seems to denigrate a whole group of people as not as good engineers, and the eng is doing groups a disservice but when people bash "whitemaleness" you don't see the same reaction of, well, please don't lump all while males into one group, don't denigrate a whole group.
A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signal against white males, even Asian males. Any other group and you're treading on very thin ice. You're likely to get summoned to see an HR rep.
And hundreds of female dominated careers that no one seems to find problematic. In France, judges or doctors are predominantly female. These are high skills/high responsibility jobs. I don't see anyone claiming this is a discrimination.
No, he's using a biological justification to openly discuss different ways to foster diversity. This is one of his points: the most common argument against him is just that you think he's a sexist, not because you don't think his ideas will actually foster any kind of diversity. And I don't understand that. The reaction here is the opposite of tolerance and diversity.
edit: I'm going to give a personal example: I strongly supported legalizing gay marriage, but I also support the right of anyone to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake or to run a church and not perform gay marriages. And I've had numerous former friends chew me out and shun me for being "intolerant". It's that attitude that makes reasonable political discussions harder and harder (at least in the US right now) because it makes everyone fear to give up anything to reach a compromise or to even understand each other.
But we're back to discussing the reaction again. Which is a neat way of avoiding the content of the article itself.
I have no particular need to apply the label of "sexist" to this guy. I have no opinion, nor enough information, to say whether he should be fired or not.
I do think he's profoundly wrong though, and think his arguments about biological differences bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments.
>> he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career.
>> avoiding the content of the article itself.
That's what I'm talking about. I also think his ideas wouldn't be terribly effective, but I think villifying and dismissing him just for saying it does more harm than him saying it. That's why there are people focusing on the reaction. It doesn't really matter who the onus is on to justify his claims if you're not going to actually listen to anyone who disagrees with you anyway. And you can't claim you actually listened, because you explicitly said he was arguing in favor of excluding people based on class. That's what you heard from all of his suggestions to approach inclusion a different way.
What does "bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments" mean? Is this the same sort of thinking that has people rabidly ferreting out "dogwhistles" in normal speech?
It's not about exclusion, it's about preference. We seem to be trying to force a result, in the name of equality, when there may not in fact be any inequality. I'm not saying there isn't sexism in Silicon Valley. I'm saying that trying to steer women into certain fields of study they may not, on average, be as interested in it as men seems really dumb.
If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equality, then their HR policies for hiring would say one and only one thing - that the best candidate is the one that gets the job. Only exception would be issues with background checks or perhaps questionable/falsified work history or resume. Other than that, the rule stands. There would be no need to ensure "diversity" as a corporate policy because any and all minorities that apply and are the best will get hired. In those cases, HR would be there to document in detail who was the best and why to protect the company from frivolous diversity related lawsuits. HR would also act as a check and balance on imperfect and possibly biased individuals.
> If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equality, then their HR policies for hiring would say one and only one thing - that the best candidate is the one that gets the job.
It's strange though that you will find many engineers who say that HR policies for hiring do a poor job of finding the right engineers for the job (whiteboarding tests, easily gamed, "culture fit" etc), but who don't seem as eager to admit that these factors, rather than "biological differences" could be what are excluding women.
Whiteboarding tests are not HR policies anywhere. HR has next to nothing to do with who gets hired other than when they intervene. They're typically the last step of the process.
> biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career
No. He's proposing a biological explanation for why the career is not split 50/50 between men and women. An explanation which frankly sounds plausible.
In addition to career attractiveness, the thing is tech is an easy target for the modus operandi. Companies in tech deeply need to have a good image and reputation. When your business model is B2C and you're targeting growth at all cost you can't afford a boycott campaign on Twitter, or a few blog posts on medium about sexual harassment, etc.
Other mostly male-dominated industries do not have this characteristic. Do construction companies care about PR? Do financial companies care? Do oil exploitation companies care?
I am not sure Uber users really care about sexism at Uber when it's 2am, they are outside of a bar and need to find a cab. I don't think users will switch away from gmail or google.com en masse because of the male/female ratio in this company. In fact outside of the microcosm of the Silicon Valley and its satellites, I don't think these issues are drawing that much attention.
Right, he's just asking questions, what's so harmful about that?
He's "asking" whether or not an entire category of people deserve to be in his field. Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. That is on its face extremely offensive and damaging. Imagine showing up to work today in silicon valley as a female engineer. Imagine having spent years, decades, busting your ass to get a job in a field you've been passionate about since you were a child and here some asshat out of left field can dangle your entire career out over a precipice in front of the world like some circus act.
That's the real problem here, the problem of entrenched misogyny and tribalism in the industry so deep that it means everyone who isn't a white skinned techbro has to constantly validate and re-validate (and re-re-validate) their own existence on an ongoing basis. White dudes have the luxury to call into question the validity of the careers of hundreds of thousands of other people with just a few words, but they never seem to have to prove their own worth. That's the problem here.
The industry, the world, is on an un-level playing field, with those who are at a disadvantage at the edge of a cliff facing a steep slope to get further from the cliff. Those higher up sometimes ask "but do they really deserve to be here? what if we just push them off, look how close they are to the edge, it would be so easy". This is not ok.
> Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers.
No, he is not, and your choice of words like 'deserve' and 'allowed' to add intent that wasn't present in the original is unfortunate.
It's NOT a question of 'permission', so it's not about who is allowed to be an engineer and who isn't. He is specifically questioning whether positive discrimination to ensure there are equal numbers of men and women engineers at Google makes sense, if there are innate differences in the degree to which men and women DESIRE to be engineers.
There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.