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.
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.