Google employee fired over diversity row considers legal action

You're kidding right? It's full of mischaracterizations.

>suggesting women are less suited to certain roles in tech and leadership

Not true. Saying women are less suited is saying all women are less suited.

What he said is that when comparing the distribution curve of women to men, the average woman may be less suited than the average man.

That's different. It means that the top 10% of women may be far better suited to leadership in tech than the bottom 85% of men.

>caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto at the weekend complaining about Google’s “ideological echo chamber”

He wrote a memo. It was posted on an internal forum. He wasn't complaining, he was suggesting alternatives to discrimination. Why are they making it sound like he was distributing fliers all over campus?

1. No 2. Not an attack, but there will be less jobs for those candidates with ability since companies would have to give up spots to hit their diversity quota 3. Yes

1.) It's not so simple. There are social mechanisms at play that will lead to a segregated workforce if we do not combat them. In today's world it takes effort to maintain a diverse workforce. As as to whether its a good thing, I think that a) diversity of people means diversity of ideas and solutions, and b) diversity in workers helps combat some of the social mechanisms that would keep the workforce segregated. It is also of the uptmost importance to note that raising diversity in the workforce is orthogonal to compromising on the quality of workers.

2.) Yonatan Zunger's response to the manifesto has been highly shared, but I think his essay "Tolerance is not a moral precept" is an important framework when talking about this issue. The basic premise is that by adopting tolerance as a social norm, we are not agreeing to also tolerate intolerance. Companies like Google have set out the edict that all their workers should be treated with respect. By questioning the inate abilities of a large portion of the workforce, the manifesto's author is doing great damage to the attitude of tolerance that allows Google to operate. He isn't be prosecuted by the government, but he is necessarily being expunged from an enviromenent that he is incompatible with.

I thought free speech was the government not making laws that you can't say something? Doesn't seem to apply here.

1. For services the general public depend on and likely end up paying for (even with ads), it seems appropriate to respect the diversity of the public and represent them, especially if the company involved is at risk or actually is a monopoly. We're not talking about being PC for a mom-and-pop style software house here: this is Google.

2. Ability in the context of software is so subjective. Software engineering is a balance of so many skills I cannot believe that any single set of abilities are dominate enough to isolate any nature of person as best at it. The ability argument on complicated code may well relate to Chess (which has sadly its own diversity problems), but that code is a minority of what we do. Diversity in IT is necessary... a lot of our software is terrible (bugs, privacy, accessibility, etc) and maybe that is representative of a lack of dominance of other abilities some of the average current programmers don't have enough of and need to find ways to include.

3. In my experience, I enjoy and worry about the cultural norms I share with most of my peers and get to enjoy through work. We like pizza, beer (fridges), burgers, the football or pool tables, casinos, the pub after work, games consoles (with Football and Fighting games) and the Giphy memes (involving comic books, sci-fi and football). As an industry we are dominated by and therefore cater mostly for young, western (Europe/USA), liberal men... how many software conferences are in Vegas? We enjoy natural discrimination that nobody (hopefully) is intending to create, but that just happens when an environment is dominated by any culture. I don't care how PC we are, we need to find a way to be more inclusive and if that involves ensuring that culture variations that aren't the majority are given additional resource or exclusivity to have room to enjoy their cultural norms in work too, then great... sadly for now, they'll still be the minority.

4. I think it is unfair to judge Google on the firing as the full context of the dialogue between employee and employer may not be apparent yet. As much damage as it might do, we do need concerns of positive discrimination to be aired and I hope Google haven't harmed that dialogue with firing the employee. Perhaps a disciplinary might have been more appropriate (the context seemed to go beyond just concern of positive discrimination and into the territory of sexism so who knows what was the right thing).

Note: the absence of women is so easy to notice that we might be missing the fact that many others are not represented well enough in our industry too: think accessibility, religions and anybody who doesn't read, write and speak English. We're terrible at some aspects of diversity and may not realise because we have people of variations amongst us, but they may not be fully representative in all ways that matter.

A perfectly reasonable question to ask.

Proving once again that on HN, sometimes downvotes are really upvotes.

It's a variant of don't be a political shit stirrer at work.