Comment by williamaadams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamaadams | Hacker News Reader

This whole episode leaves me a bit perplexed because in tech we keep missing the mark when it comes to diversity.

I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.

As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I've been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).

I want more women in engineering precisely because they're not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.

So, I'm just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: http://aka.ms/leapit

I see this mentality pop up time after time: How dare you say there are differences in women's capabilities! Except of course, here are some things women are _better_ at.

Sorry, but no. Either we are equally capable by nature and any differences in outcome are due to upbringing ("nurture"), or there are biological differences which means you have to accept there very well may be things women are less capable of as well as the opposite.

I'm firmly in the first camp and think it's mostly if not only upbringing and cultural biases, but you don't get to shun the notion that women are less capable at some things while at the same time claiming there are many things women are actually more capable of. Don't open that door.

...and, this guy being fired has nothing to do with political correctness or any of the other inane arguments people are rallying around. It's simple corporate calculation.

He release something that turned into a fire storm. Google no doubt did a law suit calculation and figured firing him was cheaper than the inevitable "hostile work environment" lawsuits they figured would be filed if they didn't take such action.

If the goal was to not get fired, but still have the dialog, he probably could have found a forum to do it. Instead, he blasted into their internal interweb, and here's the outcome.

Most large companies would probably end up doing the same thing, regardless of what they might believe about what was actually written.

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