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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

If an LGBTQ employee publishes a 10-page diatribe about how straights are biologically less suited to working at Google, they'd have been fired too.

He wasn't fired because he was a conservative, and he wasn't fired because of his opinions. He was fired because he made hostile remarks about the majority of his co-workers that legally resulted in a hostile work environment under US law.

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Except he didn't; what you describe is the media misrepresentation of the original memo.

What in your opinion, is a proper interpretation or representation of the original memo?

That the ratio of women:men in tech may never reach 1:1 even if historical biases against women are resolved (he lists some possible reasons). Therefore efforts by Google and others to improve this ratio to 1:1 at all costs can be counterproductive and discriminatory in and of themselves and should be re-examined.

That was my interpretation at least.

No, it's how I and more than a dozen other people I talked to who read the memo, from front to back, in great detail, all interpreted it.

That's the thing about words: if you're not precise, they can be interpreted differently from how you intended them.

> dozen other people I talked to

That's just like the Pauline Kael apprx-quote about how "no one she knew voted Nixon - how could he possibly win?". IOW, you are already in an echo chamber.

He didn't though. He didn't say that at all. He simply said that LESS women are interested in this field than men. He didn't say NO women were qualified, or anything close to it. He said aiming for 50/50 might not be the best idea, because there simply might not be that many women interested.

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