wow - 28 people on the about page and the only woman is the diversity director.
diversity and inclusion committee at google ask employees for feedback, the memo was a feedback saying "current policies do not work as expected, maybe offering more part time and family friendly jobs would allow both men and women that do want to spend time with their family to like working at google".
I do not know if you have read the memo, but it only objective is to find a way to hire more women in an effective way.
Personally I liked the proposition in the memo because it would allow for men and women to equally share child-duties.
That said I do not criticize google's decision to fire him as the overwhelmingly negative exposure the memo had was quite a damage to the company...
In terms of what might be best for me, were I looking for a job... equal opportunity is fair/good. Of course I would think that... I'm a white male... I am a historically privileged class of person in the workforce. Anything that doesn't adversely my job opportunities is good for me, right?
From the perspective of a company that is trying to build a high-output, innovative team... diversity is really, really awesome: diversity of thinking patterns, backgrounds, interests. I have experienced this first hand and am now 100% sold on the importance of diversity and oversampling certain segments of "talent pool" to reach diversity goals. I may I miss out on some opportunities due to how I am categorized in the overall talent pool.... but diversity is really good for the organization and society in general.
Some sports analogies apply: you can't make a basketball team out of all shooting guards or a soccer team out of all forwards. You need a lot of different kinds of talent to make a good team.
That is just my opinion... I would rather work on a diverse team and I'd rather live in a diverse city/culture.
I have worked in high tech for 20 years: biotech, a PhD @ Carnegie Mellon, NASA, some startups, back to biotech... I have worked with so many awesome people of all walks of life that notions of gender or racial superiority are long gone. Quite the opposite, i have experienced the tremendous benefit that usually arises with diverse teams: deeper group experience, less competition and more cohesion, stronger friendships and sense of connection, diverse technical experience and interest, really different and novel ways of approaching problems and developing solutions (things that blew my fragile little mind), etc.
Yes I did write of myself as a historically privileged class... which definitely falls along racial/gender divides. Hopefully the manner of that frank discussion indicates that this privilege really sucks for most everyone (we really all lose) and is short sited. Then I started a new paragraph which signifies a though break --> moving on to a different but related thought.
Nowhere in my post did I the use word "race" or the phrase "intellectual strengths", and I did't use those phrases because I don't believe in them... I used "thinking patterns, backgrounds, and interests."
To address this: "You added the idea that this type of diversity was beneficial because it's an advantage to have a diversity of interests and intellectual strengths in different areas. So you are equating a racial and sexual diversity with the latter." I wrote none of that... I believe none of that. It requires multiple logical fallacies to get from what I expressed to what you wrote above. Rather than jumping to conclusions, why don't you ask me to clarify what I meant?
So what do I think about diversity and inclusion, in brief: Diversity is highly multivariate... what team diversity means can vary from situation to situation. Hiring for a Mechanical engineering team vs. women's fashion design team would probably have very different diversity hiring goals but the desired benefit and improvement for the team is similar.
If people only look at diversity as race and gender, they are missing the boat entirely... how about personality, age, ethnicity, religion, educational background, work experience, world/life experience, family responsibilities, life aspirations, out of work interests, health concerns and disabilities, sexual preference, ...all factors which make us different/unique and interesting.
The flip side of diversity, which is inclusion and appreciation, is pretty simple: it is really important to try to understand people, appreciate them for who they are, do your best to allow them to be who they are in the workplace, and not pigeon hole them into a box.
Regardless of what I'm called next, I'm done replying to this thread. If you figure out how to construe this as "I must be the second coming of Hitler", more power to you.
The general problem of diversity is ubiquitous in tech, sort of rough to call out a young startup over this issue. Most good companies strongly desire diversity in their teams because of the real benefits diversity provides.