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Comment by tomlock | Hacker News Reader

I chuckled a little because you mention "generic white males" and then Satya in the next sentence.

Satya's comments were poorly stated and he said as much. People spoke freely about it, and he clarified. Free speech in action!

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You must be easily amused then. Satya Nadella was an example of people in generally being required to speak in a politically correct way. Haven't you heard of intersectionality? Nadella could still be accused of having male privilege in spite of being non-White.

And your analysis is very shallow. Of course speech was "free" in the legal sense, that is not the issue. The issue is that even though his honest opinion was that in the long run, women's approach might not be a big disadvantage, he was forced to recant and give the "right" answer.

I am easily amused and I also know what intersectionality is.

I'm interested in why you have the perspective that Satya was being honest and then recanted, since he pretty clearly stated that he misspoke, and it is easy to see how he misspoke. My perspective is he was speaking in terms of how tech ought to be for women, but failed to mention that the situation for women was currently different. The idea that women ought to be able to trust the system is a given, but Satya didn't say "but it currently isn't so" and in his apology he cleared that up. Good on him!

My perspective is he was speaking in terms of how tech ought to be for women, but failed to mention that the situation for women was currently different.

That's just completely wrong, watch the video again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndm_RSvAgO4

I disagree. Could you help me understand why you think he backed down rather than just clarifying his comments?

If you watch the video, there is nothing that suggests Satya is not talking about the way things are in the workplace, not they way they should be. I just don't see where you are getting this idea from. Do you have a single source for this?

Its not an uncommon use of "white male". Most of the media describes Asians in tech as white - it is the only way to preserve the narrative.

> Most of the media describes Asians in tech as white

Do you have any examples?

For example, "Google Admits it Hires Too Many White Dudes" or "Amazon’s Diversity Report Is Another White-Male-Dominated Tech Story".

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/google-admits-it-hires-too-...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/03/amazon-diversity-2014/

(Both reports show that Asians are overrepresented, white people represented, and others underrepresented.)

You said "Most of the media describes Asians in tech as white - it is the only way to preserve the narrative."

Neither of those articles - from a single source - describe Asians as white; Asian is explicitly broken out as a seperate category and described as a minority.

"It’s no better on the race front, either, with the highest minority being Asian at 34% in tech and next to non-existent in anything else."

Did you miss the fact that Asians are only "overrepresented" in tech, and not in other parts of Google?

Amazon doesn't break the job types into tech and non tech. They do Amazon everything and Amazon management. But even that tech crunch report shows that they have seperated out white, Asian, black, hispanic, and other.

These are weak examples considering the claim you made.

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