I appreciate where you are coming from. And I agree we should, "strive towards a world in which we stop making exactly those kinds of distinctions and instead judge people on the content of their character and the value they can create." And I honestly believe that diversity and outreach programs are part of that process.

The economic and social structure of the United States is the result of historical processes that were driven by racism and sexism; disparities in wealth and power between these groups continue to exist today due to that legacy.

To take one example, "If average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today." [0]

While it is a great sentiment that everyone should be treated purely as individuals and it is something to strive for, it completely ignores the economic reality of our country and is an ahistorical approach to public policy or the construction of a hiring pipeline.

We can argue about to what role public companies can or should play to reduce these historical inequities. I think that outreach and education at all levels to increase the number of candidates from underrepresented groups in the tech hiring pipeline is a great step and that reducing these inequities, beyond being ethical, will create a stronger workforce. Others might disagree and have good reasons to disagree. That is a conversation worth having, but it needs to happen in the historical context in which we find ourselves.

Writing a manifesto that claims that the disparity in tech is the result of biological differences that lead women to be inferior at performing in tech and leadership capacities is not the way to start this conversation. In fact this is the exact kind of sentiment that you call out by saying, "I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place."

[0] http://www.ips-dc.org/report-ever-growing-gap/

There are a lot of holes in the arguments you're laying out, but I'll comment on just a few:

* Google is a profit-motivated entity. They have to act in the interest of their shareholders. Correcting for historical imbalances - to the extent that it negatively perverts hiring standards - doesn't factor into the calculus of a responsible corporation.

* Jews were systematically exterminated in a historical event that was even more recent than slavery. Countless more were left destitute. Why are they any less deserving of positive bias?

* There are millions of White people across the Midwest who are dirt poor because manufacturing is no longer a meaningful economic sector in this country. What about them?

And more generally, believing that there's a contemporary responsibility to correct for historical imbalances leads you down a fantastically absurd rabbit hole. We should instead be addressing the present socioeconomic condition (which will indirectly benefit many of the historically disenfranchised). And that is the job of government. Not corporations.

* Google clearly doesn't believe or intend for its diversity programs to negatively pervert its hiring standards. And while correcting historical imbalance isn't inherently profitable, building a more diverse workforce is potentially profitable in the long term as it provides broader perspective and empathy, a valuable thing for a company with a diverse user-base. The positive PR doesn't hurt either.

* This isn't a competition. It seems that the Jewish people have collectively been more resilient to persecution and therefore need no assistance, but so what? Good for them, but it doesn't diminish the fact that other minority groups still wear old wounds that hurt them today. Are you seriously suggesting that we shouldn't help disadvantaged black Americans simply because disadvantaged Jewish Americans didn't need it?

* Millions of white people across the Midwest are in bad shape, you're right about that. I support programs and practices that will help them out. I also support programs and practices that support other disadvantaged race and gender groups. So I don't know what to make of the question "what about them?". I'd have to hand the question back to you: what about them?

* The government is definitely necessary to address much of this, but it's ridiculous to ignore the role of corporations as the backbone of our capitalist society. The private sector is responsible for the majority of economic activity and employment in many countries; they exist at the heart of the problem. Not to mention that some corporate diversity initiatives are actually attempts to comply with government policy. The wider context to this memo is Google's gender pay gap lawsuit filed by the US Department of Labor.

> Are you seriously suggesting that we shouldn't help disadvantaged black Americans simply because disadvantaged Jewish Americans didn't need it?

Perhaps he's suggesting that black, white, Jewish, etc aren't the characteristics that we should be using to classify people as needing help. You'd probably have a lot less pushback if you created a biased hiring process that gave favoritism to people who had attended lower-income high schools or people who are the first generation in their families to earn a college degree. That hiring process would, overwhelmingly, benefit minorities since, as many are pointing out, they've been historically disadvantaged and systemic roadblocks like poor schools contribute to the difficulties we have with social mobility. It's when you start using skin color or ethnic background as a discriminant that it starts to get uncomfortable for many people. I honestly find it kind of bizarre to say that I have more in common with my Russian coworkers, who grew up under communism and are also classified as white, than I do with the minorities who came to my birthday parties growing up.

Having grown up poor and now being fairly comfortable, it's easy for me to see many of the disadvantages poor people face. I attended a public middle school that was less than 10% white. Despite being part of a single-parent family just barely above the poverty line, I had a mother with a PhD who took an interest in my education. Many of my classmates had parents that simply didn't care. And I was lucky enough to test into a prep school and avoid the public high school. At that school, I saw the other side. Most of my classmates, both white and the few non-white, were rich and most had after-school tutors from the local university that would help them complete their homework. My mother worked long hours and I was largely on my own to tackle the very difficult workload (4-5 hours of homework each night). Of the few that I've stayed in touch with, I've seen former white classmates from middle school struggle. And I've seen the few minority classmates from my high school breeze through their schooling and find whatever jobs they've wanted. Their skin color didn't seem to be much of an impediment when they had successful parents standing behind them.

So my opinion is going to be biased by my experience, but I don't see skin color being the biggest factor when compared to socio-economic situation and parental education level. It's not really controversial to say there's a huge correlation between race/ethnicity and being disadvantaged in those two areas, but for some reason it's controversial to say that we should use areas like those instead of race/ethnicity for these kinds of diversity programs.

You make a good point that socioeconomic factors are a big factor in all this, but I disagree that race is merely a symptom and not its own problem. There are hiring biases that are almost completely based on race, as demonstrated by one study on employee response to resume names:

> In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.

> The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

This isn't just a poverty or education problem. This study suggests that even a well-educated, affluent black American would face discrimination simply because of his/her ethnic name.

> And more generally, believing that there's a contemporary responsibility to correct for historical imbalances leads you down a fantastically absurd rabbit hole.

It amounts to collective guilt, which is generally considered to be a violation of human rights.

Its not just collective guilt its collective punishment.

Your comment is well-written, I appreciate it.

Several states in the Midwest (Indiana, for example) are actually undergoing a manufacturing boom. Google may have just shot itself in the foot here by making it clear that Midwestern political views are not welcome. I would wager that a sizable chunk of Google's technical workforce hail from the Midwest.

> Midwestern political views

Is this sarcasm or are you serious? Please don't normalize this memo as if it's rational American political thought.

Fwiw I grew up in and went to school in Indiana and it makes this google memo no less awful -.-

Midwestern folks respect competence without regard to race or sex. Google has clearly indicated that they think otherwise.

Nice lumping everyone from a huge swath of a region into one group. I'm from the Midwest, currently living in the Midwest, do not hold anything close to these stupid views.

After reading this and some other comment sections and blogs I still haven seen single of his "stupid views" refuted in concise and logical manner, without relying on assumptions that only sexism and biases in hiring are cause of gab in distribution of sexes in tech.

Based on my personal experience during my education I think his assumptions are quite accurate. Men are more inclined towards tech and science while women are more inclined towards education and social studies. But this is generalization. You also have women who excel in math and men who excel in education. Its just that there are less of them.

Imo James was very careful with his words and stated multiple times that generalizing is harmful. He even included graphical representations of that: https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1502146696203-S...

Good luck trying to explain.

Fact of the matter is: there's a small portion of women represented in computer science than the average. Anyone whom tries to "guess" why, either based upon fact or unproven postulate, is blackballed and/or fired.

As per "diversity hire" or many other mealy-mouth ways of saying it, comes back to political correctness and affirmative action.

Affirmative action means, for a decision right now, to use attributes you cannot change (sex, skin color, race, age, height) as an equal or primary stat in deciding policy - whether to give you money, whether to hire you, whether to rent to you. It also is an (sex/rac/age)-ism. That's because of X events in the past, and collective guilt or something tries to overcompensate.

The insulting part of this, is that if you, well, aren't a white male, then you might have been hired because of unchangeable attributes, and not because of your skill. Doubly so if you work in a position that entails "diversity" in its title. In those cases, the job was created for your attributes, and not intelligence.

The other half, is that you're not allowed to talk about it. Full stop. End of story. Do not mention the elephant. There is no elephant. Anyone who mentions the unmentionable is summarily disposed.

Tl;Dr. We need a hiring test equivalent to a Turing test. No race, no sex, no body-type, no nothing other than "Can you type the language we're using, and can you answer questions pertaining to the job at hand?"

> "Can you type the language we're using, and can you answer questions pertaining to the job at hand?"

Genuine question: are all of your co-workers who are best to work with, those that provide most value to yourself and the company, those with the greatest technical proficiency for the job in hand?

I'd suggest that for most jobs the ability to work well with other people in a team to approach the problem is as, if not more important, than the technical proficiencies of the individuals involved. The inter-personal stuff is really, really important.

You're right, in that does seem to "make sense" on a first pass. Who doesn't want to work with others that you get along with?

The darker picture behind that. So we should choose for interpersonal communication and "getting along", no? Then I should hire fellow white males, since they share my culture. And I'll also choose from a similar age group, since I know we'll connect quick due to shared culture. And we can make wiseass cracks about women, share "conquests", make nasty jokes. (Hmm, just described Uber.)

Or I can hire from people whom are good at what they do, get down to work and finish a job, and go home where you make the culture you want there, and not a forced "culture" at work. I don't go to work for culture, or friends, or any social reason. I go to work because I get paid to do a job and I do it.

If working with/for someone is uncomfortable, I bite my tongue, grin and bear it. If it's past social norms and ventures into illegality, either talk with HR about harassing workplace (provide proof), or find somewhere else to work.

You are up against irrational emotion driven reactions and that in turn means anything that does not agree with a person in that state is automatically hateful, stupid, or worse.

My view is that is many parts of the fields I am in is that we are only beginning to see the benefits of women entering engineering and similar fields in significant numbers over a decade or more ago. There simply are not enough woman who came up through that process twenty plus years ago to have the experience many companies assign to a role; this artificial inflation of requirements also pushes out a lot of men as well.

So diversity for the sake of diversity is wrong. not acknowledging we have a shortage of qualified candidates is wrong as well but try to remember this is because it took so long for society to accept women in these roles that it may not have been a dream of many until the last decade or two.

anecdotal, I remember my own sister expressing an interest in science only after Sally Ride (hence the 80s). Seeing a woman in space was a big deal. Before the age of the internet young women only had TV for examples to aspire to and TV still had/has an influence of young people.

Yet, making it clear that this form of behaviour is acceptable would not be shooting itself in the foot, when it comes to hiring and retaining women?

"Come work for us - where Senior SREs will publicly question whether or not you are capable of doing your job, based on your gender!" does not sound like a great recruiting pitch. Never mind that it is also an incredibly shitty thing to do.

>where Senior SREs will publicly question whether or not you are capable of doing your job, based on your gender!

"We put a policy in place that dictates that hiring should be on the basis of something other than capability"

"Oh my god why are employees questioning whether hires were made based on capability or something else?"

Seems pretty reasonable. It is far from the first time this point has been made: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/5...

>"Come work for us - where Senior SREs will publicly question whether or not you are capable of doing your job, based on your gender!"

"Senior SREs will privately doubt you are capable of doing your job, based on your gender/racial hiring preference" sounds so much better?

> They have to act in the interest of their shareholders.

Isn't it more that "they choose to act [...]" because it makes life easier rather than "they have to act [...]"?

e.g. there's no legal or ethical strictures upon them to act in their shareholders interest, only financial.

You speak of "the calculus of a responsible corporation" and "the job of government" as if unrelated phenomena. The latter authors the corporate law that sets the former. And it would take an extreme case indeed for a company's directors or employees to violate a fiduciary duty by implementing a diversity hiring initiative. Even if there were a plausible argument that a given initiative "cost" the company relative to other hiring practices, there will almost always be plausible arguments why incurring the "cost" is in the company's best long-term interests, all things considered, in which case courts will defer to business judgment.

You comment makes me wonder: At what point has the pursuit of diversity been "enough?" What's the actual end game, so that we know we've achieved it? Is it to have an perfectly statistically balanced ethnic representation in a company's workforce based on global population densities?

Will Google know that they've "succeeded" at diversity when 50-odd percent of programmers are women, and the bulk of their workforce are Asian and Indian, since they make up the majority of people on the earth? Is Google's goal to have the best programmers they can find, but which fit within the global demographics, because they conclude that there is absolutely no correlation between gender, race, culture, or creed in the aptitude for, or desire to pursue, any given human endeavor?

Or, perhaps, to use your example, is the goal to actually increase the preference for non-white, non-males in order to "catch up" other genders and ethnicities until their population groups exhibit the same level of wealth?

There are a lot of tangents to all of this, but I'm trying to stick to the main point here: at what point will we know that American corporations have achieved "enough" diversity, and that outreach programs and hiring preferences are no longer necessary? What's the idealized situation look like? (Honest question.) What's the measure of success?

Also, are companies in other parts of the world trying to achieve the same thing? Are companies, say, in India and China, hiring white and black people like crazy because they also recognize the extreme and urgent need to diversify their workforces? The answer to that question might help clarify the first.

I'm not sure how generational wealth inequality is relevant to gender diversity? Surely rich and poor families in the US are having boys and girls at roughly the same rates? Or have I missed something here?

> as long as we continue to perpetuate diversity practices that emphasize sex and race in any way, some classes of people are going to be harmed

The whole reason diversity practices exist is because "some classes of people" are already being harmed. Without "diversity practices", we already have practices that emphasize and discriminate sex and race, except they happen to be the status quo.

Attacking diversity for harming "some classes of people" misses the point, because any change to the status quo is necessarily going to harm certain classes and benefit other classes.

Class =/= race|gender. Could be argued that race|gender equality distracts from class divisions that are far more ingrained.

I think class divisions are intertwined with race and gender divisions. You can't ignore the effect of being hired at, say, Google will have on your class.

Exactly !

But 'intertwined' means correlation, not causation. Being a woman is correlated with not doing software dev. in a tech company. It does not mean that tech discriminate against women, because correlation ≠ causation.

Sure, I'll accept the basic logic that the lack of women in tech does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that tech discriminates against women.

But you're also ignoring evidence that suggests tech actually does discriminate against women. Just to scratch the surface, we've just seen some high profile cases like the scandal at Uber and Google's court case on its wage gap.

As someone working in tech, I find it somewhat offensive that Uber had some real twats working for it, and now I am categorized together with Travis as "tech discriminating against women".

The problem is that reverse discrimination does justify the discrimination they [cl]aim to fight. If HR considers the results of my technical interviews to be biased for the benefit of people who look like me and compensate accordingly, I then have to discriminate as I'm supposed to in order to achieve overall fairness of the recruitment process. How is that supposed to reduce biases ?

Reverse discrimination is the easy way, but it is actually counterproductive in term of reducing biases. As case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law imo, of optimizing the easy metric of enrollment ratio instead of the hard goal of fairness.

You aren't suggesting that all men are embroiled in Uber-like scandals? Danielle Brown might have a word with you.

> The whole reason diversity practices exist is because "some classes of people" are already being harmed. Without "diversity practices", we already have practices that emphasize and discriminate sex and race, except they happen to be the status quo.

Citation needed and it needs to be relevant in a liberal tech company environment.

> The whole reason diversity practices exist is because "some classes of people" are already being harmed. Without "diversity practices", we already have practices that emphasize and discriminate sex and race, except they happen to be the status quo.

Wrong. Everybody has an equal opportunity. Equal results are not guaranteed, nor should be guaranteed.

> Everybody has an equal opportunity

Citation needed.

How did you miss the article that was on the frontpage today?

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...

This is specifically about why women leave engineering, with a number of incidental measures about the egalitarian qualifications across gender (for the studied population).

Of course, next up is arguing about the epistemology of what "everyone" means, which is how you would have started if you weren't trolling. -1

That doesn't seem to support "everybody has equal opportunity" at all.

It's pretty well established [0] that the circumstances of ones birth - race, wealth and, yes, gender are a key determining factor in your expected life outcomes. Equal opportunities are emphatically not available to all.

[0] - http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...

First, I'm aware that there is a concerted effort in industry & politics to promote "Gender Equality" measures; with the end-game quotas, legal statutes, government power over individuals, intervention, etc.

Second, any policy intervention to correct "discrimination" is itself discrimination. The alternative is freedom & liberty (which benefits everybody). There are countermeasures to correct the "bad actors" & reward the "good actors". Many people who will choose to not give a certain company business if the company is perceived to be against one's values.

> This is specifically about why women leave engineering, with a number of incidental measures about the egalitarian qualifications across gender (for the studied population).

My responses to the "Key Findings" on the report:

> Nearly half said they left because of working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary.

I don't have a study handy, but this is not a situation unique to women. Too much travel, lack of advancement and low salaries are a symptom of corporate culture & the inverted leadership pyramid. Being on the bottom is not as good as being on the top & there's less room at the top. Having quotas does not help the people at the bottom nor does it necessarily create better cultural dynamics.

> One-in-three women left because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture.

I didn't like the workplace climates of several of my jobs. Didn't like all of my bosses or all of the cultures as well. If there is harassment toward women in a workplace, it's probably indicative of deeper issues where others are not being respected as well (in ways related to the characteristics of that person). The solution is not to put certain politically ordained "victim" characteristics on a pedestal; in fact it's an anti-solution because it discourages organizations/people to explore root causes.

> One-in-four left to spend time with family.

Understandable as this has been a more traditional pattern for women. Having a child means focusing more on family & less on the profession.

> Those who left were not different from current engineers in their interests, confidence in their abilities, or the positive outcomes they expected from performing engineering related tasks.

The map is not the territory. Models are an imperfect distillation of reality; especially models aggregating the complexity of many different lives.

While I agree that there are different outcomes in gender, culture, race, etc. The point is everybody (as in all people) has the legal ability to succeed in a profession. If you want certain people to succeed more, address the tools that they have & work to give them better tools so they can succeed. The wrong thing to do is to encourage a victim mentality & a autocratic culture that enforces a certain predetermined outcome; that is the opposite of freedom & liberty.

> It's pretty well established [0] that the circumstances of ones birth - race, wealth and, yes, gender are a key determining factor in your expected life outcomes. Equal opportunities are emphatically not available to all.

The source you provided assumes unwarranted prejudice as a reason. There are other determining factors related to the circumstances such as ability, temperament, education, culture, intelligence.

Let me clarify. Everybody has equal opportunity but not everybody is equally fit to take advantage of the opportunity. The best way to improve everybody's situation is to make the participants more fit for the job.

You got a good point. These days social class is more a determining factor for chances to move up than it has ever been. The risk with race, gender or other policies based on past evils is fighting the last war.