Your point is the memo failed because it makes exactly your point - that people should be treated like individuals rather than their group's statistical means.
I'm curious if you've even read it.
> I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
And people are trying to treat it as scientific, and some still want to pretend he wasn't shoe horning a political point in while masking it with feel good language. Despite the fact that he uses all of his data to separate populations by sex and treat them differently. My mind is being blown this morning.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
>This evidence is certainly up for debate
Well thankfully you had the cognition to see that.
I'm advocating for discussion, but pretending that you can start setting up solutions based on the data we have around how psychological traits affect professional outcomes, attempting to shoe horn those "solutions" into a political framework that treats everyone else that rationally disagrees with it as being in an "echo chamber", especially when you are essentially characterizing an entire population of professionals, is pretty foolish and toxic.
Did you even read the article you linked? How is that even remotely relevant to anything I said or what the memo's goal was?
Purely anecdotal, but when I was told I would get a low mark in my undergrad degree, it made me work harder to prove them wrong.
Young minds are impressionable, and if you tell a young person they're probably less capable of something, they probably will be. Even as the stereotypical nerdy white male programmer I can see how people look differently at a young girl who is interested in computers. It is considered odd, if not improper. Boys never have to contend with this bias (although they have similar yet opposite biases in different fields, like child care). Inevitably this societal pressure will cause fewer girls to go into programming, and in turn fewer women to end up at google. That's not a consequence of some genetic predisposition, it is a consequence of being brought up in a world where not everyone is treated equally.
How do you flip that around? You stop thinking in terms of averages and you start thinking in terms of individual opportunity. We treat every child as deserving of the same chances as any other child, and we stop trying to steer them into directions based on their birth. That requires a modal shift in thinking where gender is just not a factor anymore, for any profession or any talent.
The diversity memo's failing is not the statistics it cites, it is that it furthers the notion that diversity is a set of statistics to control for. True diversity is about ignoring statistics and instead giving every single person the same chances, regardless of where they came from. I want my daughter to have the same chance of becoming a programmer as my son, and my son to have the same chance of becoming a kindergarten teacher as my daughter, and for no one to tell them either choice is odd or improper.