Something that always rubs me the wrong way when reading about these issues is that people in (for now) mostly American spheres use both the word and the concept "race" so uncritically [1], with no reflection at all. Heck, if we consider the US Government, then "race" is an official property of humans (see e.g. bop.gov Inmate Locator, which literally has a drop-down labelled "race" with choices like "White" and "American Indian").
[1] It should go without saying that using a different word for the same concept means you're still using the same concept. It's essentially the same as the good-old-fashioned euphemism treadmill.
My past job, I would have political discussion with coworkers but they were people I had formed extremely close and trusting bonds with. We may have disagreed at times but it came from a place of respect and knowing someone a little.
After the US presidential election, the lead execs of the office sent out emails about the results and commiserating with the staff (we had people call in sick, crying, etc.) but, despite the office being 99.9% on their side, lunch conversation later that day revolved around how most didn't think what they did was appropriate because, if there was that .1% that could feel alienated, why do so from on high?
As for the second reason, I think it comes down to professionalism. We can politicize anything if we try hard enough. But if our employer says "no politics, just get the work done", then both sides must adhere to whatever policies are provided, within the law. Don't like the bathroom rules or workplace guidance? Work somewhere else.
That's certainly an incredibly common view, so I'm not going to say that it's wrong or irrational.
But I'm reminded of the bathroom subplot in Hidden Figures - all the restrooms in one building were for white people, and so the one black woman working in the building, who was extraordinarily technically competent, needed to go on extended break to another building every time she needed to use the restroom. "Don't like the bathroom rules, work someplace else" was absolutely the prevailing culture at the time, which had hefty rules about "professionalism" and not "politicizing" things. But it had a serious negative impact on the business, and the right thing to do (which a manager eventually did) was to change the bathroom rules.
The choice to adopt "professionalism," and to bring in no politics and leave the political decisions to whatever existing culture is in place, is a political choice of its own. There are a lot of arguments in favor of that choice, yes. But it remains a political choice.
Seems like you're overcomplicating the problem. Nearly all other companies seem to be doing just fine. Certainly not without incident, but by all appearances, companies aren't waging the sort of internal political wars that this article portrays.
In your opinion, did the google memo touch on similar topics? Many represented it as saying "women are inferior engineers to men", but a crux of the argument seems to be that many say this is not what the memo said.
Also, there are tangential topics that are often phrased similar to the above so as to make it seems like we're in a Carthaginian scenario when it isn't necessarily the case. For example, the main argument seemed to be about trans-people using certain bathrooms, that touched on the topic of "trans validity" (or dragged conversation into that), but was also also a separate, related argument about bathroom usage that precipitated that.
Those people are right. The full text of the memo is readily available. The author not only didn't say this, but repeated numerous times that this was explicitly not what he was trying to communicate. There is no reasonable, charitable way to interpret those who misrepresent him.
I think this brings up an important point. Some people insist on painting this as a "diversity champions vs blithering racists/sexists" issue, ignoring the numerous legitimate criticisms for the current approach to diversity.
The politics instantly put the memo squarely at one side of the current cultural / political wars. With the current binaries in American politics right now, such will never lead to sober discussion.
Note that it doesn't imply or conclude that a given female applicant is less qualified than a given male candidate nor that the pipeline of female applicants is less qualified in aggregate than the pipeline of male applicants (because there's no reason to assume that the pipeline has the same distribution as the overall population).
It merely suggests that (assuming pertinent biological causes) we shouldn't expect a fair process to result in parity of outcomes.
Whether or not there are pertinent biological causes is a question I leave to scientists, but I do want to note that (contrary to Damore's critics), science has established biological sex differences that may be pertinent, and lots of scientists have validated Damore's position (that biological differences may explain some of the gender distribution in tech). https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201711/the-truth-ab...
The latter, yes (in the sense that the question was relevant to the memo, not so much that the memo coherently attempted to address it), but it wasn't the memo I was referencing here here—it was other posts, either in internal social media or on external forums with clear links to employees.
China has similarly dominant tech companies and I'm sure they do not share SV's political opinions.
You could just as easily say they were successful despite this or that aspect of their company culture.
Majority of US companies have 'diversity advocates' among the ranks of non HR employees?
Except that if your whole self is not within the established pc, liberal standard, you'll be fired.
There's a lot to be said about this approach (and I had a good conversation about this with someone I know who works at Google and leans conservative / Republican but not alt-right, and is unhappy that internal social media is tied to business-related communication - blocking someone who posts a lot of partisan political stuff apparently means that you can't communicate with them in an emergency, if they maintain one of your dependencies, which seems like a pretty bad design).
But I think there are two reasons it's not a completely simple solution.
The first is that Google, as the article says, encourages you to "bring your whole self to work." Heck, Google even encourages you to bring your dog to work. Google encourages you to stay for lunch and probably dinner. Google encourages you to form bands with your coworkers, go on hiking trips with your coworkers, etc. There's a lot of deliberate attempts at promoting social cohesion beyond just normal traditional professional relationships, and by all accounts, that's a lot of why Google is as successful as it is. Requiring "Don't talk politics at the workplace" involves not talking politics over meals, on weekend team trips, and so forth, which is unlikely to be enforceable and also seems like it would hurt the genuine social bonds these things are trying to promote.
The second is that "politics" includes things like "Is it valid to be trans" or "Are certain races inferior to others." I'm not going to deny that this is "politics;" the generalized question of whether whole swaths of people are deserving of recognition under their claimed identity has been part of politics since basically the first empire captured its first nation. But it's unavoidable for a large company to pick an answer one way or another. A hypothetical Google running at the time of Cato the Elder, with Roman and Carthaginian employees, could not avoid the "political" question of whether Carthage should be destroyed and its residents sold into slavery.