He was like it or not thrust into it though by the choices google has made, or appeared to make. When your hiring demographics do not roughly match graduation demographics you are not being honest. There is every appearance that google is discriminating against males in their efforts to search out women. This might be best for google overall, but he is a male which means it is not in his personal favor.
If they were thinned out in primary, middle, high school, or in university, how does Google bring those women back with their hiring practices? The premise here did involve "biased graduation demographics", which I assume to mean proper educational credentials for the job.
There are still more qualified women making it through university than Google could possibly hire. Google just has to try a bit harder to find them.
Example: Men and women are equally qualified by nature, but the graduating class contains 800 qualified men and 200 qualified women due to unfair "thinning". Google needs to hire 200 people, so they hire 100 men (1 out of 8 in the graduating class) and 100 women (1 out of 2 in the graduating class).
But to do that they have to consider and then discriminate using the gender of their applicants. The position in your example seems to be that two wrongs make a right - discrimination favored men at some point and so discriminating against men in the hiring practice is reasonable.
I strongly disagree with that position - as far as is possible that conversation has been had and settled; companies shouldn't be discriminating on gender. I dunno what the law in California is but my stance is that discriminating on gender should be illegal. Even if the people doing the discriminating might feel they have a moral right to it :P.
Google has to compete with all the other companies for the same pool of talent. They can out compete them with more money, but that would raise eye brows after awhile. Something has to give somewhere when supply is constrained.
The only real solution to the gender gap involves fixing the talent pipeline and then waiting N years for the talent to start coming through. Everything else is just a stop gap that is bound to create distortions.
It would be different if there was lots of talent that just couldn't get jobs because of overt discrimination (e.g. as is the case with ageism), but the gender gap is not that easy of a problem.
Much of Google's diversity work goes toward fixing the talent pipeline by working with students. In the memo Damore criticizes these attempts by saying something like these programs are misleading female students into thinking that programming is more people-oriented (i.e. suitable for women) than it is.
Sure, but that is a different point entirely. Even if Google was getting that wrong, it isn't really that controversial to almost all of us; programming has always been prone to misrepresentation and taught in wrong ways to both boys and girls.
Incidentally, working in a big corp, programming these days is more of a social activity than it once was for reasons completely unrelated to gender. The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
> The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
I wish this disastrous extrovert invasion were more clearly disclosed. It took me a long time to realize that my maddeningly arthritic big corp experience wasn't just an outlier.
Yes, your answer is clear but isn't correct. It doesn't actually correct any biases, it doesn't create female talent out of thin air. It only moves them from other companies to one company.
