SpecialOlympian wrote:I did read it, though I skimmed the last half. It's definitely sexist, he complains about not being able to talk about how women are naturally worse coders by dint of their gender. He does a breakdown of what men and women are naturally good at.
I don't even contest that men tend to seek status and women tend to value more work life balance. But these aren't hard and fast rules and it's pretty moronic to say Google should use them for decision making since they're interiewing and placing individuals that they screen, not hiring a generic gendered person.
You posted this in TLTE, but I wanted to respond to it here. How much did you skim? This is what he actually says:
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just
socially constructed
Sounds bad, right? Initially, this
looks like a sexist rant, right? He goes on to say this:
I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything
about an individual given these population level distributions.
He literally says that while there are small, very small differences between men and women, and that this "
may" explain why the majority of women prefer other career paths than the STEM disciplines, that it's obviously wrong to assume anything about an individual, and it's pretty obvious he's saying it's wrong to discriminate, which indeed he does:
Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap.... [I will] suggest ways to ... increase women's
representation in tech without resorting to discrimination.
[*]Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
[*]Women on average are more cooperative
[*]Women on average are more prone to anxiety
[*]Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for
status on average
In his point about anxiety, he doesn't say women are hysterical or emotional. There's nothing sexist about this. There is, in fact, a well-known racial anxiety bias during academic testing. There is an actual degree of anxiety-related lowered performance from African-Americans who take academic tests. It is not really shocking to discuss how women may feel more anxiety around men in the workplace than men feel about women in the workplace. He cites an article in a peer-reviewed psychology journal when discussing his point about how women tend to be more people-oriented in the work environment than men.
He then has this to say about male gender role stuff:
The male gender role is currently inflexible
○ Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender
role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society,
allow men to be more "feminine," then the gender gap will shrink, although
probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally "feminine"
roles.
At the very end, he does make a comment about how the "Left" dismisses any science done on biology, and mentions IQ specifically. In light of his anti-discriminatory tone and his memo going to lengths to come up with ideas on how to make the workplace work for women, I don't see how it's sexist or racist. He's a right-wing guy, but it appears, in light of the rest of his entire memo (except for the very end), that he's just making a complaint about "the Left." I don't agree with his whole memo, but I think giving it a read makes it clear he's not advocating for discrimination. He literally makes the argument that men are sometimes too uptight about gender roles, that women are valuable in the workplace, and that it's wrong to assume anything about a person based on who they are.
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