We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.
Without commenting on the contents of the memo Komoroske was not some random employee, he was one of the most senior PMs at the company and now heads up strategy for Stripe.
I would argue the top down leadership has been blind or negligent to their Achilles heel. They've let growth in all areas but their single cash cow be needlessly duplicated, rudderless, left to wither on the vine.
To rephrase, I'm not sure that Google leadership has demonstrated the great insight to see what's going wrong and change it. I'd trust just about anyone else at the company to produce an equally plausible hypothesis. Especially if it rhymes with what we see from the outside.
We've discussed these same systemic issues at Google for over a decade now. Google is a dodo.
James Damore argued that the gender gap in the tech industry was not due to discrimination, but rather to biological differences between men and women. I don't think this equals to anti-diversity.
Except that it is. What passes as a cold, rational analysis of cold, scientific facts is rooted on traditionalist biases of the conservative mindsets of scientists in the XIXth century, when the basis of our social sciences were being established. Colonialism and sexism were seen as common-sense a prioris, and those positions permeate a lot of the reasonings and conclusions achieved in these sciences without being put to test (see e.g. myths about the primitive hunter men and gatherer women, or how money originates from barter, which are passed as truisms when studying these disciplines without questioning).
Colonialism and sexism are inherently anti-diversity; and people stating those opinions and usually unable to see how their position derivates from those premises.
Acknowledging the average differences between the sexes is neither colonialism nor sexism. It is a reasonable hypothesis that explains some disparities in individual choices that lead to disparities in aggregate outcome.
To riff on your rather bold assertion: precluding such a hypothesis from consideration is rooted in activist biases of the radical mindset of non-scientists in the 21st century.
Acknowledging the average differences between the sexes is neither colonialism nor sexism. But this on itself only tells you that there are some physical differences in size and muscular weight, and a couple months of the reproductive cycle where women will be physically impaired because of advanced pregnancy; it doesn't account for anything more.
Now, assuming that those minimum physical differences have an impact on social behaviour is sexist, because it fails to recognize the social reinforcement mechanisms that influence those decisions, from the structural separation of professional disciplines (i.e. the hard vs soft sciences divide, which dissipates when using multidisciplinary teams) to the social inertia of lower salaries of caretaking professions traditionally assigned to women.
BTW, assuming that these observations are produced from irrational anti-scientifism is the kind of blind spot of traditionalists that I was referring above.
People can believe both that the physical differences between sexes imply some social/psychological/cognitive differences, and that society has unfairly categorized people according to their sex.
One can be anti-sexist and believe in sex differences writ large at the same time.
It seems more sexist to assume that differences mean one sex is better or worse. Let's let the whole richness of reality come forward, and embrace it for what it is.
You’re positing that the physical differences between men and women are materially inconsequential, have no impact on social behavior, and somehow cease before impacting the brain — and you deign to accuse everyone else of “anti-scientifism”?
You’re welcome to the opinion, but denying obvious, observable, verifiable reality because it fails to fit your dogmatic model of the world is not science; co-opting science and denying biological reality in service of your activism is far closer to both colonialism and sexism than any of the views you’re arguing against.
You accuse me of an assertion I have not made, while ignoring the assertion I have made, and go on name-calling as your only ad-hominem argument. It's clear who's having an irrational behaviour here. Good night.
What about the psychometric differences? Measuring them is not as straight forward as measuring height or weight. But they can be measured nonetheless, and they have predictive power.
It can be argued that the cause of those differences are social, instead of biological. But I'll note that
1. mental is rooted in physical too (e.g. hormones)
2. the sex differences can be seen cross-culturally
The problem of course, is that these assertions about genetic determinism are repeatedly shown to be absolute bullshit.
To bring it back to the initial “Women don’t want to code, because they’re genetically repulsed by it” argument, whe know this isn’t true, because it changed in living memory.
>genetic determinism are repeatedly shown to be absolute bullshit
There is a lot of data that says genes determine various phenotypes: https://www.gwascentral.org/
Stories like these are a prime example of grossly irresponsible historical revisionism born out of either ignorance and/or unethical expedience, unilaterally redefining “key punch operator” to be what we now call a “programmer”.
Redefining what female programmers of the first computers as 'key punch operators' is revisionism.
Those women engineered novel software systems to fit the given specifications, fixed bugs, invented the term 'bug', designed usable programming languages, and even invented the methodology of software validation that took men to the moon. Simply put, women created the pragmatic discipline of software engineering before male mathematicians and physicists devoted much thought to it, as it was deemed an activity accessory to hardware design.
The profession was then taken over by men when it became prestigious, not in a small part because of all this. None of this cultural change was caused by genetic determinism.
He argued something more straightforward and a lot less grandiose claim - at least as I understand (and remember) - he argued that whatever the diversity team was doing is not data driven, and that they are ignoring a lot of data about the sources of the gap.
Agreed. This is just a random employee bemoaning that his large, bureaucratic employer is slow to move, and the opinion document he wrote got leaked for some reason. It doesn't "explain" why Google has become slow. Anyone can work out why Google is slow. Most likely because, like a lot of other large companies, Google has a lot of bureaucracy in the way of getting anything done, and a lots of people and lots of teams leads to mismatched incentives, which aren't necessarily aligned towards shipping product people want.
A month ago a commenter linked to[1] a similar rant from Waze’s ex-CEO bemoaning the same kinds of things. Process yuck! Bureaucracy bad! Too slow! and so on. I imagine it’s a common complaint from people who don’t thrive in a slow, steady, process oriented culture.
