Google can't seem to tolerate diversity

Gender issues won't be solved if political correctness shuts down every conversation

Google is scrambling to distance itself from one of its engineers, who has gained infamy for publishing a 10-page criticism of the company’s “authoritarian” approach to achieving gender diversity. If the goal was to confirm the author’s thesis, Team Google is doing a great job.

Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, the anonymous memo sets out a well-intentioned goal: Find non-discriminatory ways to reduce gender disparities. At last tally, women occupied only 20 per cent of tech jobs at the Alphabet Inc unit, a dismal number even by Silicon Valley standards.

The author argues that Google’s use of targets (known as “objectives and key results”) can incentivise reverse discrimination, and suggests focusing instead on rewarding what the writer calls inherently “female” traits — such as cooperation and the desire for a better work-life balance.

It’s fine to question the author’s characterisation of women. (As a female engineer in Silicon Valley, I endorse the writer’s suggestion to “treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group”.) It’s okay to disagree with the proposed solutions. But the backlash has been egregiously swift and brutal. Google representatives issued multiple statements denouncing the document. Past and present colleagues chimed in with calls for the engineer to be ousted. Media outlets like TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Motherboard jumped on board to declare the memo an “Anti-Diversity Manifesto”. It appears that the ideological echo chamber extends beyond Google’s campus.

Silicon Valley has a very peculiar definition of diversity that requires proportional representation from every gender and race, all of whom must think exactly alike. Given that Google has failed to reach this ideal despite nearly a decade of efforts, the employee might be right to suggest that it try a different tack. Google rejects 99.8 per cent of job applicants, making it far more selective than any Ivy League university. It’s not unreasonable to posit that in this top 0.2 per cent of the population, there may be various ways in which talent manifests differently between the sexes.

Suggesting that men and women are different, though, can be a perilous endeavour. In 2005, Harvard President Larry Summers speculated that the under-representation of women in top science and engineering positions might have something to do with the male tendency to exhibit extreme traits — to, say, have very high or low IQs. The remarks were widely condemned as an allegation that women have an innate disadvantage in science and math. Summers apologised profusely, but it was too late. The faculty convened and issued a no-confidence vote, and the president stepped down shortly thereafter.

Suppressing intellectual debate on college campuses is bad enough. Doing the same in Silicon Valley, which has essentially become a finishing school for elite universities, compounds the problem. Its engineers build products that potentially shape our digital lives. At Google, they oversee a search algorithm that seeks to surface “authoritative” results and demote low-quality content. If the company silences dissent within its own ranks, why should we trust it to manage our access to information?

In a statement, Google’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Danielle Brown, refused to link to the employee’s memo, saying that “it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages”. Companies don’t have viewpoints. Humans do — diverse ones.