Elizabeth Weise, USATODAY
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SAN FRANCISCO — A document written by an unnamed senior software engineer at Google suggesting the company encourage "ideological" rather than gender diversity, is generating anger within the company and in Silicon Valley.
Titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," the male author wrote that women don't make up 50% of the company's tech and leadership positions not because of sexism but because of differences in their preferences and abilities.
He also writes that the company's focus on diversity tends to alienate conservatives, which he believes is bad for business as conservatives tend to be more conscientious, a trait that is required for "much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company."
The essay comes as Google is engaged in an ongoing effort to try to get more women and minorities into technical and leadership jobs, and as the Mountain View-based company is being investigated by the Labor Department over allegations that it does not pay men and women equally.
Just a month ago Google hired Danielle Brown, the former head of diversity at Intel, to be its vice president of diversity.
In the past several years as staffing data has come out, Silicon Valley firms have been shown to hire a high proportion of white and Asian men, but fewer women and other minorities. Increased efforts to deal with the lack of diversity have also created a backlash against such initiatives.
The 10-page manifesto against Google's diversity initiatives appears to have first been circulated internally at the company Friday. It was initially reported by Motherboard.
On Saturday Gizmodo published the full document, prompting a flood of angry tweets and some supporting the writer's right to free speech.
Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral' motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/…
No free speech for empiricists, I guess.
The overall tone of the essay is calm. The author acknowledges that there is bias that holds women back in tech and leadership. He doesn't suggest that women aren't capable of doing technical work but rather that the differences between men and women should be acknowledged.
He states that women tend to be more interested in people rather than things, "empathizing vs. systemizing," whereas men have a higher driver for status and so tend to end up in leadership positions.
He also says that on average, women have more "neuroticism," as defined as "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance."
The author doesn't believe that Google should engage in social engineering just to make its jobs equally appealing to men and women, calling "discriminatory" programs at the company available only to women and minorities.
Google didn't appear to have any plans to discipline the staffer, though Brown, the vice president for diversity, did say that the views expressed in the essay were not endorsed, promoted or encouraged by the company.
In a memo to employees on Saturday, she wrote, "part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws."
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