Have you read the Damore memo? It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity, given the data showing that most women are choosing to not go into engineering-like fields, rather than being forced out of them.
It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.
> It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity
Well, it was fundamentally about how Google should stop all efforts to recruit or promote women or non-white men, because Damore believed those efforts were "discrimination" against himself.
Huh? My description is completely accurate. I feel like a lot of people didn't actually read Damore's document, or perhaps read it and were shouting "YES! YES!" so loudly as they read about Google's supposed left-wing bias that they can't actually perceive the words written.
Damore says straight up and in so many words that Google should end all of its "diversity" hiring initiatives because he believes they're discriminatory against himself, this is just not an arguable issue.
I can see how you could get that Google should end "diversity" hiring initiatives as one of the core messages, but not "all" of them, and "he believes they're discriminatory against himself" is quite uncharitable. Having reread it just now after five years, the theme seems to be that he wants to find the intersection of Google being a good workplace for women and Google being successful as a company.
From the memo:
> Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap
> Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s
representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:...
He goes on to list interventions like more pair programming, changing performance evaluations to encourage collaboration over competition, allowing more part-time work, and reducing the stress of the job.
He says Google needs to reduce hiring initiatives which are not backed by evidence, and which are themselves likely illegally discriminatory, like hiring quotas (likely illegal) and implicit bias training (debunked).
It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.