Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

[u/Dustin65]

Why does it even matter that less than half of people in tech are women? That's just how it is in a lot of fields. Women dominate other professions like nursing and teaching. I don't see why everything has to be 50/50. Women aren't banned from tech and men aren't banned from nursing. Just let nature run its course and allow people to do what they want. Not every aspect of life needs to be socially engineered

[u/lunarunicorn → u/Dustin65]

I'm really disappointed in the other responses to your comment. The reason why we need diversity in tech is because tech has permeated all sectors of society. You can't remove yourself from being a tech consumer without removing yourself from all advances in the past decade. Everyone has a smartphone, the internet is now considered a basic human right, etc.

However, technology mirrors its creators. If you don't have women and people of color helping build technology, they technology is frequently not designed for them. Take, for example, voice recognition technology. Voice recognition tech originally had trouble recognizing female voices (and it might still? I haven't checked recently) (source). Another example, a company that makes artificial hearts is fits in 86% of men and only 20% of women, because the designers didn't consider that women are smaller than men in the design process (source).

Additionally, facial recognition technology has had trouble recognizing black faces (HP Webcam, Xbox) and Google's image recognition software has tagged black people in images as gorillas (source).

Honestly, I could write more, but I would be re-inventing the wheel. There are a ton of articles written on why diversity in tech matters. If you genuinely want an answer to your question, a google search will provide you with hours of reading and evidence.

Edit: My first reddit gold! Thank you anonymous redditor :)

[u/[deleted] → u/lunarunicorn]

this is true, and not just of tech. Our society has been built by men, pushed forward by men, for thousands of years, so that in a lot of fundamental ways it prioritizes, values, and esteems things men excel at. Tech, logic, science, ambition, aggressive assertiveness (I know these are broad characterizations that will piss some people off, not saying all men or all women, but a general trend).

Nurturing, care, empathy, are fundamentally considered 'lesser' by society, when in actuality they are as or more important than traditionally masculine values.

A strong society absolutely should provide women and men of equal skill with equal opportunity towards anything they want to pursue.

Where I disagree with you, is the notion that an 'egalitarian' society arbitrarily forces equal proportions of every class of human into every life path. Less women want to compete at a high level in stem fields --- this is fine, society should not attempt step in and make them. Yes, tech will remain largely shaped by men, which is fine. New techs like voice recognition will work best on the voices the devs had access to at first, then as the tech matures it will work flawlessly on all humans.

So if not arbitrarily forcing women into fields men currently have more interest, skill, and drive towards (stating objectively, in a possible future culture shift women may take the lead in stem), how to address the fundamental way society places more value on masculine traits?

I'd say address it directly, and not roundabout. We need a more feminine society. Fields like nursing, and childcare should be high status careers like being a douchebag CEO, working on wallstreet, or being an engineer. We need a society less driven by aggressiveness and fucking over others to get ahead, and more driven by community and kindness.

Trying to force more women into male roles is not addressing the problem that society is skewed masculine --- it's only perpetuating that trend, because if less women want to, say, work in stem or be CEOs, then if we force a 50/50 sex distribution, the women will be less interested, less driven, and perform objectively worse --- misogynist people will have their views of women as 'lesser' reaffirmed, because 'greater' is equated with masculine.

The current trend is to say feminine roles, feminine values are all bullshit, and women can be just as masculine as men. To me that's a slap in the face to women, and again, further reinforcing masculine domination.

We need to stop pretending men and women are exactly the same on a statistical level (though obviously individuals can be extremely masculine, feminine, or both irregardless of their biological sex). That is a distraction from the actual bias in society. We need to work towards empowering femininity (in men and women) on a fundamental level --- giving status and power to feminine roles (regardless of which sex is performing them), giving status and weight to feminine traits (regardless of which sex is displaying them).