You have almost certainly by now heard about the Google memo. So many news outlets have reported on it, almost entirely in disparaging ways. CNN, NPR, Salon, and many other news outlets have called it "anti-diversity", or similar language. I've read a lot of these articles, and they seemed to have one thing in common - little to no reference to the actual memo. They called it sexist and anti-diversitt, yet not one that I read were able to even attempt to say how. They merely lumped it into a pre-sorted category. A week or two ago I heard about Google trying ro push diversirt, and someone showed images of the Google results for "American inventors" in English and in Spanish. I actually tried it - they gave vastly different results. If you search for it in Spanish you'll get a fairly usual list with Tesla and Edison appearing early, but if you search in English the first few on the list are all African American. Odd, right? I didn't really care, though - didn't seem to make any difference to me. Then I had trouble finding a link to the memo itself while searching on google. I saw tons of articles highly critic of it, but not the link itself. Seemed funny. So I went ahead and tried looking on bing - found the link, and turned out that in that process I accidentally found that the article results on bing weren't so monolithic as on google. Indeed the responses on bing showed diverse opinion on it, whereas the Google search seemed to show only one general viewpoint of the article. Please, don't take my word for it - use identical searches on Google and bing or other search engines on the topic, and you'll see drastically different results. So I got to read the memo itself. I was prompted to look this far because a friend on social media said the old vet line, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", and said this is just what you get for sending out sexist memos. I'd heard before about it but didn't see how exactly it was sexist - the excerpts I saw didn't seem it. So I went ahead and read the whole damned thing. Multiple times. I did not see any actual sexism in it. But I did see why the Google exec speaking on the matter did not say he was fired for "sexism" in the memo, but rather for perpetuating gender stereotypes. So I'm issuing a challenge to you: read the memo, and let me know if there is anything ACTUALLY sexist in it. https://diversitymemo.com/
Don't expect an argument based on facts. The rather uncomfortable fact here is this: at the core of many stereotypes is a kernel of truth. So although one can be fired for perpetuating a stereotype, that does nothing about addressing the underlying disturbing truth of that stereotype. If anything, it sweeps it under the rug until the next person who dares to broach the subject...
I don't think we'll see anyone making an argument it was actually sexist. Pretty hard argument to make.
