Well I'm guessing we have had different experiences when it comes to diversity and gender in the work place.
As I've already said every woman in my family is excellent at math and science. I also went back and checked. Of the people supporting a mission I was involved with 10 years ago about 36% were women, including the leads. That's not half but the numbers are continuing to increase.
This default position of gender differences having some negative effect in technical areas is nothing I've ever experienced. Quite the contrary it's been biases and culture that have been the problem.
I've had inclusion and innovation training at work given by someone with a neuroscience degree. People inherently rely on stereotypes / unconscious bias when it comes to making decisions about others when they are not being mindful. Being mindful means using your prefrontal cortex and actually thinking.
No one is mindful at all times. It's too expensive from an energy perspective. If you put someone in an fMRI you can see the bloodlflow and glucose use increasing to the prefrontal cortex when actually thinking hard about a subject.
Falling back on stereotypes / memory maps when making a decision saves energy and time. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Quicker and less energy intensive thinking means less chance of being killed by an animal or other human and saving calories against starvation.
Another example of this is when you drive home and can't remember how you got there. You've already built the memory map in your head on how to do it, no reason to burn more energy paying close attention.
If you are not careful you'll do the same thing with stereotypes. We pick them up from everywhere, TV, media, our families and friends. If you are rushed, tired, distracted, etc it's easy to slip out of mindfulness and rely on stereotypes.
This is a real thing. It dove tails nicely with studies showing how teachers allow biases to push girls away from science and math. It also explains the orchestra study nicely. When evaluations are done blind the evaluators are left relying more heavily on merit and less on any bias. As a result female hires increased by 50%.
(I'll reiterate that this has nothing to do with women being more present in the arts than tech, This is an experiment on the biases of those evaluating women's performance.)
You and I are also reading his words differently.
One example:
In the memo he states:
"
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation,
Google has created several discriminatory practices:"
I think you are keying off the blue text and taking at face value that he believes in diversity. (I'm not trying to put words in your mouth so let me know if I'm way off)
I'm keying off the red text. He's pivoting from supporting diversity.
You'll point out that his only beef is in the way Google is going about diversity, a possibly legitimate complaint.
Let's look back a paragraph or so.
"
Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women.
For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that. For example currently those trying to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google’s funding is finite so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged."
I think you are emphasizing his comments about diversity needs to be done in way that helps Google and isn't arbitrary.
I see him having a problem with diversity in general. He wants to protect those that work harder and longer to get ahead and states if they don't it will be
disastrous. By itself that sounds reasonable, people who work hard should get ahead in a meritocracy, but we will come back to that in a moment.
In the last part he warns that diversity is expensive and those benefits
really need to be worth it before spending money
that we suprisingly don't have much of on them.
Finally let's back up a few more paragraphs.
"
Men’s higher drive for status
We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs.
These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths."
So on this last paragraph my guess is you see him pointing out that men's gender driven need for status can be objectively harmful to them as a balance to where he's described women's gender driven attributes that maybe harmful to them.
I see him saying men push for higher paying jobs by working longer and harder. Couple that with the comments above and he feels
it would be disastrous for the company if diversity reduced the drive for
men to stop working long hours to accommodate more
women.
So why is the company spending money they don't have on diversity? A concept he philosophically disagrees with because he see it as discrimination towards himself and other men.
But he's strongly for diversity......
Overall you see him as presenting a balanced argument and supporting diversity.
I see him as saying he's for diversity but then undermining the very concept by the way he presents his argument.
@xthetenth already provided a great explanation about him not really arguing from a balanced position.
Hope this helps you out.
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