Wow, this has been a crazy story, and really it keeps getting crazier. For those who haven’t been following the Google drama, here’s a quick rundown. For those familiar, you can skip to the next page.

The Rundown

Recently an internal memo from an employee at Google was made public. Gizmondo published it in its entirety.

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

This memo is quite long (10 pages) and been described as “anti-diversity” due to the nature of the arguments it contained in particular about women in the tech sector.

I have read the memo in its entirety, and would like to highlight a couple points that I don’t see many people discussing:

• He does not cite any sources for information
• He makes observations about trends being culturally universal that simultaneously don’t cite sources and don’t distinguish between causation and correlation.
• If intended, he does not make an adequate effort to frame the observations in a way that does not impugn his co-workers.
• At 10 pages, hours were spent writing this. The fact that the document was not corrected for these points suggests pure ideological, rather than evidence-based, motivation.

The Googler in question (no, I won’t repeat the name) has since been fired, and the discussion over the whole affair has grown. Google intended to have an all hands meeting, but that was cancelled due to safety concerns. (Jesus Christ people, don’t threaten those you disagree with.) Since then, he has chosen to do several things that convince me that he is immature and unprofessional.

Reactions

A lot of people have written on this, and more will come for sure as the story continues to develop. Here is one that I would recommend:

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/11/16130452/google-memo-women-tech-biology-sexism

And of course it’s led to other problems for Google, hence why this is a big problem and why releasing him is not dependent on ideological differences:

http://jezebel.com/dozens-of-women-are-considering-suing-google-over-alleg-1797664145

I wanted to write about this a week ago, but the story kept changing too quickly for me to approach it with the appropriate level of care and consideration. There was something to which I wanted to speak, but I didn’t want to say anything while everything was still changing. So much of the reporting seemed to be missing the real issue. Fortunately I was able to find this:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788

I am so happy to see someone so eloquently and effectively spoke to my concerns. I only wish that more people included THIS in their coverage of the story. Again, ideology is not the critical issue here, but professionalism. As this piece points out, he has created the definition of a hostile work environment and made himself toxic. The notoriety from this will make him nearly unemployable to any reputable organization.

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