My interpretation is that the author is cheifly concerned with two points: that biology impacts performance, and that dissenting views in Google are at time met with hostility that is more political reflex than it is critical countenance.
The first point should be obviously true, however we live in a time were identity politics on the left tries to shout down any but the hard line reaction to biological determinism. Both extremes are false and saying so should not be controversial.
"There are differences between the sexes." This is a statement about populations not individuals. It is also not a claim of causes only the current state of affairs.
Of all the coworkers I've had in tech, women make up a strong majority of the top 10. Yet of all the women I've known most weren't driven to excel to the same level of most men I've known. Whether you blame culture or biology for that sexism play A role, not the ONLY role in creating the gender discrepancy we see in the fields of STEM and executive management.
>> for that sexism play A role, not the ONLY role in creating the gender discrepancy
Then you say this:
>> Yet of all the women I've known most weren't driven to excel to the same level of most men I've known.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in that I'm going to assume that it wasn't your intention to make a disturbingly sexist remark in a discussion about sexism.
You can replace women with African-American, and what you wrote sounds an awful lot like the racist drivel that came out of the South for 200 years. If anything, the author of the memo's attempts to argue that there is some biological basis for discrimination only serve to weaken his position. Furthermore, this 'biological differences basis' for discrimination eventually leads us to eugenics if taken to its illogical extreme. And yes, people have taken it that far in the not so recent past.
In the cases where what you wrote is even partially true, that some women (appear on the surface) to be less ambitious and less driven than men, did you ever stop to ask yourself why?
I've worked in tech my entire career, and I've witnessed appalling sexism. I have watched with my own eyes while women suffered humiliations like being told things like "no one invites you to meetings because you can't keep anything secret". Then there are things like code reviews. At work we recently had to institute a 'no abusive code review' policy because a small cadre of the men were using the code review process to hammer several of the few female engineers we've managed to somehow convince to come work for us. Like most places, our workplace policies are required largely due to behavior that was originated by men.
It seems like it's awfully easy to forget that women are half our species! How can anyone in their right mind think that sexism, unconscious or otherwise, is okay? How can anyone think that it's because 'women are less driven to succeed'? How can anyone think this when half their DNA comes from a man and the other half from a woman?
As a gay man (a gender/sexual minority), I can actually relate to how awful it feels to be treated like a second class citizen simply because of something that I do not feel like I can change (my sexual orientation). I'm not sure how much money it has cost me, but at the very least it has cost me the difference in filing single vs. filing jointly for the first 17 years of my marriage. Women pay similar costs when they're paid less over the course of their career, and/or when they're denied promotions for 'being ambitious'.
The attitude that underlies your comment -that you could actually believe that what you wrote is true and somehow justifies unequal treatment- is utterly, totally, and exactly why we need the programs the author of the now infamous memo argues against.
At the risk of sounding sexist, I will say that conflating race and sex as being roughly the same level of difference is a little bit intellectually dishonest. I'm not going to sit here and argue about what those differences are, but sex hormones most certainly affect behavior and emotions far more than skin pigments.
I also appreciate you sharing your story, but I personally find it a bit uncomfortable that these sorts of posts need to be qualified ("As a gay man..."). While I understand you were trying to support the point you were making, this sort of thing feeds into the notion that some opinions occupy a privileged position within our society, which feeds such "screeds" as this. It's almost hypocritical in a way, because I imagine that the anger and "otherness" that oppressed or minority groups feel is not unlike what the author of such a rant is feeling. Basically when it comes to cultural discourse, you're wrong, evil, the enemy, or ignored.
>> At the risk of sounding sexist, I will say that conflating race and sex as being roughly the same level of difference is a little bit intellectually dishonest. I'm not going to sit here and argue about what those differences are, but sex hormones most certainly affect behavior and emotions far more than skin pigments.
It is just a simple fact that the 'biological differences' argument has been used to justify great evils like slavery, eugenics, and sexism. Pointing out that 'biological differences' is a suspicious argument, and for good reasons, is not the same as conflating race and sex.
>> I also appreciate you sharing your story, but I personally find it a bit uncomfortable that these sorts of posts need to be qualified ("As a gay man..."). While I understand you were trying to support the point you were making, this sort of thing feeds into the notion that some opinions occupy a privileged position within our society, which feeds such "screeds" as this. It's almost hypocritical in a way, because I imagine that the anger and "otherness" that oppressed or minority groups feel is not unlike what the author of such a rant is feeling. Basically when it comes to cultural discourse, you're wrong, evil, the enemy, or ignored.
As a gay man, I have had real financial consequences (and other consequences) in my life as a result of millennia of other people's opinions about something I don't feel like I can change.
I feel like there is a reasonable and direct parallel between that and my expression of empathy toward women who experience real financial consequences (and other consequences) as the result of millennia of other people's opinions about something they also can't change.
>> because I imagine that the anger and "otherness" that oppressed or minority groups feel is not unlike what the author of such a rant is feeling.
The author could have chosen a better argument. As it is, the biological differences argument is fraught with peril. I'm sorry if the author of the rant is experiencing a feeling of alienation and otherness - it's terrible when anyone is oppressed, including men.
But it's important to remember, that, for most of recorded history, the oppressor of most men has been other men. Not women.
> How can anyone think this when half their DNA comes from a man and the other half from a woman?
This looks like a throw-away comment but betrays a bit of ignorance about basic biology. Men have anywhere from 2x-10x more testosterone than women (lots of individual variance) [1], which has a huge effect on personality. Just because most of your DNA is inherited 50/50 does not preclude huge differences between the sexes. This is even more obvious when looking at other, non-human species [2].
Bear in mind that prominent stocks like Amazon don't trade in their value, they trade on perceived future value and settle where that perceived value crosses with the markets risk tolerance.
Amazon has, and will continue, upward because they are capable of breaking into new markets at scale. Unlike Netflix which is quickly approaching market saturation, Amazon has virtually unbounded potential to invade untouched markets as they are currently doing with postal and produce. The result is that we can't see where Amazon's revenue will finally plateau. What we do know is that AWS profits make them extremely resilliant to taking losses in these other markets but at the same time highly vulnerable to competition from other providers like Google.
Fyi google has the better product, but it's better because it puts the kind of people who decide which to use out of work. So industry hasn't flipped yet. When they do expect Amazon to take a big hit.
