The real problem with that Google employee’s viral anti-diversity memo is bigger than Silicon Valley – Quartz

A Google employee created an uproar this weekend when his manifesto about criticizing the companys diversity initiatives went viral among employees. The senior software engineer claimed the diversity programs discriminated against employees like himself by creating an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be discussed honestly.

Google staffand lots of other peopleare peeved, and its not hard to see why. The author of the document (a full version of which was posted by Gizmodo) argued that the gender gap in software engineering in part boiled down to biological differences between men and women. The ideas arent particularly well-reasoned. For instance, he wrote, Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for womens representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts. Ultimately, he contends that efforts to boost racial and gender diversity were unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

While his comments were apparently roundly rejected by most employees and Googles own diversity officer, some employees reportedly came to his defense. Vices Motherboard reported that Google employees anonymously praised the employees views on an app called Blind, where tech employees can discuss workplace problems.This is actually terrifying: if someone is not ideologically aligned with the majority then hes labeled as a poor cultural fit and would not be hired/promoted, wrote one commenger. Another said: The fella who posted that is extremely brave. We need more people standing up against the insanity. Otherwise Diversity and Inclusion which is essentially a pipeline from Womens and African Studies into Google, will ruin the company.

The internal culture clash is troubling for a company that is under investigation by the US government is for underpaying women employees, and for Silicon Valleys reputation in the wake of its sexual harassment troubles.

But it also reflects a disquieting trend across the country: Discussion about diversity and free speech is increasingly defined by people on the ideological extremes. On one side, we have the militantly politically correct leftfor instance, the students who shut down Charles Murrays speech at Middlebury College.

The liberal ideal sees free speech as a positive-sum good, enabling an open marketplace of ideas where, in the long run, reason can prevail, as Jonathan Chait recently put it, but left-wing critics of liberalism instead see the free-speech rights of the oppressed and the oppressors set in zero-sum conflict, so that the expansion of one inevitably comes at the cost of the other.

And on the other is the anti-PC backlash liberals have provoked, of which the rambling, confused tirade of the Google employee is the latest example. And hes not alone. As the election of Donald Trump has made clear, many Americans feel enslaved by political correctness. The extreme left has claimed a moral monopoly and attempted to shame dissenting views out of existence.

Dissenters are unlikely to consider the value of diversity and opportunity if they dont feel psychologically safe, as the Google author says repeatedly, in mainstream conversations. Shaming forces these perspectives onto sub-channels of the Blind app and websites like Breitbart, where these ideas tend to go unchallenged.

Neutralizing this dangerous ideological split is all the more urgent given the fact that Trump seems as enthusiastic about capitalizing on identity politics as the extreme-left zealots he rails against.

The presidents populismwhich during the campaign seemed centered on economic injusticeis proving to be far more focused on fomenting cultural clashes. Recent developments bear this out: his assimilation-driven immigration initiatives, the bizarre trans military ban, and talk of a government investigation into Harvard Universitys discrimination against Asian-American applicants. Silicon Valley wont solve its diversity problems until it both acknowledges its failures and engages in a broader dialogue about why those failures matter. Similarly, the US will only create opportunity in the face of difference when its public stops letting ideologues on both sides dominate the conversation.

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The real problem with that Google employee's viral anti-diversity memo is bigger than Silicon Valley - Quartz