The controversial memo written by James Damore, a 28-year-old former Google engineer, rattled Silicon Valley last weekend when it became public and stirred a fierce debate about diversity in the workplace.
Google leaders billed the memo as “offensive” and “harmful.” The memo said that “genetic differences” may explain “why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”
This week the company fired the author for “perpetuating gender stereotypes,” he said.
Until now, little has been known about Damore. But since his firing, he’s given at least two lengthy interviews with the hosts of right-wing YouTube channels and a significantly shorter interview with Bloomberg TV.
“I’m not saying that any of the female engineers at Google are in any way worse than the average male engineer,” Damore told Stefan Molyneux, a vocal supporter of President Trump and the host of Freedomain Radio. “I’m just saying that this may explain some of the disparity in representation in the population.”
Tech’s Myth Of the Nerd, Debugged
The Google engineer who was fired last week over his memo wrote that most women were biologically unsuited to working in tech because they were more focused on “feelings and aesthetics than ideas” and had “a stronger interest in people rather than things.”
Many scientists have said he got the biology wrong. But the job requirements of today’s programmers show he was also wrong about working in tech.
In fact, interpersonal skills like collaboration, communication, empathy and emotional intelligence are essential to the job. The myth that programming is done by loner men who think only rationally and communicate only with their computers harms the tech industry in ways that cut straight to the bottom line.
The loner stereotype can deter talented people from the industry — not just women, but anyone who thinks that sounds like an unattractive job description. It can also result in dysfunctional teams and poorly performing products. Empathy, after all, is crucial to understanding consumers’ desires, and its absence leads to product mistakes.
Take digital assistants, like Google Home or Amazon Echo. Their programmers need to be able to imagine a huge variety of home situations, whether households with roommates or abusive spouses or children — as made clear when a child ordered a $160 dollhouse and four pounds of sugar cookies on the Echo.
“Basically every step is very collaborative,” said Tracy Chou, who was an engineer at Pinterest and Quora and is now working on start-ups. “Building a big software system, you could have dozens or hundreds or thousands of engineers working on the same code base, and everything still has to work together.”
She added, “But not everyone is the same, and that’s where empathy and broader diversity really help.”
