Lack of gender diversity at Google
James Damore, a Google engineer, who had been on a PhD programme in systems biology at Harvard University, wrote a memo arguing that women were less suited than men to engineering and leadership jobs in the tech industry have been sacked.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, sharply criticised the engineer, saying that he had breached the internet company’s code of conduct and its “basic values”.
James Damore, confirmed his dismissal in an email to Bloomberg saying he has been fired for “perpetuating gender stereo types” and was currently exploring all possible legal solutions.
Sexism and lack of gender diversity in Silicon Valley, where employment is heavily prejudiced towards men, especially in engineering roles.
In June 2017, Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was booted out after the ride-hailing company became embroiled in a series of scandals and allegations of sexual harassment.
The male employee criticised Google for putting political considerations ahead of its business interests, as it tried to hire more women to address the lack of gender diversity. In a 3,500 word internal memo, he argued women were biologically better suited to “jobs in artistic or social areas” than engineering.
The dispute reveals political vulnerability at the Internet company, which backed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In the 1950s only 30 per cent of the programmers were women, in contrast to 20 per cent prevailing in tech companies today, as the share of women in technology plummeted in the 1980s, when the Personal computers appeared and professionals began to shift from hardware engineering towards software.
It was argued that varied sizes of male and female brains are directly proportional to superior male intelligence, and some even relied on IQ tests to argue women are less able.
Early facial recognition software racially discriminative and struggled to detect users with darker skin tone faces, as the engineers and the images used to train software were mostly white, and even speech recognition software, is better at understanding a male voice than female. The use of male mannequins in car safety testing was in fact designed to protect the average man.
Sundar Pichai, an Indian engineer, who landed the CEO’s job to head the world’s largest internet company, has made a virtue of avoiding public confrontation.
Is this a storm in a tea cup? The 3500-word memo from James Damore went public, as it accused Google of creating an “ideological echo chamber” where honest debate on sensitive topics was outlawed. According to James biological differences make men more suited to engineering and leadership positions in tech than women and touched a raw political nerve for the tech industry and Google. However, Mr Pichai has fallen into a trap of silencing free speech especially in America, in the name of political correctness and more importantly, he has acted to snuff out a debate that was presumably carried out in the name of science. Google who prided themselves on its open internal communications and uncompromising devotion to intellectual rigour.
James Damore wrote,“ I am simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership”.
His supporters like Eric Weinstein at Thiel Capital – investment firm of Peter Thiel, President Trump’s most outspoken Silicon Valley supporter, came to his defence and said on Twitter: “ I believe that Google just fired a biologist and create an unsafe work environment for “ anyone” who even entertains selection in humans”.
In another Tweet, he added: “ Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”
Danielle Brown, Google’s new vice-president of diversity, integrity and governance, wrote to employees to suggest the engineer’s report “ advanced assumptions about gender”>” The gender income gap is more pronounced in Silicon Valley than in San Francisco or the United States as the census data and the American community survey has found men there with bachelor’s degrees earn up to 61 per cent more than their female counterparts.