Diversity in Silicon Valley

James Damore was an engineer in Google's search infrastructure unit, and wrote an internal memo critical of the company's diversity efforts. Damore was fired for the memo, and this firing was upheld by the National Labor Relations Board (Wakabayashi, 2018). Google claimed that the firing was done, not because of Damore's criticism of the company, but for making comments in the memo that advanced stereotypes (Wakabayashi, 2018). The memo kicked off a firestorm of commentary about diversity in Silicon Valley, however. The region is home to some of the largest and most successful technology companies, Google included, but science and technology fields are dominated by men. A CNN survey found that only in administration is there anything close to a 50/50 gender split the women only make up a quarter of the workforce in some fields (Yellin & Hanley, 2018). The discourse around diversity in Silicon Valley includes discussion about women in STEM (sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics) in general, but also is a discussion about the organizational cultures of the firms in the region. Many other Silicon Valley companies, notably Uber, are considered to have hostile work environments for women (Ohnsman, 2017).

This paper will analyze the Damore memo, using the lens of a longtime Silicon Valley employee, and will then zoom out to discuss the gender discourse in Silicon Valley before making recommendations on how to build more effective gender inclusion or advancement programs.

The Damore Memo

The infamous James Damore memo has been published in its entirety, allowing for comprehensive analysis of the text (Conger, 2017). The context is that Google had been fighting a wage discrimination suit at the time, and was attempting to implement diversity policies that Damore apparently disagreed with. The document begins with a discussion not about gender but about political bias, meaning the bias against people who have conservative political views. Damore seems to be aggrieved as this was the first point of his letter. He cites Google's left-leaning political bias for creating a "politically correct monoculture" that ultimately does not reflect his particular values.

The gender component of his memo presents the argument that implicit and explicit biases may hold women back, but that "it's far from the whole story", that story forming the core of his argument. He argues that biological differences between men and women account for much of the differences in both female participation in Google and in female compensation as well. He makes several claims with respect to women, for example, that they have more openness towards feelings, which drives them towards specific fields of employment, presumably

He then adds that women have higher neuroticism. He then makes an argument as to why males tend towards higher-paying jobs, being the pursuit of status.

He makes some arguments against what he terms to be social engineering, such as Google's program to teach girls coding and different programs to prioritize what he terms diversity candidates. He then argues that part of the issue is political bias to be found at Google, and that this political bias creates blind spots. He then makes several recommendations for addressing the problem as he's defined it. The entire memo is quite lengthy, and there is a lot to unpack.

From the perspective of someone working in technology, the memo is actually quite interesting. Damore's perspective is one that can be...

…the issue front and center, it has provided a very real opportunity to change the way that America as a whole views women, so if it takes a generation, there is a pathway here that starts at Silicon Valley to end gender inequality in the workplace.

Gender inclusion and advancement programs can play an important role in that. The reality is that numbers matter, and when the numbers arent good, then the perception of progress will be poor. The numbers are the proof of progress, and in many cases it is not an unreasonable expectation that programs to build the skills of women will be a means to put more women in positions where they can move into positions of power. Women in positions of power is one of the key elements it is far less likely that a brogrammer clture will thrive if the department is being run by a woman and there are women visibly in leadership roles throughout the company. Ensuring that the women are not put in a position where they will fail is absolutely an important criteria, and that is where mentorship, advancement and inclusion programs can have the most value.

Conclusion

The infamous James Damore memo sparked a broad public conversation about gender equality, or lack thereof, in Silicon Valley. The memo itself contained fairly weak arguments based on spurious reasoning and logical fallacies, all while claiming to be the champion of facts and reasoning. There isn't much to say there other than Damore failed to follow his thoughts to their logical conclusions he thought he did, but was mistaken because he failed to flow from problem identification to solution identification. That would have been the next step his solutions did not really address the problems that he identified. So there is an opportunity to…