[Lukasa]

> Should white NBA players be offended by that statement? The answer is obvious: they shouldn't as that only means they were the ones on the tail of the genetic distribution and made it anyway or maybe even they overcome disadvantages to get there.

I don't know: I'm not an NBA player and have no idea what the experience of becoming one is like. But there is a difference in kind here. He didn't say "Men are better suited to be Google employees", he said "Men are better suited to be programmers". The closer analogy here is to say that "Black people are better basketball players than white people", and here it might well be fair for white NBA players to be offended. There is a distinction between saying "More of X are good enough to pass this bar", and "X is better than Y". People who can pass the bar are unlikely to be offended for themselves (though they may be offended for others who don't attempt to cross that bar), but they may be offended for themselves if the suggestion is that they are worse than their colleagues.

But if you said, in addition, "The NBA currently employs discriminatory hiring practices that favour white athletes at the expense of black ones", then they should be offended. At that point you are saying "I believe that group X is better than group Y, and many of group Y are here despite there being better members of group X". That is offensive.

> We can however do something with this information: we can try changing tech world to be more welcoming to women.

I have a suggestion as to how to do that: stop saying that women are worse at coding. Just don't even bring it up. This goes doubly because there is no evidence for that at all.

You can make the tech world more welcoming to women by welcoming more women, and then give them the opportunity to succeed. Writing think pieces about how women are so ill-suited to coding doesn't just display a stunning lack of understanding about how the industry got started, it also makes it clear that right now you think women don't belong.

But if the view is that "software work as it is today is just not women's work, so we should make it more like women's work", then I'm sorry but you've already lost.

[PeterisP]

Have you read the memo? By saying "stop saying that women are worse at coding" you are putting words in his mouth, as the memo states a very, very different thing i.e. that women are less likely to choose coding for various reasons, including biological ones. There's a world of difference between these two arguments.

And there is solid evidence for that difference, and it should be brought up, and asking to stop the discussion is, frankly, ridiculous - we can all see that there is an important open problem with different viewpoints and thus it should be discussed, and expressing all kinds of possible viewpoints should be facilitated.

[Lukasa]

> Have you read the memo? By saying "stop saying that women are worse at coding" you are putting words in his mouth, as the memo states a very, very different thing i.e. that women are less likely to choose coding for various reasons, including biological ones. There's a world of difference between these two arguments.

I wasn't replying to the memo, I was replying to bluecalm, and bluecalm said this:

> Now I say: women are in general less likely to be interested in tech and less likely to become good programmers because they are, on average, less competitive and less likely to devote themselves to solitude practice which is often necessary to become a very good coder.

Note "less likely to become good programmers". I feel pretty comfortable with my response given that.

> and expressing all kinds of possible viewpoints should be facilitated.

I disagree. Many kinds of possible viewpoints construct hostile work environments, and should be forbidden. It is simply not necessary to allow a workplace to tolerate all views. We don't allow people to cover their cube in swastikas, walk around greeting all their colleagues with "heil hitler", and to push for the dismissal of all their Jewish colleagues in an attempt to reduce the influence of the hidden Jewish conspiracy running the world.

If Mr Google had wanted to write this on his personal blog I wouldn't have cared at all. But he didn't do that: he wrote it at work, in his professional capacity, and posted it for his co-workers to see. Guess what: speech at work is something that can get you fired. See Colin Kaepernick for evidence.