Diversity = Conformity?

The Alphabet Corporation should be ashamed.  An employee of Google posted an essay questioning some of the company’s policies on affirmative action and  its disdain for people with other than leftist political opinions and suggesting that men on average  might be better suited to doing technical work than women on average.  While such opinions may be controversial, they are not inflammatory, outrageous, or outside the bounds of rational discourse.  (There are valid reasons for believing hiring for ability and commitment to work is fairer and  more honest and leads to better results than hiring based on quotas for race, sex, or religion.  It probably is bad business for a company to  snub and offend millions of its customers and shareholders.  There are more men than women working in technical jobs, though that fact say nothing about any intrinsic difference in aptitude between the sexes.)

The most sensible thing for the  bosses at Google to have done about the essay would have been to ignore it.  An acceptable response would have been to issue a press release stating that Google’s managers disagree with the essay’s content in regard to both fact and opinion and will continue to follow their preferred policies. Instead the company first had its  diversity czarina issue a screed attacking the essay as evil and suggesting its writer might be in trouble with the law over it and then hunted the author down and fired him. 

 Apart from  the general absurdity and blatant hypocrisy of siccing  a diversity honcho onto someone  and firing him for the crime of holding and expressing  opinions  that bring diversity to various topics of corporate practices, the company’s actions have provided evidence to support some of the man’s arguments. There does seem to be an atmosphere of enforced conformity at the company.   Google really does seem not to tolerate employees  having  private opinions deviating from its generally leftist party line.  The existence of a hypocritical double standard does  seem fairly clear. (For example, an essay by a devout Muslim employee suggesting the company would be better off requiring female employees to be veiled and to work in sexually segregated offices very likely would not have caused its author any trouble or sent the diversity squad into action.)

I hope the poor guy finds a good job somewhere.  I also hope Alphabet catches holy hell for this in public opinion. It deserves to. An outfit which touts diversity while demanding total conformity is not only a far piece away from doing the right thing. It is a purveyor of Newspeak.  I say this as one of their frequent and generally happy customers.