"We all have biases and use motivated reasoning to dismiss ideas that run counter to our internal values."When someone dares to point out any discrepancies which contradict the reader's beliefs and practices, no matter how well reasoned, and sometimes no matter how filled with caveats, they will denounce the piece as being racist, sexist, discriminatory, etc.
For example, if you dare to point out that there are differences between men and women (and despite explicitly stating that a lot of those characteristics are only generalizations and there is a lot of variation with respect to individuals), the subject person is excoriated and told they are wrong and a horrible person, for essentially pointing out the truth. In other words, some people read into it that all people conform to these tendencies, instead of taking the proposition at face value, that they're just tendencies. I'm reminded of Eric S. Raymond's blog post, which if I read it correctly, advocates just looking at the code, and never mind the identities attached to that code. Yes, eventually give credit where credit is due, but only after the code is judged for its merit, and consider nothing about from whom it comes.
While a seemingly laudible goal, to see roughly equal representation of gender, all races, all faiths, all <insert characteristic here>, is fairly unlikely for the foreseeable future to see that realized. A stance of total equality (of outcome) denies the points in the memo, that it's just the way things are. That doesn't mean that's the way things always have to be, it just means it's often easy to see that's how we are now as a society. The memo's author even states:
"I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."But of course, this will get glossed over and dismissed. Again, someone needs to be judged on their merits and actions, not their gender, not their race, not their religion, not to whom they're attracted, not their class of any sort. This includes not being given any favoritism. In other words, like the memo author, since I am male, I would feel a certain amount of frustration and anger if a company hires or promotes a woman because they seem to be low on their female quota, thus passing over me.
In the last large corporate IT environment in which I worked, we were about 75% men and 25% women. I saw no hint whatsoever that women were oppressed in any way. I could detect no way in which the company had favoritism for anyone, other than for what they had a demonstrated aptitude (some better at backups/archiving, some better at server adminstration, some better at databases, and so on). For the most part, we all got along very well indeed. We saw each other first as people, as IT pros, and secondarily as men and women. Except for only one case in the late 1990s, it didn't matter that my supervisor was female, my supervisors were all the same professionally to me. And in that exception, I thought she was fine as a person, just wasn't as good as I would hope at her job. (That also applies just about equally to two men I had as supervisors at that same company, they were really agreeable guys, just less-than-stellar supervisors.)
Come on...all I'm asking for is equal treatment. This includes that I don't want favoritism towards others just for being female, or black, or anything else. It's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. It's in no way negative that an IT staff is mostly men. It's just the way IT society is right now. I certainly hope more women do enter into and succeed in the field. But it must not be because they are women, it must be because they're good IT people.
ADDITION 08-Aug-2017: There was something pointed out on "The Glenn Beck Program" this morning, which is quite relevant: The fix for discrimination is not discrimination. In other words, the fix for discriminating against women is not to discriminate against men, it's to remove discrimination.
Another thing on this morning's program which was in the back of my mind while writing yesterday, but I didn't put it in here, is this: When, if ever, is Google's lefty bias going to bleed over into search results? Will the indexer look at the page contents and decide it's not the sort of page it wants me to see, because of these biases? What we really need is a search engine superclass, one that goes out to Oath, Bing, Google, maybe others, and combines the results somehow. The challenge may be to find search engines maintained by companies who aren't lefites. The point is, diversity in search engines would be good too.
Their bias is sometimes manifest in what they choose to Doodle. There are a few times where the radio personalities I enjoy point out that Google will bother to Doodle something which it knows is served to Americans that is some overseas event, but when it comes to recognizing something in our culture, pffft, forget that. It's not even necessarily a seeming lack of patriotism. Looking back at the Google Doodle archive, there is no Doodle for Easter, no Doodle for Memorial Day, and there's one for Fourth of July, which....come on....everyone around the world has 04-Jul...I have to wonder why it's not labeled US Independence Day or something like that. Oddly enough, there is a Doodle for Veterans Day 2016.
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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!