I wrote recently about Google’s decision to fire James Damore for daring to suggest, in a polite, well-reasoned memo, that, “Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership,” and that, “Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has vehemently defended that decision, and so has Susan Wojcicki, who’s CEO of Google’s popular subsidiary, YouTube.
Both Pichai and Wojcicki are no doubt highly intelligent, but they evidently aren’t very self-aware. According to Mashable’s Kerry Flynn, here are some things they said last Sunday during an MSNBC interview (Revolution: Google and YouTube Changing the World):
[The interviewer] started the conversation by addressing Wojcicki and calling out the statistic that two in 10 employees at Google are women. …
Wojcicki replied, “I think the problem is, is that computer science as a whole and tech as a whole has a reputation of being a very geeky male industry. And so if you look, not within the industry, but just as an educational pipeline, you see that we only have 20 percent of women graduating with computer science degrees, and that’s a problem in and of itself, because that means we don’t have enough people graduating who have those degrees. And you say, well, why is that? I think it has to do with these perceptions that the computer industry is, a geeky, not very interesting, not social industries.” …
Pichai responded, … “So, we need to make the environment more welcoming, we need to make the jobs more interesting.”
Pichai noted the differences between what women look for in jobs and men. “Women typically look for jobs with a purpose. Studies show that.”
The irony of this was presumably lost on Wojcicki and Pichai, but it wasn’t lost on James Damore. Here’s what he tweeted earlier today:
Did I read this right? Susan Wojicicki said that women find “geeky male industries” (as opposed to “social industries”) “not very interesting” and Sundar cites research on gender differences.
