Google’s Jerry Maguire moment

Think of it as the Jerry Maguire memo scene for a new generation. An employee at a successful company circulates some personal ponderings about the nature of his industry and how best to address that industry’s moral challenges. Fallout ensues. Only this time, instead of angering only his bosses and a couple of co-workers, the memo causes the entire world to flip out.

On Aug. 5, an internal forum post written by a Google software engineer was leaked, went viral, and quickly began earning condemnation from media outlets around the globe. In it, the author, James Damore, writing in the clinical and cataloged way that only an engineer can, suggests that the lack of female representation in the tech world could be partly (and the memo is careful to emphasize the partly part) due to biological differences between the sexes. Damore then meticulously breaks down what some of those differences could be, including women prioritizing life balance over status, men having a greater tolerance for high-stress roles, and women preferring more cooperative work environments. In outlining these possible explanations, he takes pains to point out that he’s speaking on a general level and that these gender preferences won’t manifest themselves the same way (or at all) in every woman or man.

Finally, Damore addresses the subject referenced in the memo’s title, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” arguing that what Google suffers from the most is a lack of ideological diversity that results in “some ideas [being] too sacred to be honestly discussed.”

For this, The Atlantic calls it a “manifesto” that “Reveals Tech’s Rotten Core.” The Guardian deems it “Google Staffer’s Hostility to Affirmative Action.” Tech news sites label it “sexist” (Recode) and an “Anti-Diversity Screed” (Gizmodo). Even Fox News is bowing to the “Anti-Diversity Memo” headline.

Here’s a snippet of the outrageous language causing such an uproar:

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions.

Is this really what qualifies as a “screed” these days?

You don’t have to agree with every bulleted line of the memo to give Damore the common grace of assuming his intentions are, at the very least, not evil. His writing may not always be scintillating or his arguments the most original, but at no point do they devolve into anything abusive or even mildly snarky. If anything, he takes tiresome care to give the other side its due. You have to wonder if much of the rage aimed at this document is a tactic to distract from the persuasiveness of its common sense.

Certainly, rather than dealing with substance of the engineer’s arguments, the tech media are simply calling for greater thought policing to prevent this sort of thing getting out in the future.

Certainly, rather than dealing with the substance of the engineer’s arguments, the tech media are simply calling for greater thought policing to prevent this sort of thing getting out in the future.

Consider this opening sentence from Motherboard: “Saturday morning, we reported the existence of an anti-diversity manifesto.” Forget for a moment that the essay in question hardly rises to the level of manifesto. Motherboard evidently thinks the very existence of such a memo is cause for alarm.

Gizmodo promises its readers that it’s working to find out how Google “is addressing employee concerns regarding [the memo’s] content.” Does Gizmodo mean how Google is addressing concerns that one employee might have moderately different opinions from some of its other employees? How should Google address that? I’m assuming Gizmodo isn’t expecting its next headline to be, “Google Employees Continue to Have Engaging Lunch-Time Debate While Giving One Another the Benefit of the Doubt.”

Again, we are talking about an internal memo. Damore didn’t submit it as an op-ed to a newspaper or post it on a public blog. He shared it on an in-house Google chat board to broaden discussion among his co-workers on an issue affecting corporate policies. Not only did someone find his rational, well-reasoned thoughts scandalous enough to leak them to the press, the tech media thought them scandalous enough to occupy top-of-the-page news space.

The entire affair brings to mind another, more current example of scripted entertainment—Mike Judge’s often ingenious but frequently profane HBO comedy Silicon Valley. In season 1, the show was criticized for not featuring more women in a scene at a tech conference … until Judge revealed that the episode was shot at a real TechCrunch Disrupt competition. So he could only show the real number of women who’d wanted to attend TechCrunch Disrupt that year.

“People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow,” Damore writes.

To paraphrase Renée Zellweger’s character reacting to the memo that gets Jerry fired: In this age, common sense like that is a revolutionary act.

Update: Late on Aug. 7 this story took the same turn Jerry Maguire did. Like the too-honest sports agent, the too-honest engineer has reportedly lost his job.

This story has been updated to include the name of the Google engineer.