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Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber Memo
In July 2017, a Google engineer called James Damore wrote a memo titled “Google’s
Ideological Echo Chamber” (Wakabayashi). The memo, among other things, sought to critique
the way that Google was handling the issues of gender and cultural diversity in the workplace.
Damore’s memo led to serious outrage by many people in the country. News articles were
written to critique the engineer's memo (Wakabayashi). Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, wrote a
memo in response to the engineer’s memo. The outrage arising from Damore’s memo led to his
firing from Google. Some people believe that the memo was intended to belittle women. In
contrast, others believe that the memo was aimed at shedding light on Google's biases and
propose better ways of dealing with the gender gap in the technology industry.
The Engineer’s Intended Message
The fired engineer's intended message was that the gender gap in the tech industry and
some job positions like leadership are not entirely due to oppression, but a factor like personality
differences between the genders accounts for the same (Damore 3). Damore argued that, on
average, women are high in traits like openness towards feelings and aesthetics, agreeableness,
people-oriented, and neuroticism (Damore 4). He further argued that on average men are more
open to ideas, are highly driven by status, and are more object-oriented (Damore 5). He
concluded that the general differences in psychological preferences could partly explain the
underrepresentation of women in leadership and the tech industry. One thing that Damore did
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right was to articulate his position clearly. Another thing that he did right was to acknowledge
that biases like political and moral biases hindered a candid discussion on the matter (Damore 2).
What Damore did wrong in the memo was the failure to provide sufficient evidence for his claim
about the general personality differences between genders. The issue of whether there are
differences between genders has created political hostility in the country. Presentation of credible
and robust evidence for his case, if such exists, could have shielded the engineer from the
hostility and sacking.
The intent of Reducing Biases in Fixing Gender Gap
Several sections of the memo justify the viewpoint held by...