Google’s Memo

Intro

About a month ago, A google engineer sent around to his fellow employees a memo with the title “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”. The memo went viral about a week ago, and he was fired soon after. The main points of this memo were the following (in his own summary):

• Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety. 
• This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed. 
• The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology. 
• Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression 
• Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression 
• 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. 
• Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business. 

The arguments to be found within the memo are riddled with damning flaws, among them poor sources and rambling tangential arguments, as other writing will point out.

But reporting these flaws is not what I currently think is important. I think we could point out the flaws of his argument, and we could talk about the long standing history of positivist reductionism that perpetuates marginalization and deeply misunderstands social issues, all while patting itself on the back for being grounded in “objective, unbiased fact”. We could do that, but it’s a little bit of a tall order for a busy grad student, and I think it would be mostly self serving, preaching to the choir (still, I included those references). I think the big opportunities to discuss and learn about the factual content of the memo have passed, and I wanted to talk about the context of the memo.

Confirming His Narrative

I think that Google should have waited to fire James Damore, or at least fired him in a different way

I do think that his firing, or at least the speed of it happening, is representative of an ideological echo chamber, which is an issue. His memo thrust a discussion of diversity in engineering and science into the public eye, and it was met him being swiftly fired.

Have you seen Se7en? Spoiler alert, in the end, John Doe includes himself as a sacrificial element in the confirmation of his own narrative (that humans are sinners). I feel a very similar dynamic here, that our engineer confirms the intolerance of Google by inciting its wrath with what he simply considers to be a difference of opinion. How Google handled this memo easily confirms his narrative (he says as much in interviews with him), and does not do the process of social justice many favors. Yes, they fired someone who perpetuated harmful stereotypes about women (and he couldn’t help but include race while he was at it), and he violated a code of conduct at Google, but can you blame me for seeing this situation as a teachable moment squandered?

Education Before Banishment

It does not sit well with me from an educator’s perspective, that we should see such misunderstanding of the nature of these social issues, and meet that misunderstanding by casting people out. What will they do about all the rest of the conservative Google employees that are supposedly in the closet? Will Google fire them too? And if the answer is yes, it seems they will find somewhere else to go and perpetuate stereotypes. The filtering out of ignorance seems a band aid solution to me. We can create inclusive learning environments, and we can teach social justice. And to create inclusive learning environments we must make uncertainty safe and resist a single right answer, among other things. We must have these discussions, rather than simply lash out.

Removing the person without addressing the issue will not make much social change, and in some regard I hold Google responsible for setting this strategy as an example. But in a larger sense, we as engineering educators are responsible. By not educating this engineer properly about the state and nature of women and minorities in STEM, we have failed. We must be committed to social justice education, and we must have these conversations before they slip out of the civil discussion of the classroom and into the hands of a polarized media.

Closing

Let us remember that the oppressor group should also take responsibility for resisting oppressive systems, not only those who are oppressed. Let us remember that in a system of oppression, the oppressor is disproportionately harmed and dehumanized, but harmed nonetheless, and that this fact contributes to building the identity of an ally. If those who perpetuate these harmful systems are going to take up the responsibility of reversing the harmful system, they must learn about it. If we are going to make change, it needs to be in culture, not just individuals, and that happens with connection, or else this rift will persist.

Let discourse be a tool for developing social justice knowledge, rather than polarization. Realistically, if corporations do not accept this responsibility, this will have to happen before the workplace, and in the classroom. It is our responsibility as engineering educators to talk about these issues, and to encourage students to engage in discourse beyond the stating of initial views.