I generally liked the memo, and I'm pretty aggressively pro-affirmative action. Some of the memo is factually wrong, but I think he tried to be measured, and I'm proud of him.

The sentence that popped out at me is this one:

"I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principled reasons for why it helps Google."

I think it's hard for women to understand this, because they are much more likely to have an intrinsic understanding of why pro-diversity social engineering makes sense. As a man, it has often not been obvious to me. I learned a long time ago to assume that women are right about gender stuff, and that assumption has done me extremely well. I've learned an incredible amount, and those acts of goodwill made women much more inclined to be gentle with me and explain things.

But I don't think institutionalizing that kind of trust is tactically feasible, and I'm not sure it would even be a good thing if it happened. Because I think pro-diversity policies will be strengthened, not weakened, if staff can form a rigorous story about how they help the company.

I believe affirmative action helps Google, so I don't think it will be impossible to tell that story, but it won't be easy. It will take work. Mostly because liberal circles don't really talk about it. Diversity is seen as a benefit to diverse people, and therefore good, 'nuf said, as the the Google VP quipped.

I think affirmative action is valuable for the reason the anonymous memo writer thinks it's problematic: because different people are different. I don't think if 50% of Google coders were women that Google would stay the same. I think it would become a very different because women have some differences from men in aggregate.

And so changing admission requirements to help more women get the jobs shouldn't necessarily be seen as lowering the admissions standards, it should be seen as changing the set of things that coders are allowed to focus on. And we should assume that we'll see a whole new influx of a different kind of men too, men who are more similar to the women in the middle of their bell curve, than the men at the middle of theirs.

But ideally the way that should happen is not by saying "let's take 50% women", but by saying "if we were to accept 50% more women, what new kinds of Googler would we be adding? How will those folks make Google stronger? How can we change our hiring criteria to find the best of that kind of Googler?" and yes, those criteria would bring in a lot more women, but they'd also bring in a smaller number of new men! And everybody involved would have an understanding of how Google was getting better. Those women would have more respect. Those men would be better appreciated, even as they were operating outside of old Google norms.

I will say, just ramming 50% more women into the culture is probably fine though. While I mostly agree with the memo's general thrust, that it would be better to do this a different way, I think the alarmism is a little out of place. It's certainly a problem that conservatives are afraid to speak up about gender issues, but I doubt that's Google's biggest culture problem right now.