Brotopia Page 10

  The government’s lawsuit mirrors a complaint I’ve heard from several Googlers: that the company’s efforts to bring women on board wasn’t matched with an equally concerted effort to mentor and promote them.

  So what went wrong? There are no easy scapegoats—rather, a web of complex problems including an industry that had already crippled its own pipeline, a pile-up of ignorant and bad behaviors, and a perception of meritocracy that led to a lack of urgency around making changes. All of this was amplified as Google’s workforce exploded in size over the first decade of the new millennium.

  “If I had an intuition about where we introduced problems, it’s when you really start to scale hiring,” surmises Bret Taylor, who joined Google as an associate product manager in 2003 and was a co-creator of Google Maps. Taylor went on to become chief technology officer at Facebook and knows a thing or two about the challenges of scaling superfast. If a company is growing quickly, he says, there’s a critical moment in its life cycle where it needs to expand from a couple hundred engineers to thousands, in order to keep up. If, at that point, you don’t already have a diverse team, he says, “it’s really hard to change because so much of your culture is built on the people you hired.” That is, if you don’t have a critical mass of women early, the problem will only magnify as the number of employees grows.

  Taylor believes that after Google’s IPO, as the company was trying to keep pace with staffing demands, it defaulted to recruiting methods that were more standard in the industry and loosened the requirements for ideal candidates simply because it was hiring so fast. Recruiters went to the same university job fairs as every other tech company and posted their openings on the same websites. The effort that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google to find great women leaders didn’t percolate down to other managers in the organization.

  “The growth demanded that we move with the velocity that wasn’t necessarily as thoughtful as maybe we would have liked in retrospect,” says Nancy Lee. “The net we were casting was not as wide as it should be and the company relied heavily—as most companies do—on referrals. When someone is referred, they are considered a known entity, so some preference is given to them, but it tends to be the case that our network of friends is destined to continue the demographic profile that we already have.”

  Some employees also blame the company’s approach to retention of women. “I feel like Google cares a lot about diversity, but I feel we have a very singular view as to what leadership means,” says Laura Holmes, who was promoted to senior product manager in 2015 and is one of the rare female managers at Google. “I’ve been coached to be less nice. I have a collaborative style; it works for me. I wish that when we went out to the promotion committee, there was more of a look at results than there was about approach.”

  It all comes down to what employees perceived as “merit.” “The attributes and behaviors and skills that the majority of engineers on the technical side thought people should have—assertiveness, aggressiveness, that pick-it-apart urge, almost the hubris they had, was rewarded,” says Nancy Lee. “The things that get undervalued are things like collaboration, willingness to listen. Some of the skills women would bring to bear were simply not valued. Then you say they lack ‘merit’ and you get the reputation that it’s a little brogrammer.”

  Lee says this “brogrammer” reputation choked the pipeline and discouraged many young women from even applying to Google. “There were so many times that I went to Grace Hopper [the Women in Computing conference] and women said I wouldn’t even apply because it’s too hard get in and it’s a tough environment. Clearly people were qualified and could have tried. They just didn’t even think about it.”

  It wasn’t until about 2012, when Google and the advertisers who provide the bulk of its revenue had fully recovered from the financial crisis, that the company had a reckoning of sorts. “There were rumblings in the culture from women because they knew they would be the only ones in the meeting or there would be presentations with no women at all,” Lee says. “Diversity was always a priority, but other priorities had eclipsed it.”

  The bottom line is this: when it comes to its engagement with women, Google gets an A for effort but a C for results. Ultimately, Google always hired and promoted far more men than women, and men dominate the company’s most senior roles today. And, while Google’s culture was always intense, it appears to have become more monolithic as it grew, rewarding confidence and confrontation.

  “In engineering specifically, people can get so caught up in what’s right and wrong in a confrontational manner, and they don’t put a stop to it,” Niniane Wang told me, reflecting on her time at Google. “It can evolve into a culture where people who love arguing are really happy and people who don’t love arguing aren’t.”

  The female Googlers I spoke to didn’t describe the work environment that early employee Kim Scott experienced, one where new hires were supported and challenged by female managers.

  “I’ve never had a female boss, and it makes me sad to even reflect on that,” said Brynn Evans, a user interface designer at Google. “I’ve worked at Google for about six years, and I just haven’t been surrounded by women who are managers. I’ve just worked with so many men, and I’ve had crappy male bosses. Crappy and rude.” It wasn’t until she arrived at Google, Evans told me, that she realized how isolated she was as a woman in technology.

  In 2015, Larry Page rebranded the company as Alphabet, now made up of twelve different divisions including Google, Google Ventures (now called GV), and Google X, each of them with its own CEO. At the same time, he set out to find a female CFO for Alphabet and succeeded, hiring the longtime Morgan Stanley executive Ruth Porat. Page also brought in Diane Greene, the co-founder of VMware, to run Google’s cloud efforts. The management team of Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai (who was promoted to the role after Page made himself CEO of Alphabet), is some 40 percent women. (YouTube, which Wojcicki runs, is a division of Google under Pichai.)

  Still, as of this writing, exactly zero of the Alphabet division CEOs are women. To top it off, representatives from several coding education and pipeline feeder groups have told me that Google’s efforts to improve diversity appear to be more about seeking good publicity than having a real effect. One noted that Facebook has been successfully poaching Google’s female engineers due to an “increasingly chauvinistic environment.”

  Most important, Google may also be guilty of a failure to tell the right story about why the company succeeded in the first place. The most commonly shared narrative is that Google’s triumph came through innovation—that it was the first to the future. Indeed, the top echelon at Google might have bought into that story themselves. One former Google executive told me that management was never Page or Brin’s favorite activity. They preferred to focus on the blue-sky projects—like curing death, and driverless cars. But there was another story to tell: that Google’s success had at least as much to do with making bets on strong female leaders like Mayer, Sandberg, and Wojcicki who brought wider skill sets and different management styles to the company in its earliest days. If subsequent managers at Google understood this lesson, that might have quieted the grumbling among engineers who had a narrow idea of what forms of intelligence or training made a Google employee. Early Google had proven that diversity in the workplace needn’t be based on altruism or some goal of social engineering. It was simply a good business decision.

  THE INFAMOUS GOOGLE MEMO

  This brings me to the case of a young engineer named James Damore, who provided a telling clue for why Google’s diversity efforts led to only mediocre results. In August 2017, Damore’s ten-page missive explaining what he saw as the root causes of gender disparities at the company, now famously known as the Google memo, was leaked to the press. The memo critiqued cultural issues and hiring practices at Google that he found troubling.

  In it, Damore argued that there were “biological” reasons that
men were more likely to be hired and promoted at Google. He suggested that men have a higher drive for status than women, which compelled them to compete harder for “high pay/high stress jobs in tech.” Women for their part were prone to “neuroticism” with higher anxiety levels and a lower tolerance for stress. He also linked to a study that purported to show that “women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things” and for “empathizing vs. systemizing.” Damore added that Google’s efforts to improve diversity were discriminatory, lowering the bar, and could actually increase race and gender tensions. Those efforts were just “veiled left ideology” that ignored scientific fact—though Damore’s citations, some from Wikipedia, were weak examples in many instances. He failed to attempt to assess the scientific big picture and made several unscientific interpretations and conclusions. Even the researchers he cited disagree with how he used the data.

  Google needed to “de-moralize diversity” and “stop alienating conservatives,” Damore wrote. “Unfortunately, our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber.” He characterized Google as a “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.”

  At least in terms of that last point, Damore was onto something. Within a day of the memo’s leak, Damore’s world was turned upside down. Social media exploded with angry commentary. One site, early to the debate, was so overwhelmed with traffic that it shut down. Another site that came to Damore’s defense was crippled by a denial-of-service attack from unknown parties. The mainstream media quickly picked up the controversy. “At Google, Memo on Gender and Diversity Sparks Firestorm,” headlined the Wall Street Journal.

  The controversy got so hot that Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, canceled his vacation and flew back to Mountain View to handle the crisis. Pichai issued a harshly worded rebuke, saying, “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it.” That said, Pichai continued, “to suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK . . . The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being ‘agreeable’ rather than ‘assertive,’ showing a ‘lower stress tolerance,’ or being ‘neurotic.’”

  Internally, Google executives engaged in an intense debate about what to do. Within a few days of the memo’s release, Damore was fired.

  Pichai promised to hold a company town hall to discuss the situation. But, just thirty minutes before the meeting, he canceled it, citing security concerns (some employees said they were being harassed after their questions were leaked online). The next day—while nuclear tensions ramped up between the United States and North Korea—the most popular article in the New York Times was an op-ed calling for Pichai’s resignation. It is not an exaggeration to say that, for a solid week in Silicon Valley, this memo was the main topic of conversation.

  I interviewed Damore just two days after his firing. He Skyped into our Bloomberg studio from his Mountain View apartment. He seemed a little shell-shocked by the dramatic turns his life had taken, looking a bit like Richard Hendricks, the perpetually bewildered main character on HBO’s Silicon Valley.

  Damore told me the reaction to his memo both internally and externally was deeply unfair. The public reaction, he said, required that he be the scapegoat. He claimed his own boss threw him under the bus. “It’s really a shame that no one in upper management could protect me,” he said.

  I asked Damore if he regretted writing the memo in the first place. “It’s hard to regret it just because I do believe that I’m trying to make Google and the world in general a better place by not confining us to our ideological echo chambers,” he said. He also doubled down on his belief that everything in the memo was not just true but also “scientific consensus.”

  Even though Damore links to scientific papers, it is fair to say that the scientific consensus is still out as to whether men and women have biological differences when it comes to traits like status seeking, neuroticism, and a preference for empathizing over systematizing. There are plenty of social scientists who insist that any differences that might be seen in large population studies are a result of culture and upbringing and not biology at all. And literally everyone agrees, including Damore, that population differences—even if they exist—say nothing about an individual’s interests or abilities.

  Was Damore correct in saying that Google’s gender outcomes could be explained by fundamental gender disparities?

  Given that we are only a couple of generations into women’s full-fledged entry into higher education and the workforce, I believe that cultural stereotypes and biases are a far more likely cause, and there is a vast body of research to back this up. It’s research that Google’s leaders might have relied on to better explain the company’s efforts to get more women in the door, which could have gone a long way toward getting all employees on board and fostering a more welcoming work environment.

  Damore’s real mistake, however, was more basic. I believe he was asking the wrong question. The assumptions he made in his memo remind me of the makers of those early aptitude tests who assumed good programmers could only be found among egocentric, puzzle-obsessed nerds who “didn’t like people.” As I’ve argued earlier, defined that way, women are definitely less likely to be considered good programmers. Damore’s criteria were slightly different but hardly broader. Like many in the industry, he took for granted that tech companies like Google should be staffed and led by people who systematize rather than empathize. The better question would be this: What are the consequences, to companies and us all, of assuming that the technology industry should be dominated by one kind of person?

  One of the most insightful responses to the memo that I read was posted on Medium by Yonatan Zunger, a Googler who happened to leave the company just days before Damore was fired. His point was not just that Damore didn’t understand gender but that he didn’t seem to have any real insight or understanding about what it took to be a great computer engineer. He took particular exception to Damore’s argument that certain roles at Google were, by nature, limited in “how people-oriented” they could be and that employees should “de-emphasize empathy” in order to “better reason about the facts.”

  Being coldly rational and solving very specific computational puzzles, Zunger admits, is part of an engineer’s job and a requirement when learning to code and in the early days of one’s career. However, it is only after that stage, he says, that the “real engineering” begins. The true job of an engineer is to fix problems that exist in the real world. Those problems always involve understanding people. It is a challenge that requires not less empathy but more.

  “Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers,” Zunger writes. “If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to.”

  “Anyone can learn how to write code,” he goes on. “The truly hard parts about this job are knowing which code to write, building the clear plan of what has to be done in order to achieve which goal, and building the consensus required to make that happen.”

  The reaction to Damore’s memo by both the company’s management and much of the rank and file was by and large abject horror. Erica Joy Baker, a former Google engineer, wrote, “What is news is that this employee felt safe enough to write and share a . . . sexist screed.” Megan Smith, a former Google vice president and the chief technology officer of the United States during the Obama administration,
told me the post was not just “offensive” but “incorrect,” and that the discrimination that women in technology face day in and day out is “almost class action.” The overwhelming criticism Damore received from colleagues seems to prove that he was an outlier at least in terms of his willingness to express his beliefs publicly.

  There were, however, some women at the company who came forward to report their suspicion that Damore’s assumptions might be more baked into the Google culture than the company would like to admit. Cate Huston, another former Google engineer, declared, “We know when we work with dudes like that. We know when they do our code review. We know when we find their comments on our performance review. We know.” I have little doubt that the reason Damore’s memo became so famous was because it revealed the toxic assumptions that exist in tech but often remain just out of sight.

  BREAKING THROUGH THE SILICON CEILING

  Google is a massive organization that now employs over seventy thousand people. Stereotypes of what makes a good leader and a good engineer run deep, and so they do at Google, despite the company’s efforts to combat them. Susan Wojcicki wrote an impassioned response to Damore’s memo in Fortune, acknowledging that while she has felt very supported by Google’s founders, she has battled significant resistance from others. “I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt.”