Google has to compete with all the other companies for the same pool of talent. They can out compete them with more money, but that would raise eye brows after awhile. Something has to give somewhere when supply is constrained.
The only real solution to the gender gap involves fixing the talent pipeline and then waiting N years for the talent to start coming through. Everything else is just a stop gap that is bound to create distortions.
It would be different if there was lots of talent that just couldn't get jobs because of overt discrimination (e.g. as is the case with ageism), but the gender gap is not that easy of a problem.
Much of Google's diversity work goes toward fixing the talent pipeline by working with students. In the memo Damore criticizes these attempts by saying something like these programs are misleading female students into thinking that programming is more people-oriented (i.e. suitable for women) than it is.
Sure, but that is a different point entirely. Even if Google was getting that wrong, it isn't really that controversial to almost all of us; programming has always been prone to misrepresentation and taught in wrong ways to both boys and girls.
Incidentally, working in a big corp, programming these days is more of a social activity than it once was for reasons completely unrelated to gender. The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
> The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
I wish this disastrous extrovert invasion were more clearly disclosed. It took me a long time to realize that my maddeningly arthritic big corp experience wasn't just an outlier.
Yes, your answer is clear but isn't correct. It doesn't actually correct any biases, it doesn't create female talent out of thin air. It only moves them from other companies to one company.
