A pervasive attitude

To many people in tech, Mr Memo’s memo is no surprise at all.

Others were less surprised to hear what they called a pervasive attitude in an industry long dominated by men. The manifesto “is the Silicon Valley mindset in many ways,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University college of engineering and a frequent critic of the tech sector’s lack of diversity. “You could take this to a lot of people and you would hear: ‘Yup, we agree with this.’ People used to say things like this fearlessly.”

The manifesto claims that men have a higher drive for status, that women might not like coding because they have more interest than men in “people and aesthetics”, and that the low number of women in “high stress jobs” is down to them having more “neuroticism”. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” the author writes.

The document also claims that the gender wage gap is a myth, but Google is locked in an ongoing battle with US labour regulators claiming to have evidence that the company systematically undercompensates women.

The US labour regulators are probably all neurotic women.

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