Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
&gt; He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills.<p>This to me is the most interesting question that hasn&#x27;t been answered about the memo. There seems to still be two camps, those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. They can&#x27;t both be right and I&#x27;d imagine if we could take a look at Google&#x27;s hiring practices it wouldn&#x27;t be too hard to tell which is which. Of course, we can&#x27;t Google keeps its hiring practices, at least the ones relating to diversity very hush hush. This was actually Damore&#x27;s impetus for writing the memo, he attended a diversity summit at Google where he learned about his employer&#x27;s hiring practices and also observed that this summit was, unlike other meetings at Google, not recorded for later viewing. Damore&#x27;s conclusion was that the hiring processes were unethical and likely illegal, although afaik he&#x27;s yet to say specifically what it was that he observed. Still I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s very reasonable to say that Damore has caused harm with this misrepresentation unless you can show conclusively that it is indeed a misrepresentation, and so far I haven&#x27;t seen anything conclusive that shows that.