So women like feelings and men are inflexible? What a load of rot

A GOOGLE engineer’s anti-diversity manifesto shows underlying sexism is alive and well among some backward-looking tech bros, writes Wendy Tuohy.

Women at Google allegedly like feelings, men like ideas. (Pic: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)

TECH visionaries are re-coding the way we live, communicate, learn and even love. Let’s just hope they have no influence in the way we see gender at work.

If they do, instead of looking forward to a more equal future we’re looking back to a professional dark age.

A male Google software engineer’s anti-diversity manifesto that set social media alight reveals how deeply resistant to change parts of this “progressive” industry are.

The anonymous author believes his company’s attempts to create a more diverse workplace — which, by the way, has been shown to provide a measurable advantage to company profits and productivity — are not healthy for its culture.

The ten-page rant attempts to back up the argument that trying to entice and support more women into the business runs counter to the interests of both genders because men and women are good at different things.

Women are open to feelings, men are open to ideas. Women like people, men like things.

So leave the guys to the dynamic stuff, because he says so.

Contrary to reality, he sees the world as populated by two narrow gender bands and suggests these limit “empathetic” women and favour ambitious men at work.

Among the more ridiculous points supporting his theory that genders should stick to roles that suit their “natural” capabilities is that women are not as driven by status, are more interested in work-life balance and don’t do as well under stress.

His manifesto was leaked to various tech sites and has revealed deep divisions in an industry that will be a key employment sector for our kids and generations beyond.

This guy reveals a world view your sexist great-grandad would be proud of, in which women are seen as weaker and more worthy of protection and men are the pragmatists.

Women, he suggests, have higher levels of “neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)” than men and “this may contribute to… the lower number of women in high stress jobs” at Google. Or, it could just be because the boys’ club of tech continues to attempt to lock them out.

Laughably, he backs up his theory that men are the naturally more assertive gender by including in his examples that when male babies are castrated at birth they still end up behaving like men.

So this means women can never attain — or, shock, naturally possess — leadership qualities? Presumably. Lol.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. (Pic: Supplied)

Male colleagues of this guy have every reason to be just as irate as women in the international tech community about his mad mansplain of biological gender-role determinism: he describes a key male quality as “inflexibility”. Non-alpha geeks need also not apply, it seems.

The real point of his effort appears to be his own, deep dissatisfaction with the political leanings of the internal culture of his employer — as he interprets it.

He argues for more diversity of thought, not people; he wants more freedom to express right-wing views without being “shamed” for it.

In short, it’s a textbook dummy spit from a guy who doesn’t like change, it's the kind of thing you see across “men’s rights” activist forums.

Perhaps somewhere in there is something potentially useful for an employer striving to take into account all the variety of feelings among staff.

But this comes across a transparent attempt to stop corporate evolution. It would be easily ignored were it not that an increasing number of sexist and harassing US tech bosses have recently been outed for running their businesses exactly along this guy’s philosophical lines.

On the upside, I interviewed a dozen women in Australian tech to a feature last month and discovered, encouragingly, that in this country we seem to have a much more enlightened species of tech dude and a more enlightened tech workplace generally.

Let’s hope plenty of our tech thought leaders jump in and denounce this backwards-looking, nameless and gormless man.

@wtuohy