It was April 1997, and I had just finished producing the corporate newsletter for a small but highly successful company named Livingston Enterprises, located in Pleasanton. Livingston then was manufacturing a compact data network router called “The Portmaster” that had become a hot product for Internet Service Providers worldwide. Suddenly an unfamiliar woman in her 30s appeared at the entrance of my cubicle and perched her buttocks on my desk. She was tastefully dressed, but she reeked of perfume. “Hi, I’m Shirley,” she warbled, leaning toward me so that her face was only inches from my own. “I’m the new Tech Pubs Manager and I have a special project for you.”
Startled, I looked up and did my best to smile. I knew the company was hiring a new manager to replace my boss because he was moving up in the company, but I wasn’t ready for this stranger’s aggressive approach. “Sure,” I said. “Glad to help any way I can.”
As a senior technical writer who had worked for several different hardware and software companies in the past, I knew I could meet Shirley’s requirements without any problem. Still, I felt a little uncomfortable about her management style. So I decided to get some advice from a friend of mine who was both a wise woman and a professional psychologist.
“Here’s what you do,” my friend advised. “The next time Shirley sits on your desk, just stand up. Don’t get mad,” she winked. “Just get even.”
Sure enough, my friend’s advice worked perfectly. After her second visit to my cubicle, Shirley never sat on my desk again and we got along fine.
I relate this career anecdote because it may offer the hint of a solution to the problems industry giants like Google are now facing as they try to impose Procrustean diversity rules on their employees. Back in 1997, the biggest concern to most tech industry managers was not diversity but what might happen when the year 2000 changed the way computer clocks kept track of time. The internet then was still pretty much in its infancy. It would be seven years before Google’s IPO (Aug. 19, 2004) and Facebook’s would be another eight years after that (May 18, 2012). In 1997, by the way, Mark Zuckerburg was only 13 years old.
According to one source, the diversity kerfuffle all began in 2013 when The San Jose Mercury News revealed that the diversity stats of 15 big Silicon Valley firms were really deplorable. Determined to stay at the head of the pack, Google immediately launched an aggressive program to boost its diversity numbers. In late July of this year, though, the initiaive blew up when one of Google’s employees posted a memo on the company’s internal message board .
Here’s how The Wall Street Journal reported the incident on Aug. 8: “Google computer scientist James Damore triggered the uproar when he published a memo last week blasting the search company’s ‘politically correct monoculture’ and progressive gender policies. After his cri de coeur went viral, Google CEO Sundar Pichai fired Mr. Damore for violating the company’s code of conduct by ‘advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.’”
So what, in fact, did Mr. Damore say in his infamous 10-page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber?” Judging by the wide range of posted responses on various public blogs and letters to newspaper editors, nothing very surprising and certainly nothing that justifies Mr. Damore’s being fired. Here, for example, are excerpts from letters that appeared in the Aug. 12-13 issue of The Wall Street Journal:
“Since more than 80 percent of engineering and computer science majors are men, doesn’t it make sense that a natural distribution of the jobs in this field will go to men? I’ll bet there are a lot more Google engineers (male and female) who agree with him than will publicly admit it.” [Janet Wylie of Jacksonville Beach, Florida; self-described as “a woman who graduated with an engineering degree in 1977 and then spent 35 years in engineering and technology positions.”]
“When I was an executive at Google, I couldn’t have cared less about the ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc., of a job candidate. All I cared about was their competency, character and enthusiasm.” [Mark Fuchs of Los Altos, Calif.]
Almost immediately after Mr. Damore posted his internal memo, it became publicaly downloadable as a PDF document. It’s still there at Medium.com.
Why, then, haven’t more people actually read it? Maybe it’s because there’s really “no there there.” A two-column table of Google’s alleged biases on pages 2 and 3 of Mr. Damore’s memo may be the core cause of all the heartburn:

Left biases

* Compassion for the weak
* Disparities are due to injustices
* Humans are inherently cooperative
* Change is good (unstable)
* Open
* Idealist
Right biases
*Respect for the strong/authority
* Disparities are natural and just
* Humans are inherently competitive
* Change is dangerous (stable)
* Closed
* Pragmatic

Apparently, one glance at this bipolar list is enough to bring on cardiac arrest for all the progressive dreamers out there. As for Mr. Damore’s list of 13 “suggestions” for improving Google’s program on pages 8 through 10, most of them are just (you’ll pardon the expression) plain old “common sense.”
Let’s begin with the absurd notion that there is no significant difference between men and women. Feminists who hold the line on that argument are hoist with their own petard, for in fact women are (at least biologically) far superior to men. Ashley Montagu, one of the few male writers who have had the honesty to admit it, set the record straight once and for all in his book “The Natural Superiority of Women” (New York, 1974). “That men may bully women into a position of subservience,” Montagu argued, “is not a biological fact but a cultural one, a cultural misuse of a biological condition.”
Clearly, it is this cultural “misuse” that should be eliminated. Yet, the arguments against existing cultural conditions are often so specific that they become contradictary. On the one hand, we hear attacks against the capitalist system as the chief cause of conflict between men and women. If you take away the concept of private property, claim feminists like Kate Millet, you will dispel the notion of women as property. At the same time, we hear a great hue and cry for women to be given a larger piece of the capitalist pie.
This argument rings hollow, however, when we consider the economic fact that American women today own more than half of our nation’s proprietary assets. That this may be partly true because of the biological fact that most millionairesses outlive their husbands does not in any way diminish the importance of such an economic reality.
What about all those single moms out there today who are not millionairesses? “According to the Heritage Foundation’s [2014] analysis,” notes Robert Rector, “…Children raised by single parents are three times more likely to end up in jail and 50% more likely to be poor as adults.”
Rector puts the blame for this not on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty or on anybody’s War on Women. Rather he blames it on the failure of traditional marriage: “The collapse of marriage in low-income communities has played a substantial role in the declining capacity for self-support. In 1963, 6% of American children were born out of wedlock. Today the number stands at 41%. As benefits swelled, welfare increasingly served as a substitute for a bread-winning husband in the home.”
There are those who will not like to hear this, but a rekindling of “manly virtues” may be essential if our nation is to thrive in the 21st century. Indeed, this may have been one of the key underlying messages of President Trump’s victory in 2016. We’re not talking about the nationwide adoption of Sharia Law, after all—not yet, anyway.
American women have come a long way since the days when their grandmothers had to wear asfixiatingly tight corsets, could not vote or own property, and were expected to let men do all the decision-making. Still, it’s not at all clear the “feminine mystique” has yet been thoroughly purged from the average American woman’s way of thinking.
Maureen Dowd articulated this lingering ambivalence in her New York Times op-ed piece for Feb. 16, 1997, “Women’s Work.” In this article, she compares the autobiographies of two powerful American women, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman and Katherine Graham: “Mrs. Harriman made it the way women used to make it—by illusion, romance and linking herself to powerful men….Mrs. Graham inherited a newspaper but then remade it and herself the way women in the modern age do, by grit, intelligence and hard work.”
Mrs. Graham’s way is not really very gender-specific, is it? Perhaps, where morals and character are concerned, we men and women are really not that different after all. Perhaps too, herein lies at least a partial solution to our biggest social and economic problems. Men and women need to step back from the confines of whatever special interest groups they belong to and view their lives and the world they live in from a broader perspective.
The world is a much friendlier place than most of us realize. Over the past 30 years, our nation has made tremendous strides toward improving the rights of hitherto oppressed minorities. Modern technology has developed and continues to improve tools that make it possible for millions of parents to work from their homes and thus minimize the child-care problems that once seemed insurmountable. Best of all, a seldom celebrated long-term effect of the feminist movement has been the fact that today’s married fathers are taking much more positive and proactive roles in the child-rearing process
We are all in the same lifeboat, and we have but one choice—to love one another or to perish. Or, if your bias is more pragmatic, you might put it this way—“Don’t get mad. Just get even.” Please understand that geting even in this case does not mean getting vengeance. It means communicating on a level playing field.
On this topic, by the way, Stanford University professor Robert Sutton offers additional practical suggestions in his Aug. 14 Wall Street Journal article “How to Survive an Office Jerk at Work.”

Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.

Sharing is caring!