The Google Memo

A male product manager at a tech company gives his take on the Google Memo that’s been a big topic of discussion in recent weeks. To bring you up to speed: a software developer at Google called James Demore wrote a memo about the company’s diversity policies. This memo spread fast internally before making it’s way outside Google and causing a lot of controversy, and led to him being fired by Google. Demore wrote largely about so-called scientific and psychological differences between men and women and how they explain the gender balance in tech, and provdes research to back up his claims. (See the links below for more details along with two very good articles discussing the memo.) Alec Molloy has been a product manager for the past five years, and has worked in San Francisco, London and Malmo. He talks about how in some ways the memo accurately describes the situation within the tech industry, how it’s calm language is both dangerous and also something he thinks these debates could benefit more from, and what he hopes future generations will take away from the discussions about gender diversity in tech. Host: Nas aka Nastaran Tavakoli-Far Guest: Alec Molloy, product manager at a tech company Links: Nas https://twitter.com/NTavakoliFar Alec Molloy https://alecmolloy.com/ ‘The Google Memo’ by James Demore http://bit.ly/2ubOmpP On Google’s firing of Demore http://read.bi/2uMBV3c ‘The email Larry Page should have written to James Demore’ in The Economist: http://econ.st/2vMFoAP ‘I’m a woman in computer science, let me ladysplain the Google Memo to you’ by Cynthia Lee in Vox http://bit.ly/2uvAif6 ‘The most common error in the media’s coverage of the Google Memo’ by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic http://theatln.tc/2vgKtCN The Gender Knot podcast https://www.facebook.com/thegenderknot/ and thegenderknot@gmail.com Credits: Logo by Frankie Dineen of Palette Group http://frankiedineen.com and https://palettegrp.com Name by Alison Greenberg https://www.linkedin.com/in/greenbergalison/ Photography by Phillip Reeves http://www.phillip-reeves.co.uk