One of the best ways to beat the averages is to use volunteers. If you need 100 new firefighters and pick people by random, you get absolutely average firefigh

One of the best ways to beat the averages is to use volunteers. If you need 100 new firefighters and pick people by random, you get absolutely average firefighters. If you just pick people who apply, without any kind of testing, you beat the average with fat margin in the quality of firefighters. Now if you would have a problem that not enough big people are applying to be firefighters, then you might increase the success rate greatly with publicity campaign with a message: "did you know that bigger people make great firefighters!" What you probably don't want to do is to send a message that "we now have special training exclusively to people over 185cm tall!" That sends two messages: 1. If you are short you might read it like this: You are doomed to be kind of "workhorse fireman". You get to do the dirty work, but the exclusive tall people club is permanently closed for you. 2. If you are tall you might read it like this: You are somehow naturally inferior to shorter people and that has to be compensated. But you get to join out of pity. Now google has been sending the latter message. Now they also send a message, that they don't give too many shits about their employees. If they genuinely care about female employees and think that memo is serious crime against them, google should have fired Damore immediately after the memo started to circulate. If Google doesn't think like that, they should have stood up for their employee Damore. This whole thing is failure from Google on quite many levels.