Fair enough, I think I understand where you are coming from; people should still be judged on their merit, rather than lowering standards in order to meet an ar

Fair enough, I think I understand where you are coming from; people should still be judged on their merit, rather than lowering standards in order to meet an artificial goal like a certain percentage of women software engineers. I don't think anyone is arguing for lower standards and that this idea, in itself, is sexist. It's not that standards need to be lowered in order to get a larger amount of women into the field. It's that the sexism in the field, which is pretty well documented, needs to be eliminated. I think that is the goal that Google is working towards and I think it's a valuable goal. For sure, it will not be achieved overnight. If there aren't enough women software engineers, well, they'll have to wait for them to appear. The demonstrated need for these software engineers may encourage women to enter a field they might have deliberately chosen to avoid. The tone of this memo, to me, is poor; my first thoughts were condescending and smug as well as unabashedly sexist. In my opinion this poor tone could be one of the reasons people are so upset, or angry, at the author. This effect is directly working against Google's goal of trying to hire a more diverse group of software engineers and maybe that's why the memo's author was let go.