The dilemma of the Google memo

The Google memo flap isn't black and white. It's the ultimate gray area.

Gray areas at Google.
(Image credit: Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images)

If I were a computer engineer struggling in Google's male-dominated culture and woke up one morning to read a treatise by a male colleague arguing that innate biological differences between the sexes — not sexism — were to blame for the company's gender gap, I would be pretty damn pissed. But that wouldn't mean that my colleague was wrong — nor would it mean that Google's CEO was out of line in firing him.

All of that might sound contradictory. But it's not: The dilemma of the Google memo is that all sides have a point.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.