Congratulations #Metoo...You've Made Women Employees Radioactive

[Editor:] The following was posted anonymously on LinkedIn, on June 10th and despite being taken down, due to the internet police a few hours later, the post has continued to grow in popularity. I was working on broaching this subject myself in the coming weeks, however this author does a much better job. 

Congratulations #Metoo…You’ve Made Women Employees Radioactive
Published on June 10, 2018

As a corporate CEO I now have a fiducial duty to avoid hiring women

I was having lunch the other day with my group of fellow CEOs…some current and some former. I asked the question: “Well, who has gotten that visit from the corporate lawyer, advising you to avoid hiring women executives”. Every one in the group groaned and looked away. The message was clear. They had ALL gotten that visit.

As a corporate CEO, I have an fiduciary and moral obligation to my employees, NOT to do something stupid that will destroy the company and throw them out into a very hard and dangerous world. The streets of Silicon Valley are full of RVs and campers with homeless former engineers and former managers, many with no health insurance. I am obligated by law and by custom not to add my people to that list.

That’s why I can’t hire women.

Even before #Metoo, hiring women came with a significant risk. I’ve seen several small companies wiped out by some angry ex-employee claiming some sort of sexual harassment. In each and every case, the company leaders honestly tried to prevent the problem, but were wiped out anyway. “$150K just to walk in the front door” says any law firm. That’s enough to destroy most startups.

As a CEO I have a legal obligation to avoid risk. Because of #Mettoo, women walk in the door with the metaphorical equivalent of a suicide bomb strapped to their back. The slightest wrong move, the slightest insult, and BANG. Everybody is dead.

In the past it was just a few women who had this tendency to use lawsuits to destroy. Now in the era of #Metoo, it has become fashionable. Even the not-so-bright receptionist I hire as a temp is on the lookout for her moment of perceived fame.

As a CEO there is absolutely nothing I can do to prevent a clash, when women are so eager to take offense. Human sexuality is wired into every man and women. Even if I install webcams and watch every single second of every interaction, having training classes, and instill fear in my male employees, there will inevitably be some action that some man will take, maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally, that will cause some woman to take offense and sue. I am unable to prevent it, just as I can’t prevent someone from passing gas after lunch.

Litigation is the business equivalent of nuclear war. It only destroys. Now every woman walking into my HR department is carrying a nuclear launch button on her sleeve, and is being goaded by their friends to USE IT! Every other employee in that company — male and female — has a mortgage and family expenses, and is looking with fear at that new female hire.

This is what generals call an “asymmetric threat”. I have zero control, almost no preventative measures, and huge, deadly risk.

That leaves me and other smart CEOs with only one solution: stop hiring women. And that is what’s happening, quickly or slowly, at every small startup all over the country. Will we be sued for not hiring women? Nope. Hard to prove. Penalties actually quite unlikely.

To my granddaughters who are just entering the workforce, and to the many wonderful women who long ago learned to ignore male clumsiness and just get the job done — I can only say how sorry and sad I am to see this. Unfortunately, you women have been betrayed by a group of radical women who are, to put it bluntly, fools. They are dragging you into a conflict which will leave you burned and the men in your lives burned. Everyone will get burned except the lawyers and the activists who will, as always, sit back and profit from the war they created.

Maybe there will be comments from women telling me “I don’t get it” or “You’ll get sued.” Um, no. I get it just fine. I’m just speaking a harsh truth, that people don’t like. Listen.

If You Are a Lady, Here Are Some Helpful Tools for Success in the Workplace--Carefully Marketed to Us Straight From "Hollywood"!

And if there is one thing we have learned, "Hollywood" is always right!


For those that don't remember. This whole thing was really started in 2017 after James Damore (a Google Employee) wrote a memo on the differences between men and women. With him explaining why there is often a discrepancy in pay and women in corporate hierarchy.

An Excerpt from his Memo [You may read the whole thing here]

Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them:

●Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ○We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

●Women on average are more cooperative ○Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do. ○This doesn't mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn't necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what's been done in education.

●Women on average are more prone to anxiety
○Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

●Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average ○Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

●The male gender role is currently inflexible ○Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more "feminine," then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally "feminine" roles.

Philosophically, I don't think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principled reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google's diversity being a component of that. For example, currently those willing to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google's funding is finite so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged.
The harm of Google’s biases

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices...

A full Interview with James

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