【Peggy Markoff】

It's hard to believe it was only a week-and-a-half ago when Google engineer James Damore's memo arguing that women are Peggy Markoffinherently less suited for careers in tech hit the internet.

A lot has happened since then, pushing conversation about Google aside. But women engineers are still rightly discussing what Damore's memo meant—as well as its fallout.

In a blog post published by Y Combinator this week, a few women engineers—including one who works for Google—discussed the memo. The Y Combinator blog series, Ask a Female Engineer, has women engineers answer questions under pseudonyms. This time around, the conversation was about the memo.

The discussion between three women working in tech for the most part criticized Damore's argument and his approach. But it also acknowledged some points of merit within Damore's memo without legitimizing his troubling arguments about biological inferiority.

"I agree that there is an ideological echo chamber inside Google (I’m a SWE there)," one self-identified Google engineer, called Ida in the blog post, said. "As someone who is generally on the 'correct' side of this liberal echo chamber, it hasn’t affected me much, but I think the vehemence of the reaction to his document proves this point right."

"He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar," the Google engineer added. "Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills."

The group also debated Google's handling of the memo after it went internally viral and was then leaked publicly.

"Social skills are part of a professional skillset," an engineer identified as Edith said. "It is important to learn how to handle difficult subjects in a workplace—we all have to do it. There are consequences for doing it in a way that causes problems for your employer, and I think in this case the consequences were appropriate. He was not fired for speaking truth to power, he was fired for mishandling a complex subject in a way that caused harm to his employer (and many of his colleagues)."

Many women have explained exactly why Damore's memo was so harmful.

It's not surprising that one of the most productive conversations around these ideas to allow for support of any of Damore's points came from three women engineers—the people most affected by Damore's arguments and the ones who understand best how those arguments hurt women working in tech.