你好，今天的日食记奉上《经济学人》对于谷歌近期解雇员工事件的分析。
谷歌一名员工在网上发布了所谓的“反传统”的一份备忘录，指责谷歌在招聘时故意偏袒女性，还声称女性因为先天原因在科技公司的发展前景不如男性。
此言论一出立刻引来骂声一片，谷歌管理层赶紧把此员工开除了事，以表明自己的立场。
但本文建议谷歌本可以采取另外一种更好的方法来处理此事，避免陷入如今这场不必要的纠纷，所以最后一段用的全是虚拟语气……
好了，准备好胃口，请慢慢享用~

跑了好远就为了拍这个logo……

Not evil, just wrong

Google should not have given an outspoken engineer the sack

Larry Page, its co-founder, should have written a ringing, detailed rebuttal

1. THE talk in Silicon Valley just now is as likely to be about sex as software. Women in tech firms feel badly treated. And they are right: they rarely get the top jobs, they are sometimes paid less than men and many suffer unwanted sexual advances. Most of their male colleagues sympathise; at the same time some feel they cannot express unorthodox opinions on gender. And they are right, too: they can easily fall foul of written and unwritten rules, and face drastic consequences.

advances: [plural] an attempt to start a sexual relationship with someone
e.g. She accused her boss of making advances to her.
unorthodox: unorthodox opinions or methods are different from what is usual or accepted by most people
e.g. unorthodox view/approach/theory etc
If you fall foul of someone or run foul of them, you do something which gets you into trouble with them.

1）在硅谷关于性和关于软件的讨论可能一样多。技术公司的女性觉得受到恶劣地对待。她们是对的：她们很少得到顶尖的工作，她们有时工资比男性员工少，而且许多人遭受不该有的性挑逗。她们的大多数男性同事都表示同情，同时有些人觉得他们不能表达关于性别非传统的意见。他们也是对的：他们会很容易地冒犯成文及不成文的规定，并面临严重后果。

2. The charged atmosphere helps explain why “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, a memo by a young software engineer, James Damore, has caused such a stir. It says that the firm’s efforts to hire more women are biased. After circulating internally, it went viral. On August 7th Mr Damore was fired. To quote Sundar Pichai, Google’s boss, he advanced “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace”.

charged: a charged situation or subject makes people feel very angry, anxious, or excited, and is likely to cause arguments or violence
stereotypes: a belief or idea of what a particular type of person or thing is like. Stereotypes are often unfair or untrue
e.g. racial/sexual/cultural etc stereotype

2）紧张的气氛有助于解释为什么“谷歌思想回声室”，一份一名年轻软件工程师詹姆斯·达莫勒写的备忘录，引发了如此的轰动。它表示，公司努力雇用更多的妇女是有偏见的。在内部流通后，它在网上疯传。 8月7日，达摩勒先生被解雇。引用Google的老板桑德尔·皮蔡的话说，他“在我们的工作场所提出了有害的性别刻板印象”。

3. Mr Pichai had good reasons to sack Mr Damore. One is the content of the memo. It says many reasonable-sounding things: that “we all have biases” and that “honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots”. But these are just camouflage before a stonking rhetorical “but”: the argument that innate differences, rather than sexism and discrimination, explain why women fare worse in the technology industry than men. “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)”, Mr Damore writes, “may contribute…to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.”

sack: informal to dismiss someone from their job = fire
camouflage: behaviour that is designed to hide something
e.g. Aggression is often a camouflage for insecurity.
stonking: extremely good
fare: If you say that someone or something fares well or badly, you are referring to the degree of success they achieve in a particular situation or activity.

3）皮蔡先生有充分的理由开掉 达莫勒先生。一个（理由）是备忘录的内容。它说了许多听起来合理的事情：“我们都有偏见”，“与不同观点的人的诚实讨论可以突出我们的盲点”。但是这些仅仅是在绝妙的修辞“但是”之前的伪装 ：先天差异（而不是性别偏见和歧视）的论点来解释为什么女性在技术行业比男性进展得更糟糕。达莫勒先生写道：“神经质（焦虑程度越高，压力容忍度越低）”可能是导致妇女做高压工作的人数较少的原因。“

4. Research has indeed shown some smallish group-level differences in personality and interests between the sexes. But drawing a line from this to women’s suitability for tech jobs is puerile. An unbiased eye would light on social factors rather than innate differences as the reason why only a fifth of computer engineers are women. Mr Damore claims women are “more interested in people than things” but,* if this were true, they would in fact be better than men at the senior software-engineering jobs that involve managing teams*. As for blind spots, although he repeatedly uses the words “discriminate” and “discrimination”, Mr Damore does so only to describe the unfairness to men of trying to hire more women.

puerile: silly and stupid = childish
light on/upon sth: (literary) to see or find sth by accident

4）研究确实显示出两性之间的个性和兴趣之间的一些较小的差异。但从这一点来反对妇女对技术工作的适宜性是愚蠢的 。无偏见的观察会发现社会因素而不是天生的差异来解释只有五分之一的计算机工程师是女性。 达莫勒先生声称女性“对人比对事物更感兴趣”，但如果这样是真的，她们本将事实上在涉及到管理团队的高级软件工程岗位上做得比男性更好。至于盲点，虽然他反复使用“区别对待”和“歧视”这些词，但是达莫勒先生只是为了描述试图雇用更多女性对男人的不公平才这么做的。

5. Mr Pichai also has legal arguments on his side. The American constitution protects free speech in public, but within a company’s walls that right is limited by what bosses deem acceptable. After Mr Damore had suggested they are less qualified because of their sex, women at Google could have refused to work with him and taken legal action. Moreover, he may have known that his memo would be seized on in Alt-Right circles (it got top billing on Breitbart and far-right websites).

billing: advertising or public promotion (as of a product or personality); also relative prominence of a name in such promotion

5）皮蔡先生也有法律论据。美国宪法在公共场合保护言论自由，但在一个公司内部，该权利受到老板认可的限制。在达莫勒先生提出女性由于性别而不够资格之后，谷歌的女性员工本可能拒绝与他合作并采取法律行动。此外，他可能已经知道他的备忘录会被极右圈利用（它在Breitbart和右翼的网站上得到了最大程度的宣传）。

6. Still, there was a better response to Mr Damore than immediately giving him the sack. Other firms may limit their workers’ speech, but the largest search engine, with a mission to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible”, should hold itself to a higher standard. It should not be suspected of limiting the debate of thorny subjects.

6）尽管如此，比起立即解雇他，本可以有更好的回应。其他公司可能会限制其工作人员的言论，但是这家最大的搜索引擎公司（其任务是“组织世界信息，使其普及”）本应该让自己有更高的标准。它本不应该被怀疑限制了对于棘手主题的争论。

Speak up

7. It would have been better for Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and the boss of Alphabet, its holding company, to write a ringing, detailed rebuttal of Mr Damore’s argument. Google could have stood up for its female employees while demonstrating the value of free speech. That might have led to the “honest discussion” Mr Damore claimed to want—and avoided the ersatz one about his firing. It would have shown that his arguments are not taboo, but mostly foolish and ill-informed. And it would have countered his more defensible claim: that Google, and the Valley, so welcoming of gender diversity, are narrower-minded about unorthodox opinions.

ringing: A ringing statement or declaration is one that is made forcefully and is intended to make a powerful impression.
ersatz: artificial, and not as good as the real thing

7）谷歌的联合创始人及其控股公司Alphabet的老板拉里·佩奇写一篇有力的、详细的文章来反驳达莫勒先生观点本来会更好。 谷歌本可以为其女性员工挺身而出，同时展现言论自由的价值。这本可能导致达莫勒先生声称想要的“诚实的讨论”，并且避免关于解雇他的劣质讨论。这本可以表明他的论点不是禁忌，而大部分是愚蠢和无知。而且，它本可以反驳他更看似合理的主张：谷歌，以及硅谷，如此欢迎性别多样性，对于非传统的观点却是狭隘的。
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Not evil, just wrong"

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原文出处：经济学人

翻译：七呵夫

本译文仅供个人研习、欣赏语言之用，谢绝任何转载及用于任何商业用途。本译文不代表本人立场。本人同意简书平台在接获有关著作权人的通知后，删除文章。