Google punishing anti-diversity views - extended corporate social responsibility?

Last month I wrote about how CNN blackmail could be an extended form of corporate social responsibility. Now we have a new case. Bloomberg: Google fired their engineer James Damore who wrote a memo against "politically correct monoculture" that he saw in the organization. According to Damore, Google wanted to silence conservative views. He argued that biological differences play a role in the smaller relative portion of women in tech and leadership positions. The memo circulated and soon gained wide attention, which lead Google executives to take a position. Google's vice president for diversity sent a stetement to staff where Damore's views were condemned, and the company's stance (criticized by Damore) was reaffirmed. According to Damore, he was fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes".

This sequence of events has sparked interesting discussions. For example, in this article, four scientists share their views. To conclude briefly, the original memo may not have been a comprehensive scientific report getting everything 100% correct. Yet, when analyzed rationally without idealism and intuitive feelings, it called for scientific understanding of human nature, differences and their relation to organizational performance. These scientists affirmed that biological differences between genders exist, and that this discussion needs to be held publicly without aims to silence or deny certain areas of thought.

I admit being more familiar with organization science and economics than psychology. My contribution to this discussion would be to remind that successful entrepreneurship is all about combining heterogeneous and complementary resources. There are valid economic reasons why organizations may want to hire different people and compose diverse teams. However, different tasks and projects require different types of people. One specific formula of diversity among a team is not likely to be the best universally. I may sound like a devil's advocate, but in other words: diversity is not good for itself. It is a driver that can be fit or unfit depending on other contextual factors. Now it seems that diversity has become an ultimate end and even close to religion.

Now I return back to the post I wrote about CNN blackmail. It seems that companies are not only facing external pressure to drive certain values beyond conventional leglislation and even environmental sustainability. As these values such as "diversity" or "equality" become myths, they do not need to be economically justifiable. As we now see, expressing a scientifically backed doubt about these values can easily appear as a violation of corporate responsibility. In other words, an organization may have become responsible for showing the whole society that their modern engineers are not reflecting scientific ideas critically around any hegemonic comfort zone.