Dear Google Memo Guy: This Is How To Criticize Feminism Without Getting Fired

A manager’s professional survival depends on reducing and managing risks every single day. To do that, management needs dependable sources of trustworthy information.

What should you do when you have a professional point of view to present, and you know that it’s not what your boss wants to hear? Don’t just give your opinion. Instead, gather a substantial body of evidence, organize it well, and present it in a useful and persuasive form.

That means you must:

• Clearly state the issue
• Present conclusions and recommendations at the start
• Outline the reasoning behind your recommendations
• Gather and organize ample supporting evidence, including evidence that may run counter to your recommendations

As tech professionals, we often feel confident that we know more about facts, figures, analytics and all kinds of technology than management. But if we want to get things done, we need to work constructively with management, and that means providing the right information in a way that helps managers make good decisions, avoid needless risk and feel safe.

And, of course, everything you do to make management feel confident and safe about making decisions also helps increase your own value and job security.

Management decides

You are not the ultimate judge of how well you’ve done this. Your manager is. That means you must respect your manager’s preferences, and adapt your style to suit your manager.

When I began my first full time job, the hiring manager made an unusual request: he wanted to see my diploma. He had once made the mistake of hiring someone who lied about education, and that experience made him justifiably cautious.

To my boss, that meant interviews, college transcripts, and letters of recommendation were not proof that I was what I claimed to be. He needed to see the diploma to feel safe about his decision to hire me. I respected that.

Decision risk

Unpopular decisions carry a lot of risk. If you want to provoke a change that may be controversial with management, investors, your coworkers or customers, you’d better provide darned well organized and thorough analysis to support your position.

The greater the risk associated with a decision, the more important it is for the manager to have high quality supporting information presented in an appropriate form. Solid research and analysis guides the manager to the right decision, and can help to defend decisions (and jobs) when things go wrong.

How to support an unpopular position

You’ve probably heard all about the Google engineer James Damore who made news by unleashing a lengthy memo arguing that women are biologically ill-suited to the profession of software engineering. This is certainly a notable example of a technical professional challenging a management position. In my own professional view, it’s not an example you should use as a model for your own work, and not just because I disagree with the author’s conclusions.

(It’s a shame Mr. Damore didn’t read this career advice I published last month. He might still have a job now.)

Let’s get some basics out of the way:

• Never lie. You can lose your job for that, even decades later.
• Respect professional boundaries. If you’re in engineering, don’t tell the sales staff what to do.
• Your opinion is not important. It’s the quality of information supporting your opinion that matters.

Keep these things in mind and get down to preparing your case.

An example

Let’s say that you have a really shocking point of view to defend. Like this…

Men should not be permitted to vote.

Wait, what?

There’s some history behind this. In the days when suffragettes (today we would call them feminists) were fighting for the vote, opponents circulated pamphlets articulating reasons why women should not be permitted to vote. Writer Alice Duer Miller countered with reasons why men should not be allow to vote.

You think it’s hard to challenge feminism?  Try challenging masculinism, if only as an exercise to develop your analytic skills.

Clearly state the issue

First, state the subject for discussion, briefly and simply. Here are several possibilities for this example:

• Should men be permitted to vote?
• Men should not be permitted to vote.
• Men make poor voters.
• Men are not biologically suited to voting.

Present conclusions and recommendations at the start

You, as a truly open minded investigator should resist adhering to conclusions until you have performed a thorough examination of all evidence available to you. Once you have reached your conclusions and decided on your recommendations, though, don’t try to make your manager sit through the whole presentation to hear them. Get to the point.

Your final business presentation, no matter the format (face to face talk, detailed report, slides…) should begin with a brief statement of conclusions. It may range in length from one sentence to one page at most, depending on the situation.

In this case, you might begin with: “Based on my analysis of the evidence, I recommend against permitting men to vote.”

Outline the reasoning behind your recommendations

You know that your recommendation will not appeal to management. Your manager will not be easily persuaded to change viewpoint. So you must present good reasons, and be well-prepare to defend them.

Move from recommendations to a brief list of major reasons supporting your conclusions.

This was Alice Duer Miller’s list:

Why We Oppose Votes for Men

1. Because man’s place is in the army.
2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
3. Because if men should adopt peacable [sic] methods women will no longer look up to them.
4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them particularly unfit for the task of government.

Keep in mind that stating reasons is not the same as making a case for action. These brief statements do no more than provide an outline of what you must prove with your supporting evidence.

I’m not satisfied with this list of reasons. It neglects the all-important starting point of defining the desired qualities of a voter. So, don’t do it just like Alice did. Do it better.

Gather and organize ample supporting evidence, including evidence that may run counter to your recommendations

Your presentation may be only a few minutes long, yet supported by massive effort and quantities of information. Each and every one of your reasons must be reinforced by detailed factual and objective research and analysis.

In practice, you will gather, review and organize much more material than you present to management. It’s your job to deal with the bulk of evidence, and summarize it as briefly as is reasonable to make your case.

What sort of evidence should you examine? Here are some of the resources you may use:

• Relevant internal data and analysis, including new data analysis if you have appropriate analytics skills.
• Published research from public or private sources, such as academic journals, industry reports, news sources and others. (Data analytics professionals often neglect these important resources, relying only on their own primary research. That’s unsatisfactory.)
• Input from subject matter experts.
• Peer review. (It’s not just for academics.)

Do not fail to consider criticism of your sources.

Look at Miller’s last point: men are too emotional to vote. This cannot be taken at face value. Dissect the statement with fundamental questions like these:

• How is emotion defined?
• Can emotion be measured?
• Are men any more or less emotional than women?

The more specific and concrete the questions, the better you will be able to identify the proper data and secondary resources to address them.

Examples supplement basic facts and help you create stories that enable non-technical managers to engage and understand your points. Take Miller’s reference to men’s conduct at baseball games. This could lead you not only to many easily-relatable anecdotes - who hasn’t been to a baseball game and witnessed some bad behavior?

Examples may also lead you to additional lines of questioning for research. You might look for studies comparing behavior of female sports fans to males, or market research on beer sales at baseball games, or police reports related to sporting events.

Plan to present your evidence in the same order as you presented your reasons, and just a little at a time. Don’t overwhelm your audience – just share the most important details. And be flexible, willing and able to change order, add or skip details to suit your manager’s questions and preferences.

And, for heavens sake, use an exact citation for the source of all the information you present, especially anything "scientific."

You may not choose to present all, or any, of the arguments against your point of view, but you had darned well know and evaluate them as part of your preparation. You will be asked about counter arguments and must be prepared to address them, thoughtfully and with respect.

The right way

Whether you are making the case for an apparent “no-brainer” or a wildly controversial proposal, there’s always a right and a wrong way to do it.

One of the benefits of the right way is that, while you search for evidence to support your position, you may discover that you’re taking the wrong position, and change course before things get ridiculous.

And if you’re right, you’re right and you’ll be able to explain why in a way that will earn management respect and preserve (and perhaps enhance) your job.