Song for Sundar Pichai to sing

The Google Heretic is the gift that keeps on giving…

From my recent Facebook feed, both from current (i.e., not-yet-purged) Google employees:

• “After canceled town hall meeting, Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at girls’ coding event” (Let’s hope none of the attendees asked “if you’re so passionate about employing women, why couldn’t you find any female managers or engineers to deliver this message?”)
• “In ‘I’m Gonna Be an Engineer,’ Peggy and Pete Seeger Talk Women in Science” (47-year-old song on the Union of Concerned Scientists web site)

The last one is interesting. If this union consists of “scientists,” how come they can’t tell the difference between engineering and science?

Lyrics samples:

What price for a woman?
You can buy her for a ring of gold,
To love and obey, without any pay,

The boss he says “We pay you as a lady,
You only got the job because I can’t afford a man,
With you I keep the profits high as may be,
You’re just a cheaper pair of hands.”

You got one fault, you’re a woman;
You’re not worth the equal pay.

Well, I listened to my mother and I joined a typing pool
Listened to my lover and I put him through his school
If I listen to the boss, I’m just a bloody fool
And an underpaid engineer
I been a sucker ever since I was a baby
As a daughter, as a mother, as a lover, as a dear
But I’ll fight them as a woman, not a lady
I’ll fight them as an engineer!

Despite the first bit having been made obsolete by changes in California family law during the intervening 47 years, I think it would be awesome for CEO Sundar Pichai to sing this song next time he is at a “Girls Code” or similar event (or maybe for the all-hands meeting if they can ever feel safe again on their own heavily guarded corporate campus?).

Separately, I wonder if Google is discouraging women from pursuing computer nerdism as a career. The company is in the news for being attacked by the Federales on the grounds that women at Google are paid less than men. By not having a “Boys Code” event, the company is suggesting that boys can learn to program by sitting down at a PC and teaching themselves while girls need special assistance (what better evidence of lower natural aptitude? You don’t see too many “Learning how to retrieve a tennis ball” classes for Golden Retrievers). Finally, by talking about the critical importance of protecting female employees, the company is suggesting that women are under constant attack once they get into a software development workplace.

Why would an intelligent diligent young woman look at the Google harlequinade and say “I’ll drop out of pre-Med and switch to software engineering”?