It is not productive because it is a (relative) non-issue. It's like the way a small number of "wedge issues" dominate the political agenda so that we have the same hand-wringing discussions for decades.<p>If Google was not bestride the world like a Colossus, and if it wasn't sucking the air out of the web and everything else, then women could go work for some other company and it would be Google's loss.<p>Silicon Valley isn't capable of having a discussion about "we can't build any housing" or "we import large numbers of male immigrants" or "we can't locate offices in the other 49 1/2 states", or "we can't house the homeless", or "we don't hire anybody over thirty".<p>Something has to be on the agenda, however, because otherwise it would be clear that politics has completely broken down, so they've got to pick the oldest and most eternal conflict of man and womankind.