Your guessing sounds rather sexist. Why not stick to data instead of guessing? There is enough bias against men already.
Also differentiate between some colleague being interested in them and boss proposing sex on first day.
As for the latter, putting lines in the sand is a good way to be seen as not wanting to listen... I'm not saying that's what you're doing in this case, just how it comes across. Like, you've decided in advance what you want the result from the discussion to be, and no woman will be able to cross whatever standard you've chosen for inappropriate propositions (even when this is totally untrue).
Don't understand your comment about lines in the sand. What do you mean?
Apart from that, I wonder what evidence you are talking about? References? How often are claims waved away? Or is that just something you intuitively know?
And by the way, people coming out in response to such an article is also just classic confirmation bias. You need to put stories in relation to the total workforce before you claim almost everybody gets harassed.
If only you applied such rigorous quantitative standards of evidence to your own claims.
And btw I think it gives the impression they don't want to hire men, it doesn't prove that Google doesn't want to hire (white) men. But if they are interested in hiring white men, they might check the message they are sending out.
For sure their reputation is so good that white men will probably still apply in droves, so whatever (same probably goes for women and PoCs, anyway). But in my opinion they will also drive away some people. (edited to add "in my opinion")
And as I said - it is fine if you disagree, but at least there is something tangible to disagree on. That's different from simply playing into some stereotypes. Seriously, you are defending here the equivalent of "I have heard all blacks are criminals, and therefore it is true, no matter what you say". Wtf?
What evidence do you have for this?
If you really want to nitpick, quantify my sentence with "in my opinion".
I can't wait for your quantification of the life at google twitter.
Simply counting people yields 29% white women, 19% women of color, 21% men of color, 30% white men.
Not a very exact science, though - I left out groups above a certain size (for example picture from Anti-Trump demonstration or MLKday), and in some cases I couldn't recognize the people. Many white men come from office shots where they linger in the background, whereas there are many tweets explicitly featuring female or black engineers. It seems by only looking at their "media timeline" I also missed photos like this one: https://twitter.com/Every28HoursPla/status/83166688771703193... (which they retweeted).
I'll try to find time for a better "analysis", ideally including texts.
Compared to last time there seem to be now more posts boasting technology at Google. For example there were several about Tensor Flow, all featuring the same white guy (I counted him for every instance).
I couldn't find the time when I last posted about lifeatgoogle, would have liked to look at their tweets from around then.
For comparison employee stats from 2014: http://mashable.com/2014/05/28/google-employee-demographics/... - 70% male, 91% white or asian.
Yes, it reflects demographics of the US, but not demographics of tech or demographics of Google employees. So the account definitely doesn't reflect life at Google in an unbiased way.
Also, I tried to err on the side of counting too many whites. For example I counted this screenshot from an animation movie as two whites: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/824649101069455361 I counted the blurry people in the background of this office: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/817466019526610947 but I only counted 2 PoCs here despite the further pictures with more https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/822528000646381568 I also missed a lot of pictures because I didn't realize the retweets wouldn't be in the "media list".
I just made it up on the fly for a quick, simple metric. It would be better to decide beforehand what counts, for example if the person should be the item of a news story, should be presented as an engineer, stuff like that. And a longer time. I think I had 150 people, so the animation picture alone accounted for more than 1% of the final count of white people. As I said, some office shots greatly raised the white people count, counting only people who were subject of major stories would have lowered the percentage a lot.
Maybe you are jumping to conclusions because they confirm your beliefs?
Your original point was that you thought Google wasn't interested in hiring male engineers anymore. The current demographics of Google are irrelevant to Google's hiring strategy. Why would they be?
You're not only displaying confirmation bias in the way you are trying to undermine the clearest quantification you have access to, but you're also avoiding your original statement.
You initially presented the lifeatgoogle twitter feed as evidence, and you had no quantifiable evidence that it was biased. Now that you do have a quantification, you're walking back the importance of that evidence. Perhaps you're doing this so you can maintain your poorly quantified view?
If only you gave as much latitude to other people.
And again - I only used one simple metric, which already shows bias (it doesn't represent the actual demographics of Google employees). You assume now that metric is conclusive because it fits your conviction. By looking into more aspects the picture would be more clear.
And where do I not give latitude to other people?
No, you're now walking back your claims because the one metric you have quantified doesn't fit your conviction. At the time you claimed that by simply looking at the feed you could tell it was biased. You initially made the claim that the lifeatgoogle twitter was related evidence to your claim that google wasn't interested in hiring men anymore. I'm not silly enough to claim that a brief perusal of a twitter account can be extrapolated into a claim about a company's hiring strategy.
Thanks to your quantification, we have some evidence to suggest the lifeatgoogle twitter is fairly representative of population demographics along gender and racial lines, at least in the US. I don't see the data as conclusive of anything more than that.
For example, should this picture count? It is not somebody working at Google, just a stock image of somebody working in the food industry: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/813410799725215744
And how should pictures like this be counted: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/800818789122129926 or this https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/812002215267139584
Maybe from the last two you can also see why perhaps simply counting people is not the best metric - a single group photo could distort everything.
You mention you work in statistics, so tell me how you would approach the problem?
Also maybe I didn't express it clearly enough, I didn't look at the whole timeline, only the media timeline: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/media (which is media they posted, pics and videos).
I also didn't claim I can tell bias simply by looking, I said it was my impression they don't want to hire white men anymore. If I was convinced I could tell simply by looking, I wouldn't agree to do an analysis.
As I said - I am sure they still hire white men, but that particular account (and some of their other publications) give the impression they are not interested in that anymore.
And they claim to represent Google's demographic, not the demographics of the general population, so contrary to what you say my numbers do show bias against white men. Not as extreme as I perceived two months ago, but still.
If your company is 70% men and you only report about what women are doing, it is revisionist.
Imagine if all stories about WWII would only be about female soldiers. The impression would be women fought and died for our freedom, all the sacrifices of men would be forgotten. That is revisionism.
Really? What evidence do you have to back up your impression? Why do they give you that impression?
>You mention you work in statistics, so tell me how you would approach the problem?
I'd measure first and then debate my conclusions based on that measurement - and in an area I hadn't measured - I wouldn't spout my impressions or claims - they wouldn't be useful.
Like this thing, which you said one day, not fifty-seven days, ago:
>Huh - that Twitter feed obviously is tilted towards only showing women and PoCs as engineers.
The twitter feed isn't about only women, or only PoCs. You did the measurement yourself.
You seem to still be holding onto your impressions with contrary quantified evidence in front of you. Where's the stuff that supports you?
Another test could be if there are stretches of time when the account gives the impression, that is length of tweet chains without any white men.
I have explained various flaws of my little analysis, but you prefer to ignore them and claim I have provided evidence for your opinion. Yet you work as a statistician :-(
I give up for now, unless you come up with a proper measurement suggestion.
You've demonstrated that you'll ignore the best evidence you have in order to hold an impression that you intuit.
>Huh - that Twitter feed obviously is tilted towards only showing women and PoCs as engineers.
Wrong. You've measured this and you are now saying that one test was flawed. The claim it is "obvious" therefore makes no sense.
>It is not just a "guess" - you can look at that feed and check for yourself.
You looked at the feed yourself and were unable to provide evidence it was biased.
It is still biased against white men (if it is supposed to reflect the actual distribution of Google employees), but not as extreme as last time. I really would like to find the date of my last comment about it. Also perhaps simply more data is needed - a single picture with several people could shift the results here, because I checked only pics from 2.5 months.
Also better methodology needed, this was just a quick shot looking into one simple metric.
Lets examine the data you've provided - 29% white women, 19% women of color, 21% men of color, 30% white men.
This data is entirely in line with the demographics of the US. About 50/50 on gender and 60% white. In fact, given google's global hiring reach, these figures are actually biased towards white people - while about spot on for gender. This entirely contradicts the point you were originally pointing to this twitter feed as confirmation of.
Women learn from a very young age to be very selective about who they trust, in a much more nuanced way than men do.
If you haven't heard such stories from women, it's quite probably because they're not comfortable telling you such things.
In any case, as I mentioned in another comment, a collection of stories is not a good way to gauge the problem. You need to put it into context - number of women in total, and also, what happens to men. Stories like this suggest that only women ever have bad experiences at companies. But you can find lots of male reports of being unhappy at a company, too. Why isn't that reason for men to quit in droves? Presumably the Uber-woman is happy with her new job at Stripe, too.
The issue is that because of bias against men, few people even realize that they are talking about completely fabricated assumptions in this thread.
And again: there are not even that many women who could tell such stories. I'd say 1 in 20 software developers at companies I worked for were female. So it is not a case of me not being told things by women on a significant scale. The women didn't tell me such stories because those women don't exist to begin with.
Until recently, I'd only ever read accounts of bad things like this happening at certain conferences, and not seen anything first hand. A few months back, one of the female staff on our team changed their github picture. When mentioning this in conversation, it turned out that random people (not physically at work, but github users who did not know any of us in person) were harassing/propositioning her solely due to that image. What sort of screwed up person does that?! People should be able to do their jobs without dealing with crap like that.
I don't doubt men are often attracted to women, even colleagues. Whether that alone should count as sexist harassment I consider debatable, but in any case it is not the same level as a boss proposing sex on the first work day, with threat of career disadvantages for rebuffing the offer.
And regarding the last paragraph, I'm not talking about anything in the workplace between colleagues or otherwise. I'm talking about creepy strangers propositioning people they have never ever met or communicated with, on github. github is not a dating or hookup site for strangers. It's for sharing and collaborating on code. There are other, more appropriate, sites for dating- and hookup-related activities with willing participants who opted into it. No one wants or needs to deal with strangers propositioning them through the tools they use for their professional work. You should not feel required to hide your appearance or identity to be comfortable doing your job without being harassed, unsolicited, by strangers.
Real harassment is already illegal. Conduct policies can only serve in the gray area where people do not want to get police involved, but still want to exact some form of retribution and punishment, often by playing the politics game. It empowers the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It also creates the illusion that tech is particularly nasty, when the exact opposite is true: despite what activists claim, it is far more meritocratic than most industries, and far more reliant on tools and methods that emphasize work over personality and identity.
The propositioning, this is a fact of life: men propose, women dispose, and it's creepy unless he's attractive. Fact is, people like to date people with similar interests, they meet in all sorts of contexts, and some are more tactful about it than others. That doesn't mean it's automatically harassment to be flirted with outside of a dating site or bar night, or that it's never welcome.
One asshole manager is just one asshole manager, and such crudeness is the exception, not the norm.
Some people would love to receive just an ounce of affection and appreciation just for merely showing up, so being able to complain about it is the luxury of the desirable. Especially when, as I've often seen, it's paired with exasperated stories of how so-and-so just won't take the endless "clear hints" that have been made, but a polite but firm "sorry, flattered but not interested" is never actually provided. We are told we must be more empathetic, but the empathy for the socially awkward or the lonely, those who are bad at reading social cues, that's never on the table. All this talk of "safe spaces" seems to vanish once it's the real nerds and geeks, the 'losers' who need consideration.
Just keep in mind, HR is mostly a female-staffed endeavour, and the passive aggressive and underhanded interaction described is certainly not typical of male interaction styles. If it's a poster child for how not to behave, I don't think those griping about techbros and misogyny are quite thinking through the implications here.
Also, if she reported you to hr, then you should consider it hint clearest possible. We are not even talking about subtle misunderstandings here, he invited new employee to have sex.
Stop blaming douchebaghery on geekiness or nerdiness, most geeks are not like that.
Also, there is little direct about male keeping business info away from competitor or retroactively lowering her review scores to keep her. The politics there was ugly as fuck and had zero to do with merit.
I think if you organize an event, you should be allowed to assume your target group are good people. For people who nevertheless step over the line, the normal standards of decency apply and they can be dealt with, CoC or no.
If you want a source though, here is one: (https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-we-fail-to-report-sexual-harassm...)
In this case, the data is moot. It doesn't matter if 10% of women experience this, or 90%. Whether or not it is a problem is not in debate. It is a problem. Preventing sexual harassment is everyone's responsibility, even if you are not the one harassing.
As for the linked problem, I criticize that it doesn't properly define sexual harassment. The comparison here is to a guy who proposed sex on a first work day and threatened a stunted career. Is that really what women experience all the time. Or is it mostly that an unwanted colleague is attracted to them? The methodology is also not clear (very likely they only asked women, which seems rather one-sided. For "real" crime there is a reason for there being courts and judges).