The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

Rather than assuming those who disagree with you are shallow and hysterical (a contentious word choice, given the subject), perhaps consider why others might be outraged, you could try some empathy (though I know the article warns us against empathy).

The doc presents a point-of-view, grounded in reality. Furthermore it's not "anti-diversity", but rather anti-discrimination

I think it is explicitly anti-diversity in that it sees nothing wrong with the current order of things, if that order can be justified by failings in the weaker vessels that surround the author like empathy and neuroticism (as the author clearly thinks it can).

It does seem a remarkable coincidence that the natural order of things so neatly reflects the author's place at the top of the pyramid though, almost as if the rules had been written by people just like the author.

Since when is dialectics grounds for ostracism?

I doubt the author has faced ostracism, he certainly seems confident enough in expressing his disdain for a large number of the people he works with, without apparent fear of consequences. Since dialectics is usually taken as a search for truth, here are some things that the author believes which are not true:

Women are not more neurotic than men

Women are not less scientific than men

Women are not more interested in feelings and aesthetics than ideas (a curious dichotomy)

Women do not innately prefer jobs in social or artistic areas over say engineering

Could we get some sources for these claims?

In particular, I'd like to see values and standard deviations for "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways."

So many do not blindly advocate equality because they believe it completely but do so to avoid the overly negative and reinforcing effects of prejudice.

Think of this as a form of "Noble lie"

1) Gender differences exist

2) ???

3) Differences in representation are explainable by gender differences

The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving. "Women prefer working with people." Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women, while programming doesn't have much women despite being on the social/people-oriented end of the spectrum?

It's not that people are angry about the article's conclusions despite acknowledging the strength of the logical/factual basis. It's that people won't give sloppy reasoning the benefit of the doubt when they don't like the conclusion.

And this is where I kind of break down on the whole argument. I've already made similar comments below, but I sort of what to expand on this sentiment. I do not think that the views of the author of this piece were political in any way shape or form. They are purely idealogical, and the ideology that he professes has no basis in reality. This is what we may criticize.

I will employ an extremely gross simile to illustrate my point. Suppose that some item exists in the world called a "whizzer". A whizzer spins extraordinarily fast. So fast in fact, that we can't even tell which direction it's spinning for sure. We can use rough guesses to determine the spinning, and support it with some evidence from the environment. If I claim that the whizzer spins left, and you claim that the whizzer spins right we have reached a state of deadlock. Would you call our disagreement in this case one of politics? Suppose I had some information that hinted the spinner spins left. (Analogous to evidence that women are actively stopped from entering technical fields due to sociological rather than natural factors, which exists in multitudes.) There is still no evidence that the whizzer spins right. Arguments that the situation of the United States' gender divisions are natural rather than sociological can easily be dismissed by looking at clear evidence. Women are not as discouraged from entering fields like biology, or medicine. These are just as technical and difficult as other STEM fields. This implies that the factors that affect this are sociological rather than "natural". This evidence is not indisputable and it does not tell the whole picture, but it points in a general direction.

If we return to the whizzers, let's suppose my evidence is very similar. It's not all-knowing, or all-answering but it provides a general direction. There's nothing "political" about this. The "other side" is simply not providing an actual basis of evidence. Your argument does not hold up to any burdens of truth. It's as if the person with no evidence that the whizzers spin right is furious that I should try and make decisions that assume the spinner spins left. That's what all the evidence points towards!

The argument that the email's sender makes is inherently flawed. There exist issues with the conclusions that they make because their reasoning is flawed. I am not demonizing a political opinion, or attempting to police your ability to think or express your opinion. The email fails to convince anyone because it lacks an accurate argument.

I am not trying to demonize you. I don't think this has anything to do with Right / Left. Look at the facts. Look at the data. Listen to women from the industry who time and time again have stories of all the crap they've had to wade through. When all this overwhelming evidence claims something and the only thing the other side can produce are appeals to cognitive bias and naturalism, arguing that this is "just how the world works" it makes no sense because there is no sense in the argument.

If this were "how the world naturally works", how could we have possibly normalized so quickly? Women were only allowed to vote very recently in this country, black americans were only recently systematically segregated. There are people currently alive who have seen both of these greatly disruptive forces in direct action. What argument can possibly claim that those forces have completely dissipated in the United States? What about the United States allows such forces to be dissipated so quickly? Why are these issues more prevalent in places like Silicon Valley than other countries when the United States was one of the latest to adopt the different policies?

The argument simply does hold up to intellectual rigor. It fails to answer those questions in a consistent and convincing matter. If you believe that those questions are flawed, then why is that? Again, there exists no refutation except one born from cognitive bias and a flawed world-view. That's why people are opposed to it. It just doesn't make any sense. The conclusion is not a logical continuation of the premise, and that is why people are upset. I don't know or care where you lie on the political spectrum - all I see is a flawed argument.

Specifically you say "reflective of inherent psychological differences". What inherent psychological differences? Do you truly claim that you can generally predict the way your daughter will think differently than your son from the moment they are born? Do you think that these are in way accurate or determinate of your son or daughters future interests and achievements? Do you actually believe that they will have a "fair shake" regardless of whether they are male / female / white / black? That their life will be entirely based on the way they live it, and not on the way the world looks at them? Do you further believe that we shouldn't try and correct such distinctions?

If you actually want to engage in argument, then attempt to address these issues. Instead all I see is a further appeal to bias by just grouping this as a "right-leaning" opinion. What makes this right-leaning? All this does is further divide idealogical issues as if they have to be "one side vs another". It's nonsensical and all it does is further group or divide people rather than address the objective quality of the argument.

EDIT: May I ask why I'm being down-voted? It seems that no one is even willing to acknowledge these questions, let alone address them. I'm attempting to engage with people at a fair and even level. I don't intend to lecture or degrade, but simply discuss. A resistance to this is concerning.

If other woman are anything like me, the bullet list comparing two different points of view are cringe. People are so hard to define. And woman in particular I think generally don't feel like their potential is known yet because their presence in the workplace is so young relatively. So the last thing anyone wants is to be categorized by old stereotypes.

It's worth pointing out that "tact" is a cultural construct and highly subjective.

It's also worth pointing out that emotional arguments are generally better received than dispassionate ones. People tend to think emotionally at least as much as they reason, so sanitizing thoughts in the wrong way would neuter the position.

I'd rephrase that more like:

"If we want diversity of thought and disposition, we should make room for diversity of work styles (pair programming, remote work, etc.). If the women-work-differently hypothesis has merit, it will help address the gender imbalance while making room for other kinds of excluded people."

The modern alt-right conservative: "I don't believe in safe spaces, but please stop bullying me!"

Your ideology is ascendant. Congrats. But please don't tell me destroying someone's earning capacity is a micro aggression.

And know, this can't last. This strange moral fad will pass: our modern Lysenkoism is about to be killed by cognitive genomics.

The lies require constant maintenance while the truth drips in from every pore.

[1] http://sph.umn.edu/site/docs/hewg/microaggressions.pdf [2] http://time.com/32618/microaggression-is-the-new-racism-on-c... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

As someone who is neither American nor conservative, I have to give it to them that there is a level of virulence from some on the left that is far beyond mere microagression, but is not acknowledged as such: there are continuous attempts to ban some speeches on campuses. If a ban fails it is picketed (which is OK), sometimes violently (which is not): speakers may receive death threats, and so can attendees. At first nobody cared because it was happening to far right hate-clowns (not that this would be a good reason to ignore this in thebfirst place), but this has drifted toward anything non-left, and now is even happening to people who do not toe the line, however liberal they may be (cf. the edifying story of Bret Weinstein).

Are there conservatives whining at things that are in fact tiny microagressions, and the hypocrisy is funny? Absolutely. But there is also a legitimately more dangerous phenomenon that is slowly growing, and the worrying part is that it is not being acknowledged by the 'moderate' left. The fact that political crusaders on their side routinely attempt to ban free speech, or send death threats, should be very much a concern to progressives. Instead it is oddly glossed over, and/or lumped in with microagressions or counter-demonstrations.

During Obama's first term people on the left could not understand how the American right could tolerate the crazies from the Tea Party and were looking the other way whenever their insane ideas were uttered. But today we are seeing the very same behaviour on the left when these psychotic episodes pop up. That is not normal. Regressive and authoritarian tendencies should be acknowledged and denounced, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they come from.

There were two very interesting discussions with similar sorts of intellectual gymnastics when I was there, one involved whether or not getting rid of bottled water helped the environment and the other how the phrase 'free tibet' was such a trigger for Chinese nationals.

Edit: I am not allowed to comment anymore, so this Eintagsfliege (mayfly) will die now. Bye.

The Forbes site you reference cites a Quora post, which quotes a Wikipedia article. What the Wikipedia article actually says is that 373,415 out of 1.5 million engineering students in Iran are women, which is 24.9%, not 70%.

This is not that different from the 19-20% of engineering degrees awarded to women in the U.S.

Because, unsurprisingly, they're also not very liberal with regard to women choosing their field of studies. Frequently, their parents decide for them.

18% percentage of graduates correlates quite well with the percentage of women in tech roles at large American-based corporations. Especially if we take in account the explosive growth of the field, which makes the numbers dominated by recent grads.

Google, 20%, https://www.google.com/diversity

Microsoft, 17.5%, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/d...

Apple, 23%, https://www.apple.com/diversity

Amazon, ???, https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=1008009..., no "tech-role" category.

Facebook, 19%, https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/fb_diversit...

A whole different discussion could be had around ratios within the foreign-born slice of the workforce, which further skew the numbers one way or another. Alas, I could not find the data.

Later in the document he goes on to point out that gender disparities are greater in more liberal countries (e.g. great disparity in US than Iran, greater disparity in Finland than in the US). Interpreting this as our culture being somehow more oppressive (and then Finland's even more so) requires an "impressive level of intellectual contortion" - if anything it seems to be evidence that there are differences in preferences, and therefore greater freedom -> greater divergence.

I read the whole thing differently than you did. What is the conclusion you are objecting to?

Because they prefer to become nurses than CS working in front end.

I think you should think beyond CS and think about careers. There are things more cooperative and empathic than CS.

I know very little about gender issues in Iran, admittedly, but I would be very very careful making any social/cultural conclusions driven on a material from totalitarian and semi-totalitarian regimes where decisions of members of society are not free. I mean, how do we now that 70% figure is a result of a cultural choice and not some governmental program driven by whatever ideas the ruling caste has? You can not say it is about culture if it could be just a direct or indirect result of some or other edict from Powers That Be.

Update: also looks like 70% figure is a complete baloney, not based on anything but anonymous Quora postings. Wikipedia has different data (see my comment above) on par with data in other countries. If somebody has any respectable source for the 70% figure please quote it.

> If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social?

It's the managers and marketing people that decide to make a website feeling/aesthetics/social oriented, and the graphics designers and artists and content writers that figure out what needs to be done to do that. From a CS point of view, a feelings/aesthetics/social website and a cold/ugly/inhuman website are pretty much the same--it's just a different set of assets they are given to display.

> Programming, in my view, is actually in the middle in the "people versus things" spectrum. It's much more about people than, say, math. And of course, 45% of math majors are women, so I'm not sure how that fits into the author's theory.

We like to pretend that CS and math are similar, or even that the former is part of the later, and perhaps that is even true when by "CS" we mean what, for example, Donald Knuth does. But for most of us working in industry, even if our degree says CS, we are really more technicians than scientists. I would expect the influences and abilities that might make one choose math and the influences and abilities that might make one chose CS at most schools to be fairly different. (At schools where the CS program is highly theoretical and rigorous, I'd expect more overlap).

Has there been any research on the kinds of math that male mathematicians and female mathematicians tend toward? There's quite a bit of research showing women are better at verbal tasks and men better it spatial visualization tasks. I wonder if that translates into men tending more toward geometric kinds of math and women toward symbol manipulation kinds of math? (I'm using both "geometric" and "symbol manipulation" very loosely).

(Math preferences are kind of weird anyway. There is a fairly strong documented correlation between whether a mathematician is an algebraist or an analyst, and whether that mathematician eats corn on the cob in rows or a spiral. WTF?)

BTW, I'm still not convinced that people are asking the right question when they ask why aren't there more women in programming. I think the right question might better be why are there so many men in programming? Looking at the Wikipedia article on "Sex differences in cognition" [1], and the one on "Sex differences in emotional intelligence" [2], and just concentrating on the ones where they cite reasonably solid looking peer reviewed research, it looks to me like women actually come out ahead overall. What I mean by that is that the things women are better at seem to be things that will be more widely useful. E.g., good verbal ability helps with far more jobs than good spatial visualization.

I'd expect that in an ideal world that is free of discrimination, where people are limited in careers only by what they are interested in and their abilities compared to others competing for the same jobs, women would have more viable choices than men.

I suspect that programmers can be broken down into two groups:

1. People who are reasonably well rounded and have a variety of serious interests. They are into programming as a means to an end. It is a tool that can be used to help with their other interests. They might enjoy programming, and strive to be excellent at it, but it is not the main focus.

2. People who are interested in programming itself as their main interest. What their programs actually do is not all that important--it is the challenge and complexity and cleverness of the code itself that matters.

My guess is that the first group is going to have a much closer to balanced male/female ratio. The second group, for reasons similar to why males are much more prone to autism, is going to be overwhelmingly male. I also guess that this second group is fairly large, and this accounts for a non-trival amount of the male/female imbalance in programming as a whole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_emotional_i...

Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important as it allows the discussion of ideas without giving importance to the persons behind them. Of courae, allowing for the fact that nothing can be truly anonymous :)

The US economy is a monstrous engine powered by discrimination and inequality. Discrimination against (mostly) college educated women who might want to be developers is barely a footnote in the much wider political picture where access to high quality education, business development opportunities, housing, and health care, are so strictly rationed they might as well not exist for a depressingly large percentage of the population.

If discrimination is wrong, then it's wrong for everyone. If it's only wrong when some people are affected by it, then it's still discrimination - and the argument is really about which kinds of discrimination are socially acceptable, which aren't, and to whom.

Instead it says "the author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. "

So instead it just seems to be arguing that there is no disadvantage in what may appear to be unfair.

It also says "Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety."

That seems super subjective unless the author has some concrete examples. While they may be right, if we policied everything other people said so that any one person would feel comfortable expressing an unpopular opinion... I don't think the author wants to open that can of worms?

Has said coworker seen the research which suggests diversity increases company performance? http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...

It's interesting your Chinese friend said that. I recently found out that unless you are ethnically Chinese, even if you are born in China you aren't a citizen.. correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like a big reason why America will continue to thrive - because it values innovation over particular attributes of the people involved.

More than 1/3 of top tech companies in the US are started by immigrants. http://www.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-founded-by...

It does not seem productive to trivialize and disregard people's issues only because we haven't witnessed them ourselves.

Indeed this attitude is actually why an internal group where people can report sexist, racist, and other inappropriate behavior is called "Yes at Google", because so many people thought this kind of thing doesn't happen, or at least it wouldn't at Google.

Where discrimination clearly exists, Google could quite reasonably want to compensate for it. No, not by lowering the bar or setting quotas. Legality aside, we should all know by now that hiring less able candidates isn't good for anyone - often least of all for the candidate who is being set up to fail. Other approaches include casting a wider net, training interviewers to avoid unconscious bias that could lead to false negatives, increasing retention by providing support and additional training (e.g. in negotiating techniques at performance-review time).

None of these lead to anyone less qualified overtaking anyone who is more so. They drive people like the "echo chamber" author nuts only because those people refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists (or matters) in the first place. Because they can't conclusively pin either the problem or solution down to one place in our social code, they decide it's a feature rather than a bug. It's the very same tendency that makes them - and anyone who enables or defends them - crappy engineers. I'll bet "echo chamber" guy was on the way out already, for reasons unrelated to political beliefs. It's not "brave" to manufacture an excuse for getting canned that doesn't require acknowledgement of one's own insufficiency.

As for the document itself, you can read literally the exact same bullshit posted on HN several times a day (and then the same kind of responses that were in the motherboard piece), so I'm not sure what's worth writing home about.

Yet even suggesting that minds are subject to the same kinds of differences is considered heresy. It's almost dualistic - as if we're all born with a mind/soul of the same capability.

NB: I do not know what the scientific consensus is on cognitive differences between men and women.

And if there's anything decades old social science research has taught me, it's the Overton Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

When talking about masters, where consistently over the last 10 years or so, 56% of the students is female here in Belgium, law, medical and chemistry studies are currently 60%+ female and some studies, like language, biology, crime, pharmaceutical are 70%+ female, arts and psychology 80%+ and pedagogy and logopedic/audiologic over 90%. That are pretty huge gaps, and yet that's not something you hear about that often.

These stats are taken from multiple reports (in Dutch) from a few universities here in Belgium in years ranging from 2010 to 2013 [1] [2], and one report I only have on paper (all with pretty similar results)

Yes there are also many areas where it's more equally divided (surprisingly, mathematics and economics), but I don't think it's necessarily the 'software engineering' field, it's for a large part society. My gf for example studied chemistry, and even if she's a bit of a geek sometimes, she never even considered software engineering/it as a study. And when I asked her why, she said it just doesn't have any appeal to her, although when I taught her to write small scripts in python and some basic HTML she thought that was awesome.

And I know quite a few geeky girls just like her, doing stuff ranging from having studied sexology, veterinary, economics, law, chemistry, ... Only 3 of the ones I knew started in software engineering and 2 never finished. One became a cop, the other switched to medical, and the one that finished her degree now teaches mostly math since she didn't see herself writing software her entire career.

The only way I see to get more women interested in engineering in general, is to get girls interested from a young age. You can't just wave your magic wand around and wish there's a even a 70/30 male/female ratio when only 10% of the software engineering students in the first year is female, and many of them drop out over the years.

[1] https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20...

[2] http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat-ugent/diversi...

> Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at google?

The corporate culture in SV is pretty far to the left (all things being considered), you don't see things like a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating internally because for the most part, those type of documents are official company policy. IMO, this is a good thing.

I think open discussion of ideas like the one in this document would be beneficial because they are easy to refute and all people involved can take it as a learning or educating experience. The guys conclusions aren't "morally bad", but they are "demonstrably wrong" and its easy to see why if honest discussion was permitted. The problem is, open discussion is not permitted because the culture of the left seems to confuse "demonstrably wrong" with "morally bad" and thus makes having bad ideas a sin, instead of say, an opportunity that one can be educated on an enlightened.

Nowhere does the author say we "shouldn't support women becoming software engineers". His argument is simply that women are, on average, less inclined to become software engineers because of innate psychological differences, which explains the unbalanced gender ratio in tech. He suggests we should stop all forms of "positive" discrimination in the form of employment quotas that are aimed to correct the gender imbalance, and instead select individuals based on their merit.

understandably, as that is extremely unprofessional and sexual harassment

As a current Googler I am surprised to hear this. I think most of the people I work with would agree that while it might be normal to think something like that, you should keep it to yourself.

Colin Kaepernick believed in something and he's paying the price. If you're expecting me to feel sorry for this cupcake, that ain't gonna happen. I have a sliver of respect for him for writing it and zero respect for what he wrote. I sure don't think I'd want to work with him.

Apparently they were one of the teams piloting Tensorflow for Android...have no idea why though....

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938471 and marked it off-topic.

The technical articles are good, though.

But, yes, most of the HN community lives in a bubble. If we're honest, we all do, but people who take pride on their education and intelligence are especially challenged when finding that kind of humility.

If that is the question, then the answer is "no".

Whenever a difficult, nuanced topic like the one HN is discussing here comes up, its important to consider the medium by which all of us are communicating. Your quote with emphasis added is a perfect example: it may have been something this particularly frustrated individual threw out without much thought (the entire letter going public at all shows a lack of thought), but it could very well have been dog-whistling to racists.

The thing is, we can't know. Unless we're in a forum (in the Socratic sense) where thoughts can be clarified, I propose we take things at their face value. That's all we can confidently do.

[0]:http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664