If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must see a society where white men are the most powerful, most privileged class, as a failure of society.
The author cannot claim to believe in equality and then go on to justify inequality with biological traits.
Yet all of a sudden when it comes to mental pursuits (which are physically based in the brain and supporting chemicals), somehow then we're all equally capable and the huge biases that exist when using other organs don't exist. And not only don't exist, but so obviously don't exist that anyone suggesting so is met with "I'm literally shaking".
There seems to be nothing more to the diversity drive than "I want it to be so". I'm not saying it's all fine how it is, but pretending the population should be reflected perfectly is baseless.
Further, he points out diversity only goes one way. If there's too much white male, then it needs fixing. But if white males are underrepresented, then that's fine. It's like that review of the 90% black cast of Black Panther: "Hella diverse!"
Same for pointing out if you're hiring for diversity and lowering standards for "diverse" hires, you're making it worse for everyone.
And as he mentions, this diversity usually isn't. Hiring a bunch of people with the same views but making sure their skin tones or gender identity fill up a big list... Doesn't give you any useful diversity of thought at all.
Being intellectually dishonest and acting existentially offended when someone points out the obvious is why the left is losing out, slowly. And it sucks because the backlash is likely to hurt civil rights and progress.
It's not "mental pursuits," it is that our society rewards men the most for excelling in fields which are created and controlled by men. When the majority of CEOs, leadership and top government positions are taken by men, it's going to be easier for men to keep gaining and holding those positions. Women will and do face more discrimination trying to enter these fields purely because they are women.
By creating a space for women to excel, by trying to fight the pay gap, and by trying to get women into leadership, we are not discriminating against men.
I'm not saying that our society, as it stands, should reflect the population perfectly. I am saying that our society needs to change to treat its population equally. And in doing so our tech companies, governments and other industries will change too. For the better.
> Same for pointing out if you're hiring for diversity and lowering standards for "diverse" hires, you're making it worse for everyone.
No one is "lowering standards" for diverse hires. No one. Why are you even implying this?
> And as he mentions, this diversity usually isn't. Hiring a bunch of people with the same views but making sure their skin tones or gender identity fill up a big list... Doesn't give you any useful diversity of thought at all.
All I got from his manifesto on this was he wants more people who think like him. His manifesto argues for less diversity, if anything.
> Being intellectually dishonest and acting existentially offended when someone points out the obvious is why the left is losing out
It's not taking offence, it is surprise that so many people are still willing to argue for inequality and are blind to the extreme imbalances of our society.
Google fast-tracks diversity candidates simply because they are diversity candidates. Other candidates must reach a higher standard to be fast-tracked.
The original use of the phrase "lowering standards" implied that Google would forgo hiring someone of high skill to hire a lower skilled but more diverse candidate. This is not happening.
Diverse candidates are given more opportunities to have their skill tested, but they must meet the same requirements as anyone else.
Without wading into the general content of the manifesto, I haven't had the time to read it, and while not directly regarding hiring, there is at least one good example where the quest for a more diverse pool has lead to differing standards being applied, namely university entrance. From the stats I've seen, Asians in the US are fairly strongly penalized with regards to the grades and test scores they need to achieve in order to gain entrance to top universities when compared to their White, African American, or Hispanic counterparts. It certainly seems to me that the standards have been lowered for non-Asians in this area, and while I make no claim of this also occurring in the hiring process, I also don't think it's an unfair question to ask seeing as it seems quite widespread in university admittance.
But maybe there's an alternative explanation, like smaller sample size, or Asians being less likely to be well rounded candidates, or maybe it's flat-out race quotas.
1: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/157998/...
Let's say blacks really are on average better at basketball. Does it then follow that whites and asians ought not play basketball?
Nobody argues that because it's silly. (Or do they? I'm not in pro ball.)
People do argue that women should not be in tech. Women in tech regardless of ability get creeped on and treated like they don't know anything. I've met more than one with a fake male avatar on programming sites to ask questions, etc.
People are agitating for diversity in certain fields like tech, government, business, etc. because they are trying to reform fields with discriminatory cultures. If basketball had a culture that actively looked down on, excluded, and hazed whites then I would advocate doing something to challenge that.
I agree that trying to argue for a level of phenotypic equality that does not exist is a losing strategy but I get the motivation. I also have trouble thinking of another way to challenge these issues that doesn't involve taking a battering ram to a culture.
What if it turns out that one gender is on avg smarter but with less range of intelligence (with some magically perfect measurement of intelligence, to avoid claims of test bias). So if that was true, would we THEN be OK with other than 50/50 split in higher-intelligence games? I think to the people getting upset here, the very thought that this is even possible to examine is heresy.
All that Google would have to do is admit 50/50 isn't based on anything hard, and commit to finding out what the real number should be. They won't do that though because the thought offends them. And so they'll shriek racist/sexist/etc. and it'll be just as effective as it was at stopping Brexit and Trump.
That being said I'm very skeptical of an innate gender disadvantage in coding. Some of the earliest coders were women back when it was considered a "secretarial" pursuit, then the field flipped to nearly all male. I also agree that this field's culture is very, very misogynistic. I've seen it. An attractive woman in tech gets ignored intellectually and then covered with creeper drool.
I am personally on the fence about these types of diversity measures, not because I don't think culture should be challenged but because I am not convinced they work. Trouble is I can't think of any other ways. Culture is generally impervious to reason.
Diversity in Tech is indeed about changing the culture. That should be the central reply to this manifesto. Both the manifesto and the negative responses to it are missing this central point - they are focusing it as being about employment hiring about aptitude and worthiness of the job. It's why a call for meritocracy is not an adequate response to a call for diversity. Perhaps this element of culture needs to be explained more by people talking about it, on both sides.
When you look at it from that angle it's more understandable that the common response is that "you're part of the problem" when someone attempts to discuss these issues because it's erroneously seen as being part of the culture that they are seeking to remove. It's been seen as an attempt to negate the errors in the culture.
To reply to a response about being sexist when you wish to discuss diversity would be to focus on the ability that it is possible to talk about gender etc whilst also being a good respectful employee. That it's possible not be a "douche" and work with women and also be an out of the closet Republican or a devout Christian at the same time. That it's acknowledged that many women have a hard time in tech and that the culture can be changed for the better of everyone, and that discussion how it can be changed is a discussion open to everyone.
It is based on something hard—the gender distribution in the population.
At least pretend that you don't have a completely blinkered view of the world.
Why do they aim for a 50/50 gender balance? What if women are actually better in some roles, and it should be 40/60? Why can't this even be questioned?
The funny thing is, I dunno if I believe the original doc author, but I find the response so abhorrent I end up against it.
Google's response should have been "good but flawed questions. Here are studies, here's how we're going about determining diversity's impact etc".
Instead we get people who are gonna quit if he isn't fired, think he should be escorted off premise immediately, write pages misconstruing what was written, and are physically "shaking" at the thought someone might question their beliefs.
It sucks because there are systemic issues, and the current diversity nonsense does nothing about it and won't even try to make it's main case.
I'm hoping some groups will publish serious research on the issue. (Rust has a huge diversity push, iirc. They should also run some non diverse programs then compare results.)
I support promoting equal opportunity for all races and genders, not race based quotas.
There is a huge difference between the two things.
His point is quite clearly based on statistical reasoning, not absolutes. He makes this point blatantly clear when he makes the point about salary negotiations.
He says that people with high agreeableness have more trouble negotiating than people with low agreeableness. Because high agreeableness is statistically more common among women, this is treated as a gender issue when it is quite clearly a personality issue. If you're going to consider this a problem, why not address agreeableness directly? Why frame it as a gender issue that ignores both agreeable men and disagreeable women?
It's possible to have this and end up with different outcomes because of differing abilities or priorities.
Also, Whites are _underrepresented_ in tech relative to their percentage of the population.
edit: The parent edited their comment to remove the "white" qualifier from "men".
The key words here are "intended to". There's a difference between doing something and intending to do something. Unfortunately, intending to do something is sometimes not enough to actually do something - you also have to do it in the right way, otherwise you might intend to do one thing and instead do another thing.
> de-emphasising empathy
Not the best sound-bite, which of course means it will get quoted a lot. Happens to techies, not all of them are good writers, yet less of them can write a text that would be robust under hostile interpretation. The point, however, was to use data instead of feel-good anecdotes.
> making Google more of a safe space for people with viewpoints similar to his own
What's wrong with making Google more safe for people working there?
Why did you call out "white men" in an article about representation at Google? It doesn't make any sense when white people are underrepresented at Google.
edit: Now the parent has edited their comment to remove "in favor of sexism".
> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
The implication here is that equal representation of women at Google is bad for business. That women aren't in tech and leadership positions because of biological traits.
This is sexism.
Right here. This point and its thorough embedding in every aspect of the article.
This is an incomplete picture of what that statement says. It does not say that 50% representation would necessarily be bad for business, but that discriminating against men to achieve this goal would be bad for business.
Discrimination is the "unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people."
Google only has finite resources. Diverting them to assist the oppressed class (women) is not discrimination against the dominant class (men). It is simply a way to correct for existing discrimination against women.
The two don't follow, at all. Lets replace this statement, and make it about the NBA.
"If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must see a game where black men hold the vast majority of positions as a failure of the game".
If the NBA example should be laughed at, why shouldn't the opposite? Neanderthals don't exist anymore, but homo sapiens do, despite very little relative advantage to us. Small differences in averages between groups will lead to dramatically different results. For the best example of all, see casinos (advantage: 2-4%) versus gamblers.
Look at the government. The majority of the US government leadership is older white males.
Either you think: wow, white males are really good at getting into top government positions. Old white males must be superior to other humans.
Or you think: society really gives an advantage to older white males and it's much easier for them to get into government. Maybe power structures are balanced in their favour?
(Hint: the latter is true. The author of the article thinks along the lines of the former, that's why it's sexist and discriminatory and people are upset by it.)
Maybe women have a higher avg IQ but a smaller standard deviation. Then what?
I'm only taking issue with the sacrosanct idea that every mind is equal and that we should expect proportional representation in everything that's not obviously physically biased like sports. (How the brain isn't physical is still an open question.)
How long did we think women performed more poorly with spatial reasoning tasks? Then we realised cultural gender inequality was the culprit, not biological traits [1].
The original author continues to propagate the harmful idea that women aren't making it because of biology, when there is no evidence to support that biology is the reason. And you seem to believe the same thing, despite the science in this area changing and even reporting the opposite results.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/06/why-judy-cant-...
(I'm sure I don't need to point out on this forum how difficult it is to measure productivity or coding performance. AFAIK there are no measures of this which are effective outside controlled conditions, and controlled conditions are close to irrelevant for actually being effective at a job)
Exactly like we expect to see certain phenotypes over-represented in basketball.
Despite the difficulty, saying it's hard but it just must be true that everyone's equal doesn't seem like a robust approach. Or is Google saying it just has zero way of evaluating a person's work? Perhaps they could do blinded code reviews or something.
I think you mean "no" here, right? Because discrimination means making decisions based on gender, not on individual characteristics.
Also your other comments seem to means you support Google's pro-diversity approach then, right?
They aim to give equal opportunities to a more diverse set of people. They don't force hiring from under-represented classes.
I think you may want to reconsider the word you use for that, because that isn't a widely shared definition.
To be clear, when you say "discrimination.. [snip] is fine" most people hear that as "making hiring or promotion decisions based sorely or primarily on the gender of the person is fine". That's what the dictionary definition is too.
This isn't discrimination, and (almost) no one says it is. Unequal outcomes have many sources, and provided they are non-discriminatory that's defensible.
The issues arise when unequal outcomes occur and no one can agree on the cause, because there is a (very good) chance that there is an inequality of opportunity somewhere in the process.
I suspect there is a miscommunication here and your defense of the possibility of unequal outcomes is being confused by the wording.
Americans think their country is the world. Trust me, you are definitely less than 5% of the world population-wise, even if you are ~25% of nominal world GDP.
It is really sad how insular Western culture has become, and weird in an industry and era where the biggest tech IPO was Chinese.
The author of the manifesto lives in a western society. So I'm discussing society with respect to our experiences.
I'm not sure how your comment relates. There are other societies in the world, I agree.