Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo
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It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity programs at Google. Given that, it's easy to understand why people would be upset. If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs.
This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified men. Because you have to hire women as the diversity program says.
If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Imagine being a woman and being hired with this program, does it mean they hired me because I am a woman or because I am the best candidate for the position? (I said woman but applies to any minority group)
Are you saying there are no situations in which applying a systematic adjustment as a function of gender to interview scores could result in a predictable net-fitness-increase in the resulting skill distribution of hired people?
> If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Imagine being a woman and being hired with this program, does it mean they hired me because I am a woman or because I am the best candidate for the position? (I said woman but applies to any minority group)
That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified?
It depends on if that bias existed or not. If the bias exists then of course, I would want to have that bias compensated for. The question is still: is there a bias? Many people say the disparity alone is evidence of a bias because a completely unbiased system would result in a 50/50 split which we obviously don't have. The author of the manifesto is saying that a bias doesn't exist because the disparity has another explanation with some scientific support.
You might disagree or think that the science which supports this idea is faulty in some way. But come on, the reaction has been outrageous and scary.
Sexims might exist and have and effect in hiring but for him the effect of the diversity program was bigger, and a result it could lead to hire less qualified individuals. He said that the company should hire based on skills and not in gender or other bias. And also it should change how it works internally to create a better environment for women where they can explode their skills, those one the men doesn't have.
There are no biological "skills" that men might possess innately that should make them a first-choice by default, nor is there any reason to ever pick a candidate over another because of some biological "fact". At the end of the day, you judge a candidate by their output (performance, displayed intellect), not their input (nature OR nurture).
This is the whole point of Google's unconscious bias training: humans create incorrect correlations between input (nature|nutrue) and output (perf, intellect) in the form of biases-- i.e., "if you're too emotional you can't think as rationally as someone who is less emotional, therefore you cannot perform at the same level as a less emotional thinker". The problem here is that the correlation doesn't hold; it's a bias, not a fact.
Here's the point: your "biological facts" are biases, evidenced by the fact that you think you need to be tall to play basketball or biologically female to be a bikini model, and neither of these things are actually true.
[1]: http://www.complex.com/sports/2013/05/the-15-greatest-short-...
The implicit bias testing has serious issues: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-meas...
Take a look here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22496180
3- to 4-months old is quite a bit younger than 4 to 7 years. I doubt that any kind of group membership awareness can affect the things a baby looks at, especially when the task is so abstract. (Do you think anyone is ever indoctrinated to think that "boys do not look at rotated objects" or some such?)
The study you cite has no bearing on the effect you seem to dispute.
Edit: If it makes you feel better, the Wikipedia page on mental rotation also mentions a different experiment, where they measured reaction times of adults: "Also it was found that the male athletes in the experiment were faster than females, but male and female musicians showed no significant difference in reaction time." So apparently the right kind of training can eliminate the difference.
The study I linked is one that seems more relevant to the topic at hand - certainly more relevant to the point I was trying to make originally.
About your edit: there is no need to try to make me feel better. Assuming you understand what makes me tick well enough to be able to do so is a common mistake (not with me specifically, but in general) that leads to the kind of cross-talk we're seeing here.
As for disputing the relevance of the effect, that wasn't really clear from your brief comment. I'd say that a test of a mental capacity that shows natural gender differences before nurture had a chance to kick in does invalidate HelloWorldInWS's argument that there can't possibly be a biological effect that makes men (or women) better at any particular mental task.
Your comment "Weird that a group of people who spend their youth being told that they're naturally bad at math and critical reasoning have hangups when given these tests. Only explanation is that their doubters were right." is also not terribly relevant, because
- mental rotation ability differs even for babies
- IQ tests are calibrated so that the average is 100, regardless of gender. So women can't actually perform worse than men. It's just that the variance is higher, which means that men are more likely to be very smart or very dumb, while women are more likely to be of average intelligence. (The explanation I've heard is that having only one X chromosome gives genes there outsized influence in men.)
- the abstract of the linked study on the Cognitive Reflection Test mentions that both genders expected their performance to be better than it actually was, so lack of self-confidence was probably not an issue.
I'm sorry how my edit came across to you, I actually just wanted to mention it because it seems important to know that even if there is some mental difference contributing to the current gender distribution in tech, it might still be possible to even it out by practicing the relevant skill.
I apologize! :)
And yes, I have a tendancy to be brief and sarcastic rather than clear, to the detriment of my discussions.
I will not argue that there are no measurable cognitive differences between any given classifiable group of people. I will argue that there is nothing shown that can account for the 80/20 gender split we see today in tech.
However, I do believe that societal and cultural pressures, in the form of stereotyping and prejudice, can cause that split. This argument is what I was alluding to, and what I was attempting to support with my link.
It seems like a really hard thing to determine because we don't have a "control society" with no sexism we could use to compare.
Look what the experts say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs&feature=youtu.be...
If you see the whole video you hear different opinions
> you don't have to be tall to [play basketball]
Look at the height distributions of the global population and the basketball players and think twice of what you said.
> There are no biological "skills" that men might possess innately that should make them a first-choice by default
Exactly because those skill can also be in women, but some are more likely to be in men as some are more likely to be in women. I don't see anything wrong with it.
Yes if you don't try to match the distribution of the pool of candidates. if the pool of candidates ratio is 10/90 and your goal in the company is 10/90, I am ok with anything that helps you to get close to the 10/90. (When both distributions are normal gaussian with similar mean and average. I don't see basketball teams hiring short people to fit the ratio or the pool of candidates)
> That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified?
I prefer being hired because they saw my skills. I think is better in the long term. If I am qualified for a job I will find it, it could take me more time but at some point I will find it and I will be happier than in a job where they saw me hired by a diversity program. Of course if I need the job to survive wouldn't care, but I think this is not the common case (or I might be wrong but as I said in another comment this is my personal opinion, other will think differently)
Dumb frat bros writing 10 page screeds about how they're not fit for the job because they're biologically conditioned to work with people and not machines -might- have something to do with it.
And, as a historical point, until the late 60s, software development was seen as "women's work". Which somewhat destroys any "biological component" nonsense.
For example, for verbal abilities the female bell curve is a little to the right of the male bell curve. For spatial abilities, it is the other way around. Does this mean men cannot be excellent writers, and women cannot be excellent mechanical engineers?
No.
It just means that if all else were equal, we would expect writing and mechanical engineering to have gender distributions that don't match the general population.
However, there are measurable psychological differences when it comes to preference of the role you want to take, how much risk you are willing to take, and what your priorities regarding status and family are, and we do have evidence that some of it is, at least partially, biological.
Interestingly, "dumb frat bros" are somehow not affected by people calling them that and manage to fight through the emotional pain and still achieve their dreams of being in tech. I've noted a very large group of people react negatively to the person who wrote the memo, writing insults(like "dumb frat bro"), demanding he be fired, threatening him with violence, the whole shebang. Unless I'm missing something, you seem to be implying that women are inferior to "dumb frat bros" because the "dumb frat bros" seem to be better at handling other people trying to bring them down.
Yes, almost as if the entire system was heavily weighted in their favour!
> Unless I'm missing something, you seem to be implying [something I wasn't even vaguely implying but makes a good false point to try and hang a specious argument on]
Does that tactic ever work for you in arguments?
> demanding he be fired
He demonstrated -in spades- that he wasn't capable of being a professional team player within that environment.
> threatening him with violence
That is too far and wholly wrong to do.
"The entire system"? Is this system like the Matrix, or is it governed by people? How did a "dumb frat bro" ever manage to get into Google in the first place when Google's system seems so actively hostile to them?
> Does that tactic ever work for you in arguments?
I didn't anticipate that you would argue "the system" was supporting "dumb frat bros", when quite clearly he was not receiving any support from Google, yet somehow managed to join them and work there.
The system, on context, clearly refers to the world of education and technology as a whole.
In fact, there doesn't need to be an explicit bad actor to have detrimental systemic effects. Just a long slow build up of bias. Like the idea, worked into our heads from a young age, that boys are better at science.
The key word here is "seems" and it only "seems so actively hostile" -to them- themselves. I don't think any impartial outside observer would say your average privileged white dude had an "actively hostile" environment at Google (or, indeed, almost anywhere else.)
That's a very subjective judgement on your part.
If you scan this discussion here on HN, I think you will find that almost half the posts are in stark disagreement with your position.
Honestly, if you find an email like this triggering to the point that you're calling for others to be fired and keep on insisting that something is "toxic", I'd rather single out you as the problem, not the original person sending the email.
You live in a democracy. People are entitled to different opinions. For your own sake, I say you better get used to it.
Of course but that's the nature of judgements.
> I think you will find that almost half the posts are in stark disagreement with your position
Indeed, I have read most of them and I would put money on them being from libertarian / alt-right dudes who would take up any cause, no matter how reprehensible, if it gave rise to "liberal tears". Given I've seen people defending Charles Murray in these threads, I'm 100% A-OK being on the other side.
> You live in a democracy. People are entitled to different opinions.
You're missing the important bit - "People are entitled to different opinions but they are not entitled to a consequence free expression of those opinions [1]."
[1] Except in very limited circumstances in the US.
How do you explain that infants without being corrupted by the popular culture still chose differently based on gender?
Personally I suspect that there's a mix of both cultural (girls play with dolls traditionally) and biological (boys tend to be more attracted to tinkering and building from even before they learn to speak) reasons for the ratio in people studying IT-related fields but I just don't see how making hiring practices biased in any direction will help with that.
Your have around 20% females. If any company has 30%, this means a lot of other companies will have to fight to get women there.
So they have to pay a lot more for the qualified ones or accept to get token women for the sake of PR.
The problem starts before the workplace: in homes and at school. Start educating minorities and women on the job opportunities in tech. Make them discover the joy of tinkering. It's not for everyone but as someone from a lower socio-economic world I experienced how you can not know what is available to you. That's a huge failing of the school system and especially guidance counselor who usually don't know shit about nothing.
I prefer to work for a company that was able to see my skills than other that hire me because other reasons. I think I would be happier and achieve more things this way. (Again, this is a personal opinion)
I agree with you; and I think everyone else does, that they'd rather work for a company that was able to see their skills.
But, what if you knew there was bias that would keep them from seeing your skills, and would keep you from being hired because of it? What if your only choices were to be hired through a diversity program, or not be hired at all?
Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.
This sentence is a little garbled so not quite sure what you're going for, but I like to point people to the example of the Danish parliament. A gender quota was established some decades ago to ensure that female members could get the job, because obviously half the population is female and so they need to be represented. Now that they have an equal number of men and women, they're getting ready to remove the quota because it served its purpose, and it's not needed anymore. There are enough qualified and experienced women with strong reputations available that they don't need the help anymore.
In India, affirmative action has basically served to deepen the lines between castes/religions etc. More and more sections of society demand that they be included in quotas. The people who do get in using such programs rarely succeed in suppressing the nagging question of whether they earned it (and that questioning stays with you all your life). Meanwhile, people forge identity documents to make it through such programmes, and the abuse of the system means that no one trusts that it is doing any good overall. In fact, by now, it has become a tool for politicians to appease fractious sections of society.
You start with an "end date" (say two decades). And you make that date difficult to change, so that the "let's kick the can down the road" option is not easy.
And not to forget there will be enough politicians to fight for them as long as they vote for them.
These sort of things are pretty much one direction. Once done are irreversible. Its impossible to roll back what people think is a right they were born with.
Exactly! If you want to remove gender, race or some other aspect from the decision making process you have to actually remove it. You can't just try to fix discrimination one direction by creating discrimination in a different direction.
[1] http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/arbeidsliv/fortsatt-behov-...
Are you discriminating me to give an opinion because I am a male? I don't think it is fair. I could also say that you shouldn't talk about gender equality if you don't live in a country with high gender equality and so you argument doesn't add any value with the discussion.
And I suspect that yes, they were suggesting that giving an opinion as a hypothetical female, given that you are male, is of limited value. I think people of both genders make real-world decisions very differently to hypothetical decisions. When there are bills to be paid, and potential bias is mixed in amongst countless other factors, I can say I wouldn't ditch a career as a chemistry teacher to start producing drugs, but who knows what pressures there are influencing that decision slowly at the time, and in the years leading up.
> I think people of both genders make real-world decisions very differently to hypothetical decisions
based on your reasoning you cannot say that because you cannot have an opinion about what the other gender would do.
The fact is that a lot of women reply to my comment saying that they would do the same I said I would do.
1. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf This study was primarily aimed at identifying the impact of race, but incidentally showed that resumes with females names received a lower number of callbacks, in addition to the race based effect.
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ "Without provision of information about candidates other than their appearance, men are twice more likely to be hired for a mathematical task than women."
3. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract "Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant."
4. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5... "the authors show that [anonymous application procedure] increased the chances of both women and individuals of non-Western origin of advancing to the interview stage."
5. http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 Anonymization in orchestra additions (blind screening) led to women advancing out of preliminary rounds 50% more often.
I can easily dig up studies showing opposite results:
"Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. " http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract
"We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates: • Participants were 2.9% more likely to shortlist female candidates and 3.2% less likely to shortlist male applicants when they were identifiable, compared with when they were de-identified." https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-unc...
"Teaching accreditation exams reveal grading biases favor women in male-dominated disciplines in France" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6298/474
"Comparisons of oral non–gender-blind tests with written gender-blind tests for about 100,000 individuals "
"Over 2,100 public servants"
"validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty"
I personally would like to have more women in tech, but it seems implausible that the current dearth is because of any systemic discrimination against women.
I wonder why people are claiming that this is a reason for the problem?
It's nice to say "I'd prefer to be hired at Google on my merits", but few individuals from disadvantaged groups go into job seeking expecting that ideal situation to occur, and they're forced to make suboptimal tradeoffs just because they're disadvantaged.
I once left a company because of the internal culture, they were not listening to the people from other countries. I didn't agree with the culture and left telling them the reason. After me more people followed. I have also left other things for similar reasons, even when everybody were telling i was doing a mistake. I just prefer to be somewhere I am happy even if it involves less money or status.
Meanwhile normal people deal with more practical problems like yours.
That's a funny term for merit-based.
It's ridiculous how many times I see this dropped out of nowhere in this thread without any sources or proof.
This is a very contentious statement on a two sided issue.
It is similar to proclaiming that minimum wage increases will always lower job opportunities without any proof.
At the current rate of $X / hour, there are a number of economically viable jobs (jobs where the employer considers it valuable to hire someone instead of doing the job themselves or doing without, because they are worth at least $Y / hour to the employer, with Y > X).
At an increased rate of $Z / hour, Z > X, some of those jobs are no longer economically viable - they only generate $Y / hour, with Z > Y > X; while they were viable at $X / hour, they are no longer viable at $Z / hour so they disappear. For an obvious example, making the minimum wage $1000 / hour would destroy the viability of most jobs.
This proof assumes, of course, that nothing else changes - the government simply mandates "the minimum wage will change from $X / hour to $Z / hour" and doesn't add other changes like "all taxes are halved" or "all employers get free Bahamas holidays". With that caveat, also known as "ceteris paribus", the proof is (as I said) obvious.
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...
"Still getting asked if I can handle being in a mostly male work environment in interviews in 2009 - I’ve been an engineer for 9 years, obviously I can. I know when I’m asked that question, I HAVE NO CHANCE AT THE JOB. It is nice they brought me in for equal opportunity survey points but don’t waste my time if you don’t take females seriously.”
The point is when you have a male dominated "bro"/"frat" culture, diversity programs are indeed just to meet labor standards - but they don't actually hold water. Which is why women end up leaving these places because people can't treat women like human beings. A diversity program becomes virtually useless if you can't keep people from leaving short of incentivizing them to deal with a company's toxic culture.
As a male I was told something similar in an interview at Google: if I would mind to work in a company where most people are men? And as the girl you cite I found the question stupid. I have worked in tech I already know how is this.
Instead of diversity program to hire women we should create tolerance programs for everybody.
Women started finding it harder to get into CS in the 80s. Until then, the historical record is that diversity was better than it is now.
But generally hiring-process solutions to this problem are hopeless. You either have a diverse culture, in which case markers for age, gender, attractiveness, charm, ethnicity, extraversion, and so on, are irrelevant... or you don't.
Tech generally doesn't - and that starts at school, not during hiring.
Adding a few extra women won't change that. It's a small improvement at best, not a revolution in accessibility.
Because the reality is that even with a 50:50 gender split startup culture would still be primarily white-or-asian, young, attractive, middle class, and motivated by a very small selection of possible ethical positions - and a lot of possible talent would still be excluded.
Age, race, and class discrimination is far more obvious to outsiders than gender discrimination.
You could make the "Well it's still an improvement" argument, and that's true - up to a point. There's still a bigger conversation to be had about inequality in general, and I'm not sure how many people in tech of any gender are interested in having it.
Tech is a very fast moving space with a lot of premium attached to entrepreneurship, moving fast enough, failing often etc.
This sort of an environment is very hard for almost everybody to survive through.
There was a strong bias for older workers. Eventually people said "fuck it", made their own startups, hired their newly graduate colleagues, and started making a big push about why younger tech workers were better.
Since the pipeline is growing (more and more people are going in tech), new grads around that time easily outnumbered the older ones, and thus the situation we're in now. It's almost a backlash to what happened back then.
My grandfather always shares his stories about leading the development team at Lewis (an old English insurance corporation) and British Gas.
In his view, they were slothenly, unkempt, often unwashed and unsuited nerds. They were allowed to be because they did a job nobody else at the time could do- and while the rest of the office was suite/tie/polished shoes- they showed a flagrant and blatant disregard for that. Because they knew that they could get away with it because they were "needed".
This is why he has a respect for me being clean/polite/respectful while "having the same skills" in his mind.
So I don't fully buy that tech was previously more professional; it might be a different culture in SV, but generally tech is as professional as anything outside of finance in the cities I've worked (in europe)
Why does it matter what the employee dresses or looks like, if they produce the same results?
I have never understood the reason for people forcing their views of how people should dress onto others. It is absurd.
Granted, there are levels of what is 'appropriate' for the workplace, but I think generally having a flexible dress code is important for employee morale.
Because only biiig and serious corps had the dough to play with mainframes. IBM, AT&T, Nokia, Alcatel, Ericsson are still very corporate. The world has changed a bit since then. (The Cold War changed how people view openness and sharing, the Vietnam Wwar (and recently Iraq) changed how people related to the Establishment (and the "military-industrial complex"), and big corporations. Openness became important and "cool" again.)
And CS is small even today, but it was much smaller. Only the very determined, rather serious people were doing software development. And the projects were much more "serious" back then. Waterfall development model, etc.
Diversity was better, about 36% of CS grads were women. Still long before the big Information Age explosion (.com boom, and so on).
And nowadays when you need a gadget or a website you don't need a professional big corporate project, you need just a few guys-gals.
> But generally hiring-process solutions to this problem are hopeless. You either have a diverse culture, in which case markers for age, gender, attractiveness, charm, ethnicity, extraversion, and so on, are irrelevant... or you don't.
Agreed. But if you want to ensure a transition from bad culture to good culture, you might need to start brute force hiring for it. But usually companies that lack good culture are allowed to rot because someone at the top doesn't care.
> There's still a bigger conversation to be had about inequality in general, and I'm not sure how many people in tech of any gender are interested in having it.
People much better off than the average "for some reason" find it "not their problem". Of course, some do, and try to maximize their impact (see effective altruism).
I think saying 'can you HANDLE being in a mostly male work environment' is not the right wording. But the decision I took to let a potential candidate know they would be working in an otherwise male only office, I would take again in the same circumstance - it WAS something she was interested to know and WAS something that also came up when she started the job.
I can't speak on behalf of any other women, or scenario in the world, the above is the account of what happened to us. We typically get at least 10X more male candidates to female, and we employ and the same ratio. For about half of the jobs we recruit for, the personal doing the interviewing is female.
I perfectly understand the innocence of the question and can empathize with both scenarios: one where the candidate is frustrated by seemingly not being taken seriously, and one where the candidate is genuinely interested in knowing and hoping she can find someone to relate to.
Finding out if you fit into the social norms and groups is really really hard when you're an adult.
This applies to the majority of protected categories one way or another, but people forget it's not "just because people are biased" - while many sadly are, at an explicit or implicit level, even if they weren't there are good reason to keep certain quotas around.
Edit: enlighten me naysayers, why protecting special categories with objective limitations a priory even in absence of cultural bias would be so bad?
Regarding your employer being able to potentially firing you, the point isn't that they can fire you but that hiring you based on a diversity program for women could have excluded a more qualified man (not saying that you could not be the most qualified candidate). Firing you later doesn't fix the missed opportunity for that man or the employer.
ALL the people interviewed are qualified, they can ALL do the job
It depends on the disability, but still disable people can do things that normal people cannot do. Everybody has skills companies can use, regardless their disability or race or gender.
A blind person wont seem like a good fit for a programming position, but if they prove they can program (as experience in their CV or having passed a test like the rest of candidates) they should be consider as the rest of candidates without any prejudice. And I am sure that blind person has put more effort to achieve the same goals as a non disable candidate and it might be a positive point to hire him as that blind person is showing one more skill than others.
But we shouldn't hire him because he/she is blind but because of his/her skills.
In the case of my employer, all the qualified men who might want the job have already applied for it. The diversity program came about because they are actually struggling to find enough qualified candidates, even with generous pay and benefits. The company. No one has missed an opportunity because of me. The company was majority white and male, and they didn't have enough people, so they decided to tap into the vast universe of people who aren't white or male. In my opinion, that's the best possible reason for having a diversity program.
Of course, you can have hypothetical scenarios e.g. you have two candidates who are equally qualified and practically match neck to neck and you can only hire one and you have a lack of diversity in your company, sure, you can hire the person who brings more diversity.
However, if you have, say, white male person who is more qualified than, say a non-white female person, and those are your top two picks, then you should choose the former because it is about being most qualified for the role. If the non-white female is most qualified, than she should be chosen. I'm simply advocating meritocracy.
You mentioned that "The diversity program came about because they are actually struggling to find enough qualified candidates" and "he company was majority white and male, and they didn't have enough people, so they decided to tap into the vast universe of people who aren't white or male". I don't understand the first part - were they excluding non-white/non-male people from applying initially? Isn't that unlawful? Why didn't the "vast universe of people who aren't white or male" didn't apply initially and had to be brought in via diversity program?
They weren't excluding women or minorities, they just weren't finding any qualified ones. Now they are running short of people who are qualified of any color and gender. White men have already had lots of opportunities to get experience, so now they are giving those opportunities to women and minorities explicitly. At some point in the future they'll be able to reap the results of having more experienced people available of whatever gender or color.
Many companies think that it's not their responsibility to train, that the world is full of qualified people who are ready to step in and do whatever job whenever they're needed. It's not working out in the technology sector though. Some companies are getting the message that they have to take people who don't have experience, and give it to them until they are as qualified as they need to be.
In the past it was simply easier for white, male people to get experience, and that's why many companies now find that it's easier to find qualified, experienced white men to fill jobs. Except when it's not. Then they start diversity programs.
Based on you wrote now, I found the piece I was unable to understand. What you are saying is that: they were not able to get anybody (white males or otherwise) so they invested in a diversity programme which results in more non-white/non-male candidates getting experience and skills and increased the overall job pool of available candidates. If that understanding is correct and the goal is to increase the overall pool of qualified candidates, then why a diversity programme? Why not a general internship programme where the most bright of _inexperienced_ candidates are chosen irrespective of their color/gender? Note the stress on inexperience since your argument is based on lack of experience for non-white/non-male population. That takes care of:
1. Companies' responsibility to train 2. Increases the overall pool of candidates 3. Ensures that the brightest are getting into the pool i.e. merit rules instead of skin color/gender (which means that if a non-white/non-male person is the brightest, they get the experience and join the pool)
They have such a program as well, which has been in place much longer than the diversity program. With no specific requirements to pick people who aren't white and male, they ended up getting mostly white males.
I find that if a decision on morality is made into a general rule, they are much easier to assert if they are good or bad. A gender neutral diversity program on a national level would radically change the discussion, and it would be interesting to see if the proponents of diversity programs would still support it.
1) what happen if less than 40% want to be in the profession? Are you going to force them to join non-desire careers?
2) does it apply also to bad things? like for example the ratio of men in jail is higher, does it mean we are putting in jail wrong people and leaving women out that should be in jail?
3) will it apply to different minorities? like for example would short people be more selected to play basketball?
"Nah, we all know CS is the best, and the only logical possibility is that women are being discouraged to do it, because if I chose an IT career, it's obviously the correct choice of profession." -- Lots of people here.
2) & 3), when making law, rules tries to become more general but only to a point. Where that point is is naturally up to debate, but should match the intention of the rule maker. If we want to eliminate gender segregation in the work place, then it naturally ends with gender. If the idea is to eliminate segregation in general then more classification of groups would have to be included.
But the big question I wanted to ask is if we take gender based affirmative action, would that explicit form of action be consider moral when made into a general rule rather than applied locally by specific companies. If it is not, then why is it moral when done in smaller scale.
I see your point now. That is such a good question. But I think in US as in other countries there are laws for gender diversity, like you have to pay more taxes if you don't have gender diversity. And some countries have positive discrimination policies that give money to company who hire minorities.
The diversity program is an invitation for women, minorities, and disabled people to do an internship. The goal of the internship is to learn, not necessarily to demonstrate ability to do the job. It is paid. It lasts 4-6 months. Interns are invited to go through the normal hiring process afterwards, with the benefit of some experience on the job. There are no full time jobs reserved for any particular type of person. If they choose not to stay with the company, they still get a genuinely useful resume item out of it, moreso than they'd get from a 2 week trial. It can also be used for school credit. Some people might come back and apply again after they finish school.
Around a hundred people go through the normal trial process each year, and it's currently not enough. That's why the diversity program was launched, just to get more people into the pipeline. Only about 8 interns go through the program each year, because so far it's a small experiment, but it's working out so far. A few interns have been hired full time, and a couple of people who couldn't hack it got to at least have a taste of what it's like.
One of the smartest people I know belongs to one of these castes. She is brilliant at her job but constantly worries whether she got in because of her brains or because of the reservations.
There is STILL a serious need for reservations and affirmative action in my country, but man does it screw with people.
for someone with a PhD in biological systems, you'd expect a person to be a little more developed in their thinking...
These differences can be in factors that impact ones desire or ability to perform certain roles. Is this wrong?
This individual person, because they are a man/woman, is unfit for the role. This IS wrong.
Is it wrong to say there are differences that make women, on average, worse football players? Is that inherently bad, perhaps even blasphemous, thing to say? I don't think so.
So why can't one discuss this about other jobs? Perhaps they are wrong, Perhaps which ever group isn't worse on average. But even if they are wrong, then the way to respond is to say that their information is wrong, not that they are wrong for saying it.
We are treating the conversation itself like it is a blasphemy that shall not be uttered aloud. Instead, we should be asking 'is this information factual or not'. And we should be taking safe guards that averages aren't assigned to individuals.
This is what bothered me the most about Google's response. They have the data to prove that the stereotypes about women were wrong. Instead of doing that, they focused on the idea that articulating the stereotypes was wrong. Some stereotypes actually have a basis in facts. The best way to deal with ones that aren't is to use the facts. Google failed at doing this.
Implying they cared about false stereotypes. They only failed if they actually wanted to do that.
My bet is this gives them negative PR to their target market, end of story.
Did you actually read the paper or just one of the many summaries? Because he didn't say that, and your use of quotes is inappropriate here. Also, he didn't question anyone's humanity. While I don't agree with some of the points he made and I'm for Diversity programs in general, I find these misrepresentations and personal attacks on him quite disturbing. What we need is more civilized discussion, not name-calling.
there's nothing to discuss. women have just as much right as men to be programmers or any other "computer science" or "tech" job and they reason there AREN'T that many of them is preicsely because of the pseudo-science bona fide bullshit written in his "Manifesto".
it only takes one asshole to drive away everyone else.
At no point did it even insinuate that women were less capable than men, what it seemed to be trying to do is note marginal statistical differences in choices by men and women and what we could do as an industry to be more accommodating to women without resorting to hiring quotas- which, he claims, may actually cause greater levels of imposter syndrome and tension amongst genders.
There was no part of the document that came close to refuting that women have a right to be in the industry. In fact. The document was the opposite, "how do we get women in tech in a non-discriminatory way?"
It's the idea that it would be unfair that on average women cannot do as well in things men do, ignoring basic biology that genders are different and that there are things that absolutely no man can do, that women can. Even sometimes those areas which privilege females are seen as they were basically cornered into doing, and have no bearing into the fact that while there is some chauvinism, that possibly on average the desires, needs and skills may be not better or worse but different. And the women that embrace those things are positive are seen as being dominated against their will, or brainwashed into hating themselves.
In short, if a women does something that historically men used to do, then it's good. Else, and even more if it is something that historically women used to do, they are being subject to sexism.
The PhD guy should know better, perhaps too much specialization in his field made his brain go fritz.
I come from the same country.
Reservation policy has denied hordes and hordes of exceptionally smart, hardworking and merit people their rightful chance of doing good in life. It continues to. This has been one of the key reasons for mass exodus of these people to foreign lands. The damage is irreversible. Those people are lost for ever. And worst, they do so well outside India that more and more smart people are incentivized to leave the country for the better.
The damage to the Indian economy and the STEM ecosystem in India in general is incalculable.
Also by and large, at least from the past few decades(of economic boom and social progress) these reservation policies have no meaning at all.
However, you do raise a good point. Reservation policy should not extend into the work force. I am more in favor of literal handouts of cash rather than forced diversity in the workplace. Come to think of it, basic income can't come soon enough. I don't mean we need to end diversity programs in the workplace but the way it was explained to me was these were recruitment programs and not hiring programs. Considering gender or caste or color of skin as one of the conditions for employment should be illegal in all nations.
This was the original vision of the people who designed the reservation system in India. Their idea was some people where so behind in the social strata that merely expecting them to make up on hard work would take it forever to work. But this policy should have some expiry conditions. Else it leads to absurd conditions like it does in India.
There are cases where the father is a well earning rich doctor, and the kids still get reservations. There is a guy who has just done his MBBS, and yet he qualifies for reservation for a MD seat. Entry and qualifying marks/percentages are lower for reservation seats, so you have a condition where exceptionally good performers and bad performers are both in the same peer group in a class, and then the bad performing group routinely does bad and loses out.
>>Reservation policy should not extend into the work force.
Once you create a entitled group of people, you can't succeed them in stopping them from asking special privileges in other places.
Given research showing that the most diverse teams are, on average, more successful than less diverse teams [1], should gender or caste or color still never be considered?
People bring more to their workplaces than algorithms and programming languages, their life experiences and worldview can positively influence the whole company.
The employer should encourage new ideas, create an environment where everyone feels empowered to contribute, and facilitate education and improvement for all employees.
Algorithms, programming languages, technology stacks, etc. can all be taught. The perspective an employee brings to the company can not be taught.
I think we would agree that gender, race, and ethnicity are crude proxies for a "unique worldview". There are so many metrics that could be considered: education, location history, age, previous work, hobbies, etc. Even more can be gleaned from a conversation.
A good hiring manager should know that too, and should select candidates who truly complement the team, not just check the boxes for race and gender.
This is true for some countries and the problems and solutions are still the same.
Your "hordes and hordes" who have been denied their "rightful chance of doing good in life" seems more than a little overblown when you compare that to millions of people who were denied the same chance for centuries due to where their families fell in the social chain at one point.
Affirmative action policies often seem unfair to the majority, but it's often extremely difficult for that majority to consider just what the minority went through, and how much longer it will take - if it can ever happen - for them to reach parity without policies that recognize that they've been forcefully held back for their entire life, their parents' lives, and so on.
The modern day hard working people affiliated to a particular caste be punished generation after generation for a mistake some ancestor of theirs made some 5000 years back?
>>Even today people get ostracized because of their supposed caste, even though the system has been illegal for many years.
Strictly speaking caste affiliations today are entirely voluntary. You can by all means absolve yourself of any caste/religion. People stick to a particular caste/religion for various reasons many of which are cultural and not because they forced to. Also note caste isn't a binary classification. There are castes that go as deep as farmer, shepherd, cow herder, black smith, cotton weaver, weapon maker etc etc.
Some of them do it because of the explicit benefits like reservations that come along with it.
>>Your "hordes and hordes" who have been denied their "rightful chance of doing good in life" seems more than a little overblown when you compare that to millions of people who were denied the same chance for centuries due to where their families fell in the social chain at one point.
This my experience being born and living in this country for 3 decades of my biological life. The default condition for any body smart and hard working here is 'immigration abroad'.
Take any steps from your childhood. Attend any exams(which by the way decide your entire life direction), appear for any government job interview, parliaments seats etc etc. Reservations exist which will ensure many hard working people ever succeed.
The system actively brutally punishes smart, hard working merit people to a point most people are driven to migrate foreign lands to get due returns for their work.
They are theoretically voluntary. Practical reality, however, is very different: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/13/48988349...
And the previous interview that I had linked to noted how often even in the US, people get asked what caste they're in.
Deeply rooted discrimination doesn't go away just because it is officially outlawed, and the effects of that discrimination don't go away just through hard work. There are plenty of smart African Americans and women in the US who can attest to still getting paid less than white males even if they did get good jobs.
Caste is similar, if you throw away your caste and then go for marriage, a strong caste affiliate who doesn't subscribe to your world view may reject your proposal. This isn't discrimination, everybody has a right to marry somebody whom they feel they can be comfortable with.
You will be surprised how much 'pride' people take in their caste here in India. There are many caste specific festivals and traditions people observe. Almost all caste affiliates in India are willing participants.
Proof?
The very fact that you ask for proof means you are completely disconnected from the everyday reality of life middle class hard working students face in India every single academic year.
Even today I meet freshers at IT companies who have stories of having scored in upwards of 95% aggregate marks, and best rank in competitive exams(JEE, NEET, NATA, CET etc) and lose out an engineering seat to some one who had 35-45% marks.
[0] http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/census-c...
[1] http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/scs-sts-form-25--of-po...
We are talking of problems General Merit people face here.
Secondly, you are making the same mistake, we generally do in India while comparing these things. Comparing human ingenuity one-one. A good merit performer can contribute way more disproportionately compared to a bad performer.
Lastly you don't mention the problem of filling up mandatory quotas. Where you can't allocate seats to general merit folks until all reservation quotas are exhausted. In Karnataka this problem was so serious back in the day, the general merit seat counseling used to happen at very last after each reserved category exhausted their picks.
The resultant situation was so bizarre. It was literally the best students in the entire state had to pick up leftovers, while people who had performed way worse took plum picks.
I remember during our first Math lecture in the first semester, some of us used to solve problems way ahead of the remaining class. Our professor used to remark the general merit candidates in the class were basically the top ranking students who had missed out on top colleges and the performance difference in the peer group was already showing, and will continue to show in the future.
So what you are really saying is there's a problem with affirmative action for lower castes, because large numbers of people assume that they are inferior. That's the problem your friend has. That's she's brilliant, and lots of people assume she isn't because of some arbitrary prejudice. This is the same arbitrary prejudice that the affirmative action seeks to remedy, and so these attitudes to affirmative action, in themselves, prove the need for affirmative action.
You're taking this the wrong way. It's not that they think that people who came in through reservations are inferior. It's that they don't have to work nearly as hard.
In an exam where an upper caste person might have to score 100 to get in, the reserved caste person would have to score 70.
It's about the unfairness of this system.
Which is strange because the caste system before this was wildly unfair itself.
To mitigate the damage of one unfair system, we've set up another one.
Are there less people in the "lower" caste? I would assume there would be more and severe competition.
The remainder bulk of the people who don't get reservations fall into this category called 'General Merit'.
Now the system fills up the reservation quotas first, leaving leftovers to general merit. General merit has way more candidates and a larger section of people who score above reservation people. The net result is you end up denying top performers seats, so that you can fill reservation quotas.
If they're not, then why does it matter?
If they are, then is it a) a tragedy that should be remedied by providing better nutrition, education, opportunities, or b) are they a lower level of sub-human who we just have to put up with in menial roles?
I'll note that if you do a) then the problem of them getting in on lower grades solves itself, as they compete for the limited slots available to them. And at that point you can remove the system entirely.
And we all know that the way to treat people with respect is to deal with them as if they were handicapped.
So let's create tolerance programs for the people who has this prejudices. This will solve the problem, lower the bar for minorities it is only a treatment of the problem which won't do anything in the long term. Because if they hire you and then the cultural corporation is broken you are going to be very unhappy and probably leave the career (his actually happens)
Anyway see countries like Norway consider one of the most equality countries, and also one with the more gender inbalance in careers like tech. We should consider that some people don't like a professional and also work in way to make this profession more appealing if it is possible. But if it not possible just understand that the imbalance is natural. we
Only someone who is not a woman or not from a minority could say this. People tend to dismiss other peoples problem or minimize them, even when those people are telling they are hurting.
Only someone who is a woman or from a minority with liberal views could say this. How can you speak for 70% of people? How are you hurting from being treated equally to the 30%?
edit: not sure why downvotes, I'm being sincere. :S
This is a little presumptuous. I am a woman and I too would prefer to be hired without any diversity program. I am not inherently against them and think that striving for diversity is overall a positive thing, but when I compare the thought of being hired as part of some target female quota or active diversity push vs being hired as a "regular" candidate I prefer the latter.
Diversity programs I appreciate more are those less involved in the actual hiring phase and more in the teaching girls to code and getting them interested in the subject phase. Of course I'm privileged and lucky in other ways and understand that plenty of other women feel differently.
They have done this to themselves and now have to force policies to make it seem like good PR. It wasn't even until a few months ago they even changed their pay structure because of "extreme" gender gaps.
But being treated as less capable thus requiring lower barrier of entry to women is just plain old sexism.
I somewhat agree with the other comment here that "you wouldn't need a diversity program, sensitivity training, or unconscious bias training if you stopped hiring frat boys with no life experience straight out of college." I would just add to that that the issue isn't just the frat boys hired straight out of college, but also some experienced devs who were allowed to simply remain in the frat boy mindset as they aged in the industry.
How could you possibly know that?
Do I qualify as belonging to a minority according to your definition of "the oppressed", or will you "dismiss or minimize" my opinion because it doesn't align with yours?
I'm trying to approach this respectfully by acknowledging that I know it's only your opinion, but I rarely get the opportunity to ask something like this, so please forgive me if my curiosity seems out of line - I genuinely want to understand better and no offensive is intended.
As for your question, I live neither in the US nor in Canada, and where I live "diversity hire" programs don't even exist. I'm also a contractor, so it doesn't apply to me anyways.
Finally, I don't really have well-reasoned arguments against affirmative action. All I have is literally the thought that "F* anyone who tries to take my agency away by calling me a victim."
"When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there." -- HP:MOR
If I fail, I fail because I wasn't good enough. I am in control of my life. Perhaps the bar for me is higher than for a random white person, but so what? If I work hard and reach the bar set for me, I will have surpassed the vast majority of white people in the process, and even if I fail at reaching the bar, I will still be in an excellent position to monetize the acquired lead. So win or fail, I always come out ahead.
Please don't presume to speak for all minorities and even worse, dismiss other people's opinions just because they belong to certain groups like you just did.
Are you discriminating me to give an opinion because I am a male? I don't think it is fair. I could also say that you shouldn't talk about gender equality if you don't live in a country with high gender equality and so you argument doesn't add any value with the discussion.
This statement is just way out there. I almost want to say the opposite to you.
I've known an African American PhD who says this. After his defense he had trouble finding a job. My company was ramping up hiring of minorities. He sent me his resume, and I asked him if I should enter his minority status in the system as it would prioritize his application. He said "No way."
He didn't get a decent job for a whole year after that. He doesn't regret it at all.
I'm glad at least that some IT employers care less about education and look more at potential and whatnot.
I've often thought about how I feel knowing something as simple as the postcode I grew up in affected how I got somewhere, but always arrive at it being a net positive.
There are pros and cons to it all of course, and it doesn't take away from the fear that you don't deserve it. But, society needs to kickstart the fortuitous cycle of opportunity, direction and inspiration somehow. When a group of people have no role models, nobody empathetic of their route or life chances or aware of any other skills they can bring, we can't progress.
When we're talking about whether someone is more or less qualified, it's not like it's a AAA+ grade male vs a CCD- female. It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table.
Actually, diversity initiatives can decrease cultural diversity in tech. Many diversity initiatives leave immigrants behind and mainly benefit Americans.
It can be said that foreigners are considered more "culturally diverse" than Americans in USA based workplaces. Diversity programs might increase gender and racial diversity, but also decrease foreign representation as a result and make a company less culturally diverse.
We're treating highly educated specialists tasked with delivering highly complex, variable and nuanced output like 19th century factory workers. How many hundreds of books have been published on just the question of measuring employee productivity, yet for the sake of this conversation we toss terms like "more qualified" around like they are law.
That's not what the OP is saying though, he's saying "qualified" as seen in demonstrated performance after the hiring. It would've been clearer had he said "better at the job" (as in, leading to a greater total company value) than "qualified".
(Ok yes, people see a woman to hire and say +1 point because you a woman and will us pay less taxes because of the diversity balance. This shit happens too)
You talk like you have written those books, enlighten me.
The problem they're solving shouldn't be "we need more women in tech, so let's lower the bar for them". The problem they should be solving is "There are two candidates for this leadership position. One tends to use assertiveness and authority to get the job done. The other uses encouragement and persuasion. Who do you hire?". The default response is often to choose the person with the leadership style you've seen many times before, and thus the person who uses unfamiliar, equally effective techniques doesn't get a shot.
You sure as hell shouldn't hire me because I'm female. You should hire me because the set of techniques I employ to do my job are effective, even though they might be less familiar to you. Every tech lead has a different style, and that style has been tailored to that individual. Measure the outcome, not arbitrary characteristics that contribute to the outcome.
I couldn't agree more with it. And I think it is one of the points of the infamous memorandum. We should change how the companies works internally so we can use other skills in our benefit. I am not sure the diversity programs work like this, because if they worked like this the focus should be more inside the internal culture than in the hiring process. They would say something like we need to teach people in the company to increase the tolerance and assess diversity skill instead of increasing the diversity. Increasing diversity should be an emerge feature not a goal.
This is like saying "I'd enjoy my success more without the Mortgage Interest Deduction unfairly advantaging me financially". Theoretically feasible, but in practical reality, uh no. If you're hacking it in a competitive environment and you have a life, you most assuredly have 1,000 more important/interesting things on your mind.
Do I want a better salary? a better job? yes. But I want a quality of life, I don't want to work long hours. So I wont have something better because I have other preferences in life. And I am ok with it.
A more relevant one would be whether brokers are now showing houses or discussing financing options differently to people based a perception of the person's identity group.
The hiring process is subjective, not fair. There is extensive evidence that just having a name that is assumed to be female makes a candidate less likely to get hired. Without diversity programs, less qualified men are hired over more qualified women, producing the skewed results we observe.
Women are on average more qualified than the men in the same jobs they hold because of these social forces, so your assumptions make you particularly systematically wrong.
Is this really an honest assessment? I haven't yet seen a single reply to the manifesto that addresses its points and counters the supposedly "lousy arguments" in a neutral tone and objective manner. Please point me to one if you have...
This is not exactly a strong counter-argument.
> If...
Nothing empirical in that sentence just assumption. And even if we assume that statement is true, on the other side of same coin are qualified men that didn't get job solely because of their genitalia.
if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.
This article specifically avoids countering the original article point-by-point. I would love to see an article or comment that does that.
I found this post to be the only one I saw that actually managed to rebut some of the memo author's conclusions. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...
> And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I'm not going to link to it here as it's not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.
> Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.
Yay we believe in "a culture in which those with alternative views [...] feel safe sharing their opinions" (except when they diverge from our view). We want them to feel safe sharing them and we show this through firing people who ask for an open discussion. Bravo google. And linking to the manifesto or at least quoting an example of what is wrong is bad, because ....?
(Yes a shitstorm is brewing and there now is a hot headed "discussion", but the main problem is that nobody actually references or talks about the actual manifesto. People talk _about it_, but quotes are sparse and the critics never point out any (logical) fallacies. It's a much to emotional "debate".)
Anyway thanks to the full text I now actually could revise my opinion on the whole matter (I actually have yet to follow all the references/sources), but am disgusted at googles reaction to fire someone because their opinion created a toxic reaction. If such a reaction spawns, maybe there is room for an open discussion and maybe we can find a solution everybody is happy with. Killing off unwelcome voices doesn't sound like a welcoming environment to me and unethically at best.
Edit: Let me close with a quote from the manifesto in relation to the response from the VP of Diversity
> My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology.
He now seems kind of right at least in that regard.
Secondly, you really believe that even if had all the references in the world that it would make a difference?
This topic is way past "references". People believe what they want to believe. In the end, reality wins.
These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained.
The idea of qualification is something that is misunderstood far into academia as it assumes some sort of quantitative measurement is possible.
The reality is that short of what you have paper on (she's a bachelor he's a bachelor) qualifications really isn't about skills but about personality and I would challenge anyone to find even close to a way of measuring how a person fits into a company short of asking the people who work there whether they think person X fits or not.
Furthermore the idea that diversity is better for companies really need to die. Diversity is good in many cases but you can easily have one company filled with women and one company filled with men and having the group of women being of very diverse backgrounds and the group of men being of very diverse backgrounds. You still have diversity. Hell you can even have a group of women being of exactly the same background and a group of men being of exactly the same background and do really really well.
The idea the women brings something to the table simply by being women or that men does simply by being men is what is so wrong with this whole conversation. The individual brings something to the table but the individual needs to fit into a culture not being force fed into it.
Having hired and interviewed a great deal of people in my life in the tech industry I think it's fair to say that most companies will look for ANY talent they can get to. Talent is extremely hard to find and being a woman or being a man is not enough.
More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women if they feel it's better for their culture. But until they start doing that to the same extent that men does and until they start to the same extent having interest in technology early on, gender based anything will always be hurting more than it will help because just having gender diversity isn't going to make your company better off there simply aren't anything proving that.
And just to be clear. I have worked with women and men far better than me. When it comes to the best there really isn't any difference. I have worked for plenty of female bosses and they are as good as the men I have worked with.
And if you define corporate responsibility as doing only what is needed to put effective people in chairs, then there is no need for diversity programs to meet corporate responsibility (at least, assuming sufficient talent).
But your entire comment misses the phenomenon of biases having affected women their entire lives, from what hobbies they were steered towards, to their experiences during education, to their interviewing process, to their working environments after having jobs. These are all part of what gender diversity programs are trying to combat.
And honestly, I'd say that this statement right here:
> These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained.
is more of a really effective example of the actual problem, and an illustration of why gender diversity programs are needed, than an effective counterpoint against them.
Biases are affecting men, women, red haired, young people, old people, gays, lesbians, fat people, short people, people with too much education, people with almost none etc their whole life.
Singling out gender is exactly what's so wrong with this whole discussion.
Try and get a job in SV after you turn 45.
The actual problem if you really want to focus on something that would naturally bring more women into the industry, is that less women start companies or get into tech early on.
If you for some reason want to solve the problem of gender diversity, get more women to start a tech company.
It's really that simple.
I would have sworn that this would be "Not being sexist 101", but apparently words do not mean what I think they should…
"from what hobbies they were steered towards"
Ok, but the thing I don't quite understand here is that it's not like men are "steered" towards tech that strongly either. At least when I was young it was not "cool" to be some geek who sat infront of the computer all day, in fact quite the opposite.
"to their experiences during education"
I'm in Europe and I have no clue how a woman can have a worse experience in the educational system over here. Women tend to perform better in school and I'd to so far as to say that things are probably the other way around. Based on anecdata more "traditional" boys/men are probably very poorly served by the current educational system and there could be much done here.
"to their interviewing process, to their working environments after having jobs"
Again, I'm rather confused here. Is this some reference to startups? This whole debacle seems to show that women, at least at the larger corporations, has some clear benefits. As anecdata I can add that I've had women tell me "getting an internship at Corp XYZ was very easy, they kept telling me they were looking to hire more women". I've heard a professor comment on hiring new faculty by saying "If we don't hire a woman we have failed", etc.
Are there boxes with pictures of boys on containing toy guns, cars, trucks, diggers, cranes, computers, science kits?
Is there a section for girls' toys and boys' toys?
That's your cultural steering of gender roles, right there.
Ever seen someone think a particular book isn't "appropriate" for a girl to read? Or another book isn't "something boys will be interested in"?
Did the girls grow up seeing women on TV programmes who were scientists, executives, lawyers? Or were those people almost all men? What does that tell them about the world as they watch?
Okay so you can argue television should reflect the real world, but in doing so and simultaneously acting as part of a child's education in how the world should be (which you are, whether intentionally or not), your TV programme also acts to perpetuate the status quo.
I really don't feel there are any mysteries why we see so much gender segregation in career paths.
Similarly: how many people do you know who seriously consider nursing as a viable profession for a man to pursue? What about preschool childcare? Kindergarten teacher? Who cleans your offices? Are they female? All the cleaners in my current office are female.
It is not hard to see the cultural pressure on both boys and girls to go in certain directions.
Sure there may be some bias in early childhood between the sexes, but honestly, I have a somewhat hard time seeing this having a serious effect on someone's career decision much later.
Firstly, this whole argument just seems like it could just as well be some urban legend. What possible proof is there that this actually has any effect? I'm not even sure how one would go about investigating this. I feel throwing around some argument which seem plausable (to some people) but in fact have basically no solid support and then treating it as if it were an established fact is, well, maybe not so good. It seems more like something the president would do. [1]
Secondly, and more importantly, there is a very significant number of both men and women who during high school will receive a fairly through introduction to the natural sciences and to me this would seem a much more significant than some trucks and dolls one played with when one were 5 years old. To provide a more precise counterargument, many boys wants to become firefighters or police officers, yet when they grow up, many abandons these career plans.
I admit I may be extremely naive, but the argument about people on TV has always struck me as somewhat odd. It seems to rest on the assumption that most people (well, at least women/girls) in fact think men and women are different, otherwise, why would it matter what gender the people involved have?
Finally regarding the last point about career paths, well, the problem with all the examples is that there are jobs with similar pay where almost all employees are men, compare say kindergarten teacher with being a construction worker. Sure, I can admit that there is some pressure here and it being (significantly) easier for a man to become a construction worker and a woman becoming a kindergarten teacher. But if there was a wage gap between these two professions it is not as clear to me.
I would also like to point out that one can discuss things in different context, if these arguments were just made in general about how (some) women feel and how things have affected them and whatnot, that is one thing. But we are not just discussing things in general, instead there are some (at least to me) very serious accusations of of discrimination, and then we have as a society enacted and allowed a large scale discrimination of men in order to offset this. And now we have a man being fired for daring to even question these accusations that have been made against him.
[1]: If there is some solid support for this view I will happily admit I am wrong.
Try some science.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
The simple counter argument to this, and what changed my mind utterly, was that the number of woman on boards never changed. "Women will setup companies" was what they said in the 70s, 50 years ago.
It never worked until we started forcing it. There's still a ridiculously small percentage of female chairs. There's still a ridiculously small percentage of female board members.
If they're just as good, as you say, and I also believe, why didn't it change? Because gender discrimination is rife.
Without positive discrimination, the status quo did not change, will not change.
Doesn't matter anything you said above, it's all noise. It doesn't correct itself like you say it will.
The reason why people get board seats is again one of those misunderstood discussions. It has absolutely nothing to do with qualification as in non-at-all. What it has to do with is the board members access to network, political power, special experience etc.
So as long as you and other keep insisting qualification is somehow important in this discussion, you are actually the ones making the noise.
Qualification has nothing to do with this.
If you're having a problem getting a job 'cause you're old in SV, I'm sorry. I have no such age discrimination problem in the UK, loads of jobs here but not any where as well paid as the US. I might point out that you had 20 years to make a ton of bank. If you want to fix age discrimination, campaign for it, but leave it out of this thread.
As for companies being boys clubs, to me that's clearly unacceptable, it's simply wrong to say that a "company culture" can be male only as that's clear discrimination.
If you think that discrimination's ok, it feels as if you want to take it out on women because you want to go back to living in a man-cave, replete with pizzas and then a late night coding sessions followed by a game of Quake, where women don't fit because they spurned us at high school. And if they want to join in, they better start their own company.
Do that with your mates, that view doesn't belong in a company, shouldn't belong in a company. It's not a male-only social club.
But if you agree that's wrong, you and I caused this problem, and we're the ones who have to fix it, have the opportunity to fix it. Perhaps our Dads and Grandads told us computers are for men only, but they aren't and we don't have to wait until your kids are growing up to fix this. We can fix this now, and positive discrimination is a way that works.
Tech is growing up and we need to fix the gender imbalance we helped cause.
But it's now clear that without strawmen you have no arguments just insults and claims about my person you can't back up. But I guess that's kind of symptomatic for this discussion isn't it?
Old white male coders in SV, which it now turns out you have no personal experience of and just making stuff up about:
Try being +40 in Silicon Valley
Try and get a job in SV after you turn 45.
Examples of you saying women can't be part of our club, because they didn't play with the right toys when they were 12:
Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact
men also takes the most high paying jobs because more of them were interested in technology early on and are better at selling themselves
is that less women start companies or get into tech early on
Examples of you saying women can't be a part of existing tech companies, they should form their own:
get more women to start a tech company
More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women
Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks
In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards
Those are not arguments they are facts you can educate yourself about them which is obviously not in your interest.
Furthermore I would suggest you learn the language of the country you live in. None of those quotes mean what you claim they mean.
You've just cited an anecdote to try and counter mountains of scientific research.
There could be all sorts of nefarious stuff going on. Could he have been refused a promotion and now blames women? What's the back story? Has he gone on record? Is there a real problem or is a misogynistic manager using it as an excuse to him to cover his own incompetence?
And yes it is an anecdote, so no there's no citations, but most posts in this discussion don't cite citations either.
What if women are just not as intelligent? What if they could be as intelligent, but are lazy?
I appreciate you think you're being rational and reasonable. You're not.
The only way to reach truth is to be willing to look for it.
You're just "ask"-ing if women are as "not good/stupid", or that perhaps they "aren't interested/are lazy".
It's just a gender stereotype dressed up as a question. It's an insult dressed in an insinuation.
Women do make different choices we know that for a fact. Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact. Women start far fewer companies than men we know that for a fact.
We also know that women score way higher grades in school which we also know for a fact doesn't matter in real life.
So maybe women (in general) are just prioritizing life differently. That doesn't mean they aren't as intelligent, smart etc.
If you can't make your argument without pushing for strawmen then you don't have one yourself.
It's just trying being polite about it. It's still an irrational bias, no matter how you dress it up.
There is a world of difference between someone having spent their entire life coding and someone only starting at university. Or someone having learned to draw from the age of 5 and someone who starts way later in life. That applies to men as to women.
Being not as good is about experience and knowledge having put in the hours. It is not about intelligence.
[1] http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-...
Also, can you clarify what you mean when you state that pediatrics is "an example that's a biological function primarily to do with women." Are you stating that women are innately (in other words, due to their gender) better suited to administering healthcare to minors as compared to men?
64% of practicing gynecologists are men, but only women have vaginas.
You don't have to give birth to children to be a pediatrician or a gynecologist.
Please stop making these unqualified statements on very touchy subjects
It's like claiming climate change isn't real.
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...
This is hardly the only study. There are many more.
My favorite was the law students from second tier schools where males who signaled coming from middle class backgrounds had a huge statistically disadvantage from males signalling wealth.
The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.
https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...
Bias and prejudice are real and evaluating people is hard. To make things worse, your brain likes to save energy by substitution rigorous evaluation with heuristic evaluation and then convince itself it did the rigorous work.
The problem isn't gender discrimination is rife, it's that thousands of forms of discrimination is rife because heuristic-based discrimination is what we excel at, not rigorous evaluation.
I hope that didn't make it more touchy.
Yes we have biases all of us but they are certainly not by any metrics confined to only women. Try being +40 in Silicon Valley, try being black or latino male on WallStreet, try making it as a hip-hop artist as a black guy. Try being fat in the fashion industry, try being a nerd in high-school.
The world is rife with bias and prejudice against all sorts of "these are not like me" but the solution is not and have never been to force quotas through whether in board rooms or on the job market.
If you want to change things changes them at their root cause. Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks so that they are less depending on existing ones. Teach them not to excel at school as that doesn't really matter but to learn how to sell themselves. Teach them that if a job posting names 10 skills and they have all but two it's still a job for them.
These are the real barriers to entry not modern day companies light biases.
Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed. It used male hobbies for both males and females. Rich females don't generally sail. I think their stereotypical activity would be humanitarian efforts.
And if it wasn't flawed, what conclusions do you draw from the study? Lower class women did 5 times better than lower class men. The lower class is many times larger than the upper class, so only a tiny percent of men enjoy the the upper class privilege while most men are doing terribly.
Looking at the big picture by aggregating the lower and upper class, women do better than men.
> http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-....
I'll give this some legitimacy but it's one study and not completely convincing. It can't be generalized outside of science research positions.
One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.
On the disparate power dynamic, I doubt the males with power care about the wellbeing of the other 99.99% of males. They will look out for the interests of super high class males which may not overlap with the interests of lower class males.
I think that non high class females benefit much more than non high class males from the power of super high class males. The super high class males will spend time around females and make transfer payments in the services industry. Sugar babes, prostitutes, strippers, webcaming, regular waitresses, etc. They are more likely to enjoy the wealth of high power males and have a much easier time forming a relationship (romantic or platonic) with a super high class male.
Most structural issues are gone today and those that are left benefit women as much as men. In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards.
Are you saying the study is flawed because women got more hires in this context and that doesn't reflect the larger aggregate trends? You realize this study doesn't reflect society as a whole, right? It reflects the resume screening habits of a sample of people from a cross section of law firms.
Rather than dismissing a study because it doesn't yield results that fit your worldview, how about you try understanding the context is was done in and reflecting on the culture where it happened? Don't give it a fleeting thought. Really consider the many possible stories it could be telling you, but don't settle on a favorite. Hold the many possible stories in your head instead, ask questions and try different stories.
People have all sorts of biases. I've known my share of bros who only hire pretty girls and other bros with common interests, taste and upbringing. If they were being studied, their numbers would probably yield similar results. Some of the bros I know would call in like-minded bros and then they'll call in the women for an interview to see if they're hot. If they were part of a similar study, their screening habits would definitely skew the numbers toward this trend. If it was up to me, I'd be counting how many of the pretty ones made into round two. (Let's just say they excel at recruiting and only hiring pretty girls.)
This is one small study that reflects an aggregate of biases of a sample of participants in one industry. It does not reflect the world. It doesn't reflect their industry. It doesn't reflect one bias. It is literally a snapshot in time of a sample of a cross section of society. We don't know how if those biases (there are many) were well-distributed or concentrated. Repeating the experiment may even yield very different results.
All that doesn't matter in the bigger picture, because for that slice of time & sample, we have enough evidence to suggest gross discrimination for that sample and time.
It's a reminder that the world is a complicated place and that there are all sorts of ways people discriminate against each other. What it reinforces is that superficial discrimination happens for all sorts of complex reasons, rather than simply saying everyone is guilty of one form of discrimination.
> One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.
Let's not be obtuse about accepting or dismissing these studies. People have a tendency to either overstate or discount their results when it serves their purpose. I gave you a very small sample and merely suggested that discrimination happens in the world and that discrimination can be complex and nonlinear. Take it with a grain of salt.
Or how exactly what are you arguing?
Because some men do more dangerous jobs, totally different men should get all the high paying ones? Perhaps for each man in coal mining, oil rigs, the army or deep sea fishing, we get a plushy finance or tech job exclusively for men?
Or tech workers should be paid less than coal miners?
I don't follow you?
> Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.
I understand that discussions within a business are different than talking with friends around the kitchen table, but I still think that you should go as far as you possibly can to have open discussions about sensitive topics like this. Of course you aren't going to open a dialogue about the benefits of white power, but there is still a lot of ground to cover between that and what people are doing this weekend. I think that the original article fits into that realm of what is acceptable to at least talk about, regardless of whether you disagree or not.
To which the diversity proponents are quick to rally a mob and get the guy fired. Open and honest discussion indeed.
If you are so insecure in your ideological position that you can't even have a discussion about it without calling foul, I'd consider that the best possible sign that you actually need to have that discussion.
It's the only way to make sure that it's properly rooted and based on fact, and to legitimize it, and by proxy, the means you use to further it.
Sticking your head in the sand to avoid criticism will probably do the exact opposite, and sure as hell wont further your cause.
It's been accepted for a long time that the place for arguments against racial, religious, or gender programs is not the workplace. I'm a man and I find his manifesto an issue, he said things about men that are blatantly untrue, and frankly unhealthy as well, and I wouldn't want to work with him.
People's opinion on their coworkers is for private discussions with their manager and HR, and don't get precedence over their colleagues comfort and security at work. It's been that way since black people got rights and women got the vote.
1. It wasn't published anonymously
2. What he's saying is not even close to promoting slavery or legally allowing religious discrimination
3. The entire point of the screed was that the diversity issue isn't talked about openly but should be. The response by Google's diversity chief literally says:
> Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.
So your assumption that these things should not be discussed at Google is wrong, at least in the eyes of their Diversity chief, who's opinion I would think is highly relevant in this case
Finally, like many others in this thread deride what's said in this article as untrue and unhealthy without ever backing it up. Obviously I'm not saying the article is 100% right, but most the claims he makes about men and women have scientific backing, they are just not regularly discussed. As others have noted his premises about men and women being biologically different are basically a summary of this study:
And that's the problem. In a truly open forum for ideas and discussion I would expect ideas about, like your example cites, the benefits of slavery to be actually freely discussed without negative consequence to the people involved. We don't get better as a society by not examining ideas in detail frequently.
>People's opinion on their coworkers is for private discussions with their manager and HR, and don't get precedence over their colleagues comfort and security at work.
Stated differently: Someone has an opinion that the system currently in place doesn't fully work and wants to discuss change.
If we're not allowed to invite to a discussion, how else do you suggest we facilitate change, or investigate the need for such change?
You don't seriously imply that there's never a need to review the basis for existing programs? Or are you just ignoring the general principle of things "because diversity"?
That's not how I read it.
I read it as trying as carefully as possible to start a discussion about having a discussion about a topic by many deemed to be sensitive. And change doesn't have to merely be cutting something, as you suggest. It can be replacing something ineffective/unfair with something more effective or less unfair.
There's literally nothing in that sentence which says "we need to remove/cut down on all programs related to subject $x". I'm not sure where you're getting that from. To me, your response to this fairly harmless email seems overly defensive. Are you acting rationally based on what has been said, or are overreacting based on things you assume to be said?
Maybe this would be a good time to (re?)-read the original email[1]?
[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
"We need to have an honest discussion" or the dreaded word "review" always prefaces dicing up some policy, usually without an adequate replacement.
Encouraging immediate, unthinking, righteous and moralistic condemnation over rational discourse on issues close to the friction points of various cultural/ideological conflicts, is quite a dangerous thing to do, even if its satisfying and cathartic (that's precisely why its so damn dangerous).
Having an open discussion means you accept that other participants may have very different opinions, and agree that honest fact-based discussion is the correct solution.
In any case, screaming "WE'RE NOT EVEN DISCUSSING THAT!" and calling for getting the person fired is hardly a proper response. What I'd like to see is a fact-based response to the memo, showing numbers/reasoning for the individual policies, etc.
My main take away is you really can't openly discuss this topic (not just in Google), which was one of the points. Ironic.
No, the use of English in politics (which this is) is pretty consistent, actually, in my experience. If he wanted to have a discussion, point at a policy and suggest an alternative rather than falling back on "merit is good, women are terrible engineers".
Replacing discriminatory hiring with paid apprenticeships and other education for groups the organisation is lacking in, would be a great example. Men can still get into Google because there's more of them in the pool. They're never discriminated against for a job, since the apprenticeship pool is separate from the job pool. Google gets a more-qualified, more-diverse workplace with more control over its training program. A win for everybody.
Secondly, I find it perfectly valid to discuss the very foundation of the policies (instead of discussing individual policies).
FWIW this does not mean I agree with the memo. But I think the immediate calls for getting the guy fired (and firing him) are damaging for the discussion.
I hope you'll forgive me for saying it but that is my definition of the "burying your head in the sand" expression.
edit: furthermore, what if he's in fact saying that he wants them to be cut down? Why isn't that a reasonable motive to want something to be more closely examined?
If people would like to discuss this, they can at least discuss it for what it is - an attack on the program. Treat it as such. Don't hide behind "he just wants to talk".
There are, no doubt, many people who discuss Google's diversity programs every day on a good-faith basis. They don't need a manifesto in order to do so.
What's the problem of wanting some light shed on a program because someone openly believes it should be shut down? They're not doing an executive decision to shut it down without allowing for discussion, which is exactly what Google management is doing. He posted an opinion, partially based on facts and partially based on conjecture to bring attention to it.
In short: there's nothing wrong with wanting a program to be shut down and using that as motivation to put it in the spotlight. I don't see how motivations should get in the way of discussion and examination of existing systems; a system that is beneficial to it's environment should be able to stand on its own merits.
ugh, my "in short" is as long as its preceding paragraph :(
Phrasing it more honestly and straightforward would be heresy in a corporate environment.
If the author is wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool.
I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far lower female graduation and entry level application rates to CS jobs. If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. That means that the overall point of the authors manifesto, that programs designed to specifically increase the ratio of female engineers are unfair, is true.
We need to do something about the low number of women going into tech fields in school. Punishing companies for not hiring women when the vast majority of candidates are men is a perverse incentive that is biased against men and doesn't fix the real problem.
It's like punishing someone for taking more yellow onions at the market when there's 3 times as many nice looking ones as white onions. The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude.
Fixing this at the education level would mean owning up to a mistake. It's much easier to just fine everyone to make it look like you're fixing a "problem" caused by inadequate regulations.
b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible
most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management
a few years ago even <10% [2]
[1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu... [2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...
I don't think the percentages in management really matter because you tend to get promoted from lower rungs. Management % probably reflects the programmer hires 5-10 years ago.
We really need to look at the percentage of female applicants. In the ~1000 applications I've seen directly from indeed etc, less than 20% we're female. I didn't count, but it seemed closer to 10%. It's so bad that for some job listings I remember not receiving a single female application for 20+ males.
So choices in life means much more than we want to admit.
Of course women are being affected early on just as men but then the discussion should be about that rather than putting the guilt on companies who are just trying to make a business.
Also worth remembering that women CS grads entering the field used to be climbing at the same rate as lawyers and other similar fields, then something changed in the mid-1980s and while the other fields progressed ever-nearer 50%, CS numbers took a nosedive. I don't have good research into exactly why that happened, but I'm guessing women didn't say "oh we're doing 32bit computers now? Nah you keep this one bros" ;)
How do we fix this? I don't think the silicon valley startup will ever appeal to women. Live in a closet for three years for a 10% chance to make a million dollars. Those odds only attract people with an appetite for risk. Mostly, unsurprisingly, young men. The problem with that is that silicon valley represents the field.
To get more women we need to change the image of the profession. I'm of the opinion that females just don't want to do software development and that decision is made really young.
Anecdotal, but I know plenty of guys that tinkered with PC's as young as 10 years old, and zero women that did so. It's seen as a boy thing, like cars.
That's my memory of it anyway, boys got pushed to go into STEM the second they showed any aptitude, girls were just sort of expected to keep it up.
My wife is more educated than I, with a masters degree. But she wanted to stay home, work part time, and not have our kids raised by a third party.
The traditional family structure for Homo sapiens has strong biological and environmental roots, which in turn caused "societal traditions". Changing that in a few generations seems quite unlikely.
I think the change we need to make is less about the profession and more about the people in the profession. We need to make it a field that seems open to women. Currently it isn't. I don't have a daughter, but I'd be very hesitant to suggest to her to go into the SW field.
BTW, my sister tinkered with PCs as a kid. It is interesting that she went on to get a degree in statistics and me in computer science. She works in policy now, and me in CS -- despite the fact that both of us had very similar achievement paths through HS. To this day she is better at most maths than I am, but most people seem to assume I'm better (at least when it comes up).
If we're serious about fixing the ratio it needs to be done with policy and young, well before students graduate highschool.
What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues.
Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems.
How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds.
[0]
1977 Atari 2600
1977 Apple II
1981 Sinclair ZX81
1981 BBC Micro
1982 Commodore 64
1983 WarGames (movie)
1983 Nintendo Entertainment System
1985 Amiga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers
[1]
"When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64."
"My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school."
"1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program."
"In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work."
"My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD."
"I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it."
"I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879
[2]
"It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20."
We would have loved it if anyone did, alas that wasn't the case. I'm glad things have changed and you're no longer an outcast if you're a geeky kid; I feel that I paid a big personal price for being that way inclined, but later on there was a payoff in that it was easy to get into programming as a career, when the Internet started happening in the mid late 90s.
If my next kid is a girl, she'll have no shortage of computer science ahead of her. My son's already way deep. :)
One of the examples in the podcast expands on the viewpoint that computers are for men and that idea is ingrained even to the level of the family, so computers are kept in the sons bedroom so incidentally the daughter had less access to it.
Its not suggested by guidance counselors to females when looking to select electives in junior high school.
So if they are seen as a male hobby or interest, at a time when what your peers think is so important, girls are less likely to want to venture into that area and be outside the norm.
The interesting thing, to me, is that you can't look at those 10-year-olds in isolation. My experience mirrors yours and, yet, if you look back further, I'll bet you find that those 10-year-old tinkerers almost all have some history with Legos or other such construction toy that, very early, started building the guess-fail-iterate problem solving model that I believe is so important to computer aptitude.
One of the side effects to being "good with computers" is that you end up getting asked to do a lot of tech support. Over the years, I've seen so many people who are so afraid of doing something wrong that they can't figure out how to do what they want despite being otherwise intelligent enough. They don't realize what's perfectly summed up here: https://xkcd.com/627/
Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that.
This SMBC comic sums up the issue perfectly: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883
On a side note, I've also noticed that the bulk of my female classmates in college and the bulk of my female coworkers since then have been either Indian or Chinese. It might be worth exploring why Indian and Chinese women are more willing to work in tech than western women.
Still, it proves that a better gender ratio is definitely possible in the US as well
I don't know that you can say that financial success is more important in those countries, but I think you can say that tech is a more viable path to that financial success in those countries since careers like finance, law and medicine (the stereotypical high-paid professions in the US) mean working in their own country rather than coming to the US. If you're primarily motivated by money, as an American, there are surer paths to getting it than writing code. But as a foreigner that wants to work in the US (and therefore make more money), writing code is one of the best ways to do that.
If you dont believe me ask them yourself, but make a clear distinction between immigrant and first gen.
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China.
As Adam Grant says, while there are some (small) differences between men and women, they're "not biologically determined"
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...
Alas, I knew no girls who were into this even the slightest.
Suppose that the much higher proportions of female programmers in poorer countries might be because their choice is more limited; there is way more incentive in a poor country to want to land a fairly secure and well paid job, because you risk starving if you don't.
Going for a liberal arts degree (or similar) in India, Romania or China would then be discouraged.
Conversely, in the West, people are more free to pursue whatever profession they may like, because they most likely won't starve if they do.
I'm not saying that this would be the only explanation for the gender gap, but I do think the explanation involves many more factors than 'computer games in the 80s'.
I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely, especially since there are many studies that corroborate that they _do exist_.
> I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely...
"naïve", huh...
So, Adam Grant is one of the world's foremost experts in this area. Did you read his fully-sourced article, linked from my parent post, that refutes this exact "biological" point?
The problem is that many people seem to forget that the difference applies to averages, and therefore mean very little on an individual level.
In other words, it's not far fetched to assume that a part of the gender gap in STEM/CS is because of biology, since an average trend would influence said gap. Conversely, it's incorrect to claim that a specific woman is more ill-suited doing STEM/CS than a man, just because she's a woman.
Also, I didn't go through all the references, but Adam Grant (at least indirectly) cites the 1995 study by Steele & Aronson which has been proved to be of shoddy quality. Like everyone else who denies any possibility of biology influencing how people think, he seems to have a political axe to grind. I therefore consider his opinions somewhat unreliable.
Regarding the quality and replicability of stereotype threat studies, that came in vogue after the seminal Steele & Aronson 1995 paper:
https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/does-stereotype-t...
https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/hidden-fig...
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/12/30/is-stereotype-threat...
I think Scott Alexander makes one rather poor argument towards the end of his debate with Grant.
> I agree this is surprising. But let’s also not claim it supports the sexism theory, unless you think people in computer science became more sexist between 1980 and today for some reason.
Attitudes change precisely that quickly. Look at the massive change in attitudes towards homosexuality.
Then look at the way computers were marketed directly at boys in exactly that period https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
The way I read it, Grant claims that the decline can't have a biological explanation, Scott agrees but counter-claims that it does not necessarily follow the reason must be sexism then, and then goes on to provide a plausible non-sexism explanation. Are you reading it differently?
Regarding the article you referenced, I'm not sure I understand how it supports the sexism theory either. Up to about '83 women CS share rapidly and steadily increased (indicating decreasing sexism, I presume?), then Apple started marketing to boys, video games producers started marketing to boys, and because of that sexism within the industry immediately and dramatically increased? Or is it "sexism increased, and that caused Apple and video game producers to market to boys"? What's the narrative here?
More object-level, or nitpicking, if you will - the Apple ad they referenced didn't actually market "to boys" - nobody would buy an Apple II for a boy in 1985, it was too expensive, around $5K in today's money. The ad merely used a boy as the lead character, and no, mischievously pressing a button on the girl's keyboard does not constitute "teasing girls' computer skills".
If so, the existence of a problem at one stage in the pipeline is a poor excuse for failing to address a bottleneck at a later stage. Particularly when the actor in question is mostly involved in the later stages.
To make up numbers, if a student has 3 times a high risk of switching a program after a failed exam, the chance that they will graduates will be significant lower. Having a gender segregated education fixes this, but as soon the graduate enters the work market the same phenomenon happen after a failed interview unless they only seek work which is also gender segregated.
You are assuming that women are choosing their college degrees in a vacuum. They don't. They ask: can I see myself doing this job? Is this a worthwhile investment? And when they cannot see themselves working in tech, because they see no-one like themselves in IT, they choose other fields.
> Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude.
What specific mistakes can you point to? What particular solutions are within reach of the government? Because right now this just looks like shifting responsibility onto the state.
Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code.
Maybe it's different for "career programmers," if such a thing even exists.
If you're like me, you probably thought of yourself as smart, and had a short list of "smart things that would be cool when I grow up." Astronaut, doctor, computers, stuff like that.
The movie War Games was honestly important to me and my career. I was small and kind of dorky but pretty smart (at least, that was what all the adults told me, I suspect even that is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy) but Matthew Broderick showed me how cool that could be. I could see myself in him. And, you know, there were TV shows and movies that made me want to be an astronaut too. I'm not saying War Games was some seminal moment in my life. But it was an influence, for sure.
And when I told people I wanted to do that, they never made a face. Or they suggested it on their own "What do you want to be when you grow up? Are you going to be a scientist?" You know what people say to my girl? "Are you going to be a nurse/ballerina/etc when you grow up?" We all pick up on this kind of thing at a young age, and it shapes our perceptions of where we fit.
Women choosing what fields they go into is shaped by their role-models. Do they see female programmers on TV? Do they know any family members that are programmers? That kind of thing. Fixing this has to start somewhere.
The question then becomes why interest isn't shown in the first place.
You could argue, as the "manifesto" writer did, that there's some kind of innate biological explanation. To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof. It's true that there are some differences between the sexes. Women do a bit better on some mental tests than men and vice versa. But how much of that is biology and how much is upbringing? For instance, from an early age, studies show parents make girls say "please" more than they do for boys, and emphasize sharing. So do women fair better on some emotional tests because of some innate biology or because we've emphasized that kind of thing literally since they could talk? It's really really hard to tease these things apart. And it's so hard because those differences are tiny. If we assumed those differences really are 100% biological (again, a big assumption), it might explain why Computer Science would be 55% men, and 45% women. It wouldn't explain the huge disparity we see today.
So if the reason women don't show interest isn't biological, what is it? A further complicating factor to the whole discussion is we're talking about why women aren't in computer science now. It hasn't always been this way. Historically, the field of computing had lots of women. A lot of women went from "human computers" who did math by hand to programming the early mainframes (the movie Hidden Figures shows a time at NASA when this was happening). While a gender gap has always existed, it used to be a lot smaller. Women made up about 1/3 of people with CS degrees in the late 70s and early 80s. But as the STEM gender gap has been closing everywhere else, it's actually gotten wider in CS, and only CS. Why? The "it's biology and girl brains are different" argument can't account for that. Biology didn't change.
What did change was society. Movies like Weird Science and War Games (my favorite) came out. The "cool hacker" entered Pop culture, and the stereotype they settled on was a boy. Girls were a lot less likely to have computers in the home as well. This is an interesting article (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...) that talks about how early home computers were marketed as a toy to buy for boys.
It's like we as a society decided that computers fell into the "boy stuff" category with GI Joe and baseball, not the "girl stuff" category like Barbie and softball.
I think it all adds up to a pretty convincing argument that biology has nothing (or very, very little) to do with it.
I don't understand why people think this is such an extraordinary claim. It would be extraordinary if the sexes were exactly equal. There are very obvious and enormous differences between men and women in numerous areas. Why would we expect them to come out exactly equal?
But if you want stronger evidence, try this: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
>Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d= 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
The point about differences in personality was brought up in the Google memo and perhaps explains your "please" thing. But look at the "interest in people vs interest in things" statistic. A d value of 1.18 is enormous. That means 93% of men are more "thing oriented" than the average women. And that's assuming there is no noise in the measurement, likely the true value is even higher!
There's also this later on in the document:
>When Del Giudice computed the Mahalanobis D for gender differences in Big Five traits, based on a published data set, he found that although the mean d for gender differences in individual Big Five traits was 0.27 (conventionally considered to be ‘small’), the Mahalanobis D was in contrast 0.84, suggesting a relatively large mean separation of men and women in the multivariate ‘space’ of personality
To give an example: In the U.S., teaching is consider a woman's profession, because it involves "nurturing." But in India, teaching is a man's profession, because it involves training the next generation workforce to participate in the economy. Even if you suppose women are more "nurturing" innately, that doesn't explain any particular demographic distribution among, say, teachers.
Another example is the fact that 60% of accountants are women. Accounting is not only about "things" rather than people, but it's often about completely abstract "things" (e.g. accrued tax credits). Women also are more "agreeable." But within, for example, the legal profession, the cooperative practice of transactional law has a lower representation of women than the conflict-oriented area of litigation.
Within STEM: over 40% of math majors are women, but only about 20% of CS majors. In other words, "social" and "people-oriented" women evidently prefer a field where people work almost completely alone on completely abstract concepts. Meanwhile, Pinterest's engineering team is almost all men.
The point isn't whether biological differences exist. The point is whether the evidence for biological differences explains what we observe in reality. And it really doesn't (not without egregious handwaving, anyway).
There have been a number of experiments trying to remove all cultural influences from kids and see what toys they prefer. Despite their best efforts, boys still prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. Why should we expect the differences in interests to disappear with age?
Second, where do you get the statistic that 40% of math majors are women? Just a quick Google search and I found this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-wom...
>In mathematics, just 15 percent of tenure-track positions are held by women, one of the lowest percentages among the sciences, along with computer science (18 percent), and engineering (14 percent)
They are even worse than computer science. This is about exactly what I would expect. (The article of course blames sexism. Since they can't consider any other explanation. But they don't present any evidence to support that.)
Even if the differences aren't perfectly predictive of real world outcomes, so what? I'm not claiming they are. All I'm saying is we shouldn't expect the distribution of interest to be a perfect 50:50 split between men and women. If the personality differences between men and women are as significant as these studies show, it would be very surprising if every profession had a perfect gender ratio.
Computer programming in particular is extremely interest driven. Programmers like programming and do it in their free time. Most of them taught themselves to do it before they studied it formally. As opposed to your other examples like accounting. How many people do accounting in their free time just for fun?
And even if there was a gender difference in terms of preferring trucks to dolls, what would that really be measuring? Again, a five month old couldn't possibly have an association between trucks and building things. You could just as easily be measuring the degree to which infants have an affinity for faces. You can't get from that to a preference for/against CS without a whole lot of handwaving. Which is ultimately the big problem. You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation. It's an argument that doesn't just have little explanatory power, what explanatory power it does have is based on gendered characterizations. (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).
As to math preferences, you're comparing tenure track professors, while I was referring to undergraduate degree holders (hence "math majors"). Women earn over 40% of math/stat undergraduate degrees: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor....
> (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).
If women don't go into CS because society as a whole views it as a thing-oriented discipline and women are more people-oriented than thing-oriented, this opens up the possibility of reframing CS to be more people-oriented, changing its perception in society, thus causing more women to become interested in CS.
The memo had this to say on that topic:
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
Which actually sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Might as well just measure what toys they prefer when they come out of the womb. No shit a five month old has no idea what a truck or a doll is. But by the age of four they will definitely prefer trucks as expected.
>You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation.
I did provide a theory (things vs people), but it's not really necessary. The original comment suggested that there were no personality or behavioral differences between men and women. This is a ridiculous claim. I have showed there are huge differences between the preferences of men and women.
Why would we expect two different groups with (statistically) different personalities and interests to make exactly the same career choices? I can't necessarily predict which factors are the most relevant, or which traits correlate with which careers and how strongly. Those are specifics. But I would be completely shocked if the correlation between mental and personality traits and career choice is absolutely zero. And if they aren't zero, that will necessarily imply a difference between the genders.
The alternative theory is that "it's all cultural". This theory also makes no specific predictions. No matter what outcome is observed, you can blame it on culture. You can invent a just-so story about how mathematicians are less sexist than programmers or something. It doesn't require or present any evidence. It isn't falsifiable. If one cultural factor is ruled out (e.g. discrimination), you can always make another and shove it in (e.g. "role models".)
If you show evidence that one cultural explanation can't possibly be correct, they just move onto another. E.g. showing that there are the same percentage of female tech workers as female computer science graduates. So they move onto blaming sexism in universities. So you show there are the same percentage of girls interested in computer science in high school. And then the theory moves onto blaming parents for discouraging girls from computers... or something. And I can't think of any possible experiment that could test that and prove it false. So they say "aha, gotcha! It was culture all along!" as if they've proved something.
>E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated
The link I posted sort of addressed this. In less egalitarian cultures it's possible differences are more cultural. E.g. Indians straight up discriminate against female teachers and don't even make it an option. Or Indian parents forcing their girls to learn computer science because they see it as a way out of poverty. But as cultures become more egalitarian, gender differences will become more determined by biology. The west generally gives children a lot more freedom to choose their career and doesn't discriminate by sex. So gender preference will become a lot more important in such a society.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Any citation on this? i have seen most teachers being female...
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-teachers-day-women-teac...
The extraordinary claim here is that there are less women in tech due to sexism from men and we have yet to see the extraordinary evidence.
> So do women fair better on some emotional tests because of some innate biology or because we've emphasized that kind of thing literally since they could talk?
Evolution probably favoured caring mothers, you can observe this in animals as well.
> And it's so hard because those differences are tiny. If we assumed those differences really are 100% biological (again, a big assumption), it might explain why Computer Science would be 55% men, and 45% women. It wouldn't explain the huge disparity we see today.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0831_050831_...
"Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same, Gene Study Finds"
4% doesn't really explain why we are totally different form chimps. Not everything scales linear manner.
> Historically, the field of computing had lots of women.
That's both true and not, computing used to be radically different historically then it is right now.
> Why? The "it's biology and girl brains are different" argument can't account for that. Biology didn't change.
What if CS changed or what you do with your CS degree changed?
> that talks about how early home computers were marketed as a toy to buy for boys.
I can debunk that for you: look at countries where computers weren't marketed and have the still ratios.
> It's like we as a society decided that computers fell into the "boy stuff" category with GI Joe and baseball, not the "girl stuff" category like Barbie and softball.
So all companies ignored half of their potential market? It's possible, however, it's hard to explain though why would every single company would throw away half of their market.
> I think it all adds up to a pretty convincing argument that biology has nothing (or very, very little) to do with it.
I think it was magazines. Which weren't gendered. I don't think I've seen any male programmers on TV, and I don't have family members who were programmers, and I was interested in computers before I knew that programming was a job.
As far as I can tell, computers were just innately interesting.
Some things are explicitly gendered, like GI Joe or Barbie.
Some things are implicitly gendered, like Legos. There's nothing about then that makes them "for boys." But most stores put them in the boys aisle. Lego started making "girl sets" that are all pinky not too long ago just so they could go in the girl section.
As a kid, where were the magazines with computer stuff in the store? Were they next to Tigerbeat? Probably not. It's little stuff like that. That's not the whole story, of course. But what we find interesting is at least partly due to society.
I'm not saying there's not gendered influences, I'm saying my personal life story doesn't have positive-reinforcing gendered elements that I can tell.
I'm already seeing this play out with my daughter. At four, she's highly gender normative, which means she wants to have pink everything and play with girls, not boys.[1] But she also loves puzzles, numbers, legos, and building things. That came to a head recently, because she ended up being the only girl in one of her science camps. At age four, she's already grappling with the tension between her gender identity and what kinds of activities society tells her are associated with her gender.
[1] One of my grievances about the Google Anti-Diversity Memo is it makes an erroneous assumption that just because children show some gendered preferences at a young age (e.g. trucks versus dolls), that somehow explains a gendered preference for/against programming as a career choice.
Diversity programs from big businesses have always seemed sick to me. Why does Google want more diversity? Ultimately, because they want to double the supply of engineers and reduce their hiring costs. The idea that I should subvert my daughter's innate interests, and encourage her to follow pursuits that are foreign to her, just so that Google can save money on employee salaries is perverse.
In my view, true diversity is valuing what makes people different. School teachers tend to be female and software developers tend to be male. "Diversity" shouldn't be taken to mean that 50% of developers should be female and 50% of school teachers male. That's not diverse, it's uniform. Instead, diversity should be recognizing that a school teacher isn't inferior to a software developer.
The categorical error you make, like the author of the anti-diversity memo, is conflating gender identity with a specific set of "boy" versus "girl" activities. Just because children have strong gender identity does not mean that you can categorize any given activity as "girl-like" versus "boy-like." I.e. there is nothing to show that liking pink unicorns causes someone to have a preference against computer science.
As to our own daughter, I don't want her to be an engineer or a scientist. I want her to be a lawyer, like her mom and myself. I also hated school and don't place much emphasis on education. She's the one who wants to do puzzles and math worksheets and build legos.
Of course, that's anecdotal and doesn't prove anything. The real evidence, to me, is that this association between math/science and men differs dramatically between countries. In Bangladesh, more than 80% of teachers are men (overrepresented compared to the total labor force). And in India, half of science undergraduates are women: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-sciences. It's really a different societal mindset about what professions are appropriate for women versus men. For example, I grew up hearing my Bangladeshi mother complain about how the teachers in U.S. schools are women, when men make better teachers.
So,
> Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code.
Yep.
I've countless interviews with vets. When a person becomes a vet they do it because they want to help animals or want money and to help but rarely because someone else did it before them who looks like them.
I disagree with the above sentiments, despite those being excellent reasons or attitudes to choose a field/calling/career. It is not necessary for others to arrive at a path in the same way that other people do. It is entirely possible that the burning desire, inclination, and careful choice occur after being accepted into a program or after more exposure into a coding environment. It is also very likely that such desire, inclination, and choice are discouraged by not having relatable peers or role models. I would find it much harder to fit and grow into a role if from the very beginning I was expected to already have inclinations and reasons that are similar to my coworkers.
Asking because I (female) ended up being one without any desire and I am now working my way into CS.
If anyone, man or woman, decides to pursuit a given career because they can see others like them in the field, then really, I am grateful they don't. I want to work with people who deeply care about their choices. Who are dreamers. Who are willing to give a lot to fulfill their drive for knowledge. Who learns out of sheer curiosity of the world around them. Who can ask a meaningful questions. Who believe in what they do. Not with a sheep who chooses to follow other sheep.
If people want diversity at work, they should start with elementary school first. Do not assume any biological equality or lack of it up front but also do not ENFORCE any. Just give people equal rights to study and to make their own choices.
The push to 50/50 would cause me great concern as I would lose my advantage. Do any women feel the same way with the situation now?
I have a hunch you graduated a relatively long time ago and do not socialize with people who are currently in school. People do not have to declare major for two first years in school. Outside those doing pre-med or pharmacy students do not need to take any hard science/math/cs classes ( the later in a lot of schools taught in math departments ) for years. Early juniors are the first ones who need to decide on a major and boy is CS low on that list ( why would one want to spend next two years cramming math, CS, and physics into the schedule class after class when one can take a few creative courses and graduate with liberal arts degree? ).
> What specific mistakes can you point to? What particular solutions are within reach of the government? Because right now it just looks like you're shifting responsibility onto the state.
Allowing Jack and Suzy to take $100k loans to for a degree in operating a coffee machine.
This right here is the problem fundamentally. The good thing is google seems to at least pretend to have an interest in changing things. They've tried running their own coding bootcamps for minorities and women.
If we really want to fix the problem of diversity in tech then what we really need is a systemic change in how learning as an adult is handled and viewed. I feel like most of my peers did not learn to program while they where at university but learned it while they where younger through google. Perhaps if we could find a way to provide the same socialization and critical thinking exercises that universities provide without the incredible administrative overhead we could make it easy for people to transition into difficult STEM fields. This would be a win for pretty much everyone except the bankers and school administrators.
This is very dependent on your school and program. At my school, the engineers selected their specialty at the end of, I believe, freshman year. My program was so rigorous with specific requirements that if I didn't start them during freshman year, I could not have graduated in 4 years. As it stood, I missed a semester due to illness and was set back an entire year because of it.
Within a group of fields, you are correct. In the business school, the first two years were all the same. In engineering, though, CS classes started first semester freshman year. In the first two years of undergrad, the typical CS degree program had at least 6 courses: 2x intro, Discrete Math, Algo, Automata, and something else.
So perhaps if one had gone EE and decided they wanted CS, they would 'only' be a year back. Going from one college to another within Uni more than a year in, is almost starting over.
This was not the case at my university at all.
It will be worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14965074
We are already starting to drop the admission standards to achieve equality of outcomes.
If Google is anything like Redacted, that's the case. Redacted pays monthly bonuses to their international offices for each woman on the office's payroll. I have two friends working at Redacted in a relatively cheap region and they say the bonuses are as high as their junior-level salaries - they can afford to hire a second junior developer for each junior woman they have. Your guess what happens. An upside is that this poses no threat to male developers so they don't complain and just have a chuckle when their mandatory diversity training explains how the company's policy improves performance by "tapping into the pool of female talent formerly overlooked due to systemic discrimination".
Or it implies that the bias has a more profound origin than simply hiring practices
(the funnel tapers earlier in the process)
Isn't that kind of the definition of the gender discrimination most companies are trying to avoid?
Or maybe women just enjoy doing different kind of things than men.
>it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.
I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts.
However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%.
I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply.
Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company.
Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%.
Not 50%.
Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.
If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.
>If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.
You want them to go out of their way to clarify assumptions you are making about things they never claimed?
If Google doesn't agree, I would like for them to publicly state this.
And even if it is and everybody is looking to hire the top 30% then the poll of the best women candidates quickly dries, and you have a harder time every time to find them. So if your agenda is to have 20% of women, you will probably ultimatly have to adjust your criteria.
gender should not mather, if you hire only the best you should hire them it does not mather if they are women or man.
There are many components to the problem, but one component is institutional bias in the hiring process itself. You assume that all candidates are given a fair shake by an impartial, unbiased set of criteria that should be ferreting out the best talent and making offers to only those people. But those supposedly impartial criteria are executed upon in interviews by fallible human beings with their own personal or institutional biases, not by impartial pattern-matching robots. Consequently, many talented female engineers are passed over for inferior male ones, not the other way around.
I have interviewed literally thousands of candidates in my tech management career, and not once have I seen an inferior female candidate picked over a superior male one because of a diversity initiative. I have, however, had to work with young male interviewers to train them to properly identify their own unconscious biases and to ensure that they are truly being as impartial as possible when interviewing candidates of any gender. And to the degree that that is impossible - well, that is why we still have diversity targets.
> not once have I seen an inferior female candidate picked over a superior male one because of a diversity initiative
What if you have an unconscious bias and didn't notice that inferior female candidates are being hired?
It's unconscious, you might just view men as inferior to women and not even know about it.
That implies that diversity initiatives are going to continue until we have slightly more than 50% representation. Which is not bad in and of itself, but it seems like the initiatives are not allowed to used research or data beyond less than 50% representation. It gets sinister and loaded with unintended consequences when the expected shortcut is just to implement quotas to teach that one metric.
Please stop blaming the school system and our government. Our society puts so much emphasis on women looking a certain way; the way they should socialize; they need to be pretty, cheerleaders and subordinate ... Little girls aren't supposed to be nerdy and engineers. That's what society tells them in the movies they watch, the songs they hear and reinforced at home ... Let's get Jane some dolls. We'll give John a lego set. That's the "problem"
I think you've got it backwards. In the real world, supply is increased to meet demand. Farmers aren't going to grow more white onions just to see what happens. They've got to believe it's going to be a more profitable crop because it is in demand.
To extend your food analogy, it's like when Paul Prudhomme introduced blackened redfish at fine dining establishment Commander's Palace in the 1980's. Redfish went from being a "trash" fish to a species overfished to the point of near extinction. Importantly, nothing changed about the redfish itself. What changed was a new emphasis on using it in a dish.
Similarly, lobster went from being a peasant or prisoner food to a delicacy when railways and canning helped extend the demand beyond the northeast US.
What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? I think this has to be the case because no one is getting into an employment pipeline that ends with what is perceived to be a hostile working environment.
Last I read, the Economist said there is an advantage to diversity when attempting to be creative, but in other scenarios the advantage goes to the homogeneous team.
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most...
I think it was that article I read, can't tell because I'm over my article limit.
Is it additional burden on the companies? Sure. But we are fine with taxing companies and placing on them the burden of workers protections and environmental protection. This is just another protection. Protection against reinforcing inequality. I'm not saying it's good but additional education for less educated and more equality in society doesn't seem bad if the only cost is money from the richest corporations especially the ones that get most of their money from advertising which nowaydays is less about informing customer about your product existance and all about everything else.
I agree with your point but economist will say that increasing the demand will be a better technique. Supply side will take care of itself. Affirmative actions are usually intended to create an artificial spike in demand for the purpose of greater good. How effective they are is a different matter altogether.
It's a shame that the administrators of this site feel the need to shut down discussion on important issues like this.
The story is clearly important and less than 24 hours old, and already it's been forcibly removed from the front page in favor of a bunch of 15-vote ephemeral Javascript trivia posts.
Pro tip: use https://news.ycombinator.com/best
They seem to be used by companies as a "shield" when sued for discrimination. [1] The so-called “diversity defense”. It worked for WalMart.
[0]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122406071004...
[1]: https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...
But is the bias substantiated so that diversity hiring tracks it? Do the men who lose out to diversity candidates, the same that are benefiting from bias (as individuals, not "men, as a group")?
Isn't this like saying "Jailing innocent men is a fair price to ensure the guilty don't get away"
This is why there is such intense reactions against correcting for bias: men with imposter syndrome or who are actually incompetent are afraid that they wouldn't be able to compete if the system wasn't so heavily skewed in their favor.
I haven't read the study in your link, and might not even be qualified to interpret it, but two things stand out to me:
1) The study appears to focus on a single "event" or "snapshot" - not an ongoing, corrected process:
> Our research asks what happened when the central party organisation of the Social Democratic party imposed the quota on 285 local (municipal) political parties from the 1994 election and forward.
As such, it might be that the "mediocre reducing" nature of the results only apply to one-off applications of gender quotas where there previously were none. In fact, if one of the concerns is "cronyism" (or "insider bias"), then any quota requiring employment of outsiders might just be as effective at ousting the mediocre.
This has nothing really to do with my question, of whether such policies actually "track" bias, because it doesn't seem this example does.
2) They use a problematic/controversial definition of "merit":
> A competent politician, we argue, is a person who makes more than the median amongst politicians with similar characteristics.
They directly equate personal income with competence/mediocrity, which invites all kinds of questions...
Also, politics is a little different - there is a sense that politicians "represent" their populace, so the race/sex of politicians should also be more representative. Plus, politics is more "restricted" in the sense that only a certain population (size) of politicians need serve a certain national population (size) - but the restrictions (market size) in the corporate world might not be so distinct; There is plenty room for more qualified software developers.
As this thread shows, if he'd just kept his whiny assumptions about women's innate incompetence as engineers to himself he would have been able to remain happily employed in a cushy job.
This is an internal matter, and the intended audience is Google employees, so to prevent attracting attention from the wrong audience and maximize attention from Googlers, I'll post it in the internal board...
It doesn't help that Google apparently encouraged employees expressing their thoughts.
As such, I've personally benefited numerous times from diversity hiring programs.
If someone at any of my previous employers had written an internal memo criticizing the respective company's diversity program (ie the funnel through which I was hired), I can't imagine calling for their job, even if the way in which they stated that opinion was offensive to me.
I say this with the understanding that there's an obvious difference between choosing to join the military and being born as a woman or person of color.
Wouldn't the same be true about any non-optimal hiring practices and procedures though?
Google is pretty famous for constantly evaluating and tuning their hiring processes, because presumably - they sometimes fail to hire qualified people, and sometimes hire unqualified people. They want to tune their process so they are as close to 0 as humanly possible for each of those cases.
Maybe the guy is a sexist and racist asshole, I don't know him - but if I give him the benefit of the doubt and read him charitably, I take it to mean he's saying gender-based diversity programs might produce worse ratios of qualified/unqualified hires, and unqualified/qualified passes than some of his other proposals. In other words, tune the hiring process, as it relates specifically to diversity hires, to improve the ratio of qualified/unqualified workers.
I have no idea if that idea is crazy or sensible, but it doesn't strike me as being obviously one way or the other. I'm sure with all the attention this is getting somebody, somewhere, who may be experts in these things could offer their take on it.
Here's the problem: "Start with some selection of people chosen optimally for job performance...." That's the hiring equivalent of "assume a spherical cow." Sure, if your existing process optimally chooses people for job performance, then any move toward diversity will reduce quality. Likewise, if you have a spherical, frictionless cow, then its speed after descending a slope with a height of 100 meters will be 44.3m/s. Both statements are correct and equally applicable to the real world.
With regards to your second point, this kind of analysis does not require that the employees selected are in fact optimal. It only requires that they're the company's best guess given the inferences from the limited evidence available. Any move away from picking the best guesses will yield choices that are not the best guesses.
To get back to the example of purple people, you wouldn't see a company today which only accepts purple people. However, it's highly likely that people involved in hiring decisions have opinions of purple people, possibly subconsciously, which influences their evaluation of purple and non-purple candidates. If this skews their evaluation toward purple candidates, then pushing things back toward non-purple candidates will give you better results.
You're right, hiring in tech has gender bias, but right now that bias leans in women's favor at every step. Other commenters have posted research on this point, but I'll add my anonymous, unverifiable anecdotes to the pile. When I was on hiring committees at my old company, I watched us hire women who performed less well on our technical interviews than men we rejected, for the explicit reason of hiring more women. But I'm savvier than Damore, so I knew when to keep my opinions to myself about it.
And still there's fewer women in tech. There has to be other explanations.
Well put. Regardless of what side you take, I'm sure everybody understands that this is a controversial, emotionally-charged topic that must be approached with extreme care. This fellow did not do so, and created a firestorm in his wake. That alone seems like sufficient reason to fire him.
It's sort of the verbal equivalent to lighting a match to illuminate a darkened oil rig. Maybe you just wanted to illuminate things, but there are better ways to do it.
The "treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group" sentiment of the author is fine except that we have hundreds of years of doing just this in order to oppress and disenfranchise groups of people. Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach and working against institutionalized racism and sexism which has created the distribution of wealth and education and work culture that we have today. Given the massive disparity we see in tech it's ridiculous that this individual felt the need to lambast the relatively minimal amount of work being done to foster a more diverse and inclusive culture across the industry.
If one of the things you have to deal with as a woman in tech is seeing 10 page pseudo-intellectual manifestos about your inherent inferiority at performing in technical and leadership roles published at one of the premier tech companies in the world, and then see that piece supported on the most popular tech social sites then it's no wonder we have the gender gap we see today.
When somebody's views are being attacked for being misogynistic and alienating to their female colleagues, it is not suppression of free speech and diverse political opinion it is common decency. Nobody is infringing on your free speech but they will respond. All of these cries of 'authoritarian left-wing thought-police' makes me think We need a manifesto on White Male Persecution Complex Culture in Tech.
[disclaimer: I work at Google, my words are my own and not my employers]
I guess the one challenge I would put to this is that I find it difficult to believe that East Asians or Indians have been on the receiving end of any less discrimination than, say, Hispanics in the US, but yet they are now vastly over-represented in tech compared to their population statistics at large. They are so over-represented that they are now clearly discriminated against in areas such as college admissions at top tier universities, where being Asian essentially raises the requisite SAT bar by about 50 points.
You may think there needs to be a manifesto on a "White Male Persecution Complex Culture in Tech", but I'd be interested in why you didn't also write an "Asian Male Persecution Complex Culture in Tech."
Finally, I'll add that there is plenty of evidence it's not a "persecution complex". How do you square Github's reaction to their proposed Electron conference, where all the proposals were accepted in a completely blind process, but they decided they'd rather cancel the conference when it turned out all the proposals accepted were from men? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
Given the much, much larger pool to pick from, it's natural that they would be over-represented in tech too.
On average in the United States (I say average because someone here is bound to call me an Asian supremacist when I am just taking statistics), Asians make up the highest percentage of college applicants [1], Asians have the highest average SAT scores [2], Asians are the most likely to enter and graduate college [3], and Asians make up the highest income bracket in the US [4].
Given these trends, we should, in fact, see a larger number of Asians in tech and it should not be surprising. Google's bureaucracy should not hire less Asians because "there are more."
I would not mind if Google were 100% Black females. Just as long as it's a merit based system.
[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions... [2] https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webAdmission%20Preferen... [3] https://nscresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Signature12... [4] https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/... [4] summary on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Note, 2/3rds of CEOs in Silicon Valley are not Asian, he was probably overreacting based on looking just at Google, Microsoft and Facebook, and they're probably under-represented at the management levels overall.
I have no comments on the current Washington administration's personal views - if their goal is to get rid of AA and remove diversity regulations from industry then it's a goal that's fine with me.
If anything, by firing him Google might be saving money in future gender-based discrimination lawsuits. On that alone, the "laissez faire capitalists" should stop moaning about this.
That is your own fabrication. Please stick to what was actually said. They simply showed a lack of faith in their companies hiring practices (making sure diversity candidates were not accidentally turned away) being in line with their stated goals (hiring on merit). On principle, its no worse than employees complaining a bunch of new employees "got in easy" through an aqui-hire. If additional evidence was to be unearthed that this person is actually a raging bigot, then sure, bring out the pitchforks.
>If anything, by firing him Google might be saving money in future gender-based discrimination lawsuits. On that alone, the "laissez faire capitalists" should stop moaning about this.
Indeed, if we're operating on feelings and perception alone, then firing this individual probably makes a lot of sense from a PR standpoint.
I'm sorry, but trying to bring up physical make up as an explanation of why women may or may not be interested in a subject that was denied to them until very recently is ill-informed at best. It'd be like concluding that "gay people aren't interested in getting married, based on the last 200 years of history until 2015."
> Indeed, if we're operating on feelings and perception alone, then firing this individual probably makes a lot of sense from a PR standpoint.
It's not PR, it's HR and legal. Nobody is trying to hang him in a public plaza, but there's a pretty solid argument about him being a future liability.
No TV ad is from 15 years ago was denying anyone anything. They were playing to certain stereotypes, yes, but thats completely different from denying someone a job in tech.
It's kind of unbelievable that people who are willing to take a single study that says pre-natal testosterone determines all future behavior at the same time are happy to dismiss hundreds of other studies showing the impact of gender stereotypes.
And by reading memo instead of its misinterpretations on feminist blogs it seems like he just pointed out that Google created environment where people who dont agree with current left leaning political correct agenda cant express their opinions safely anymore. And he got fired for exactly this: expressing opinions that are not aligned with SJW dogma.
His language was very careful, his claims were sourced. He mentioned multiple times that this controversial points are not his personal opinions but rational explanations, and he was very careful to point out that he doesnt generalize based on this data. I havent find single sentence that could be used on court as proof of misogyny. He is guilty only of opening talking points SJWs and feminists dont want to talk about and use tactic of character assassination to dismiss messenger instead of debating his message.
HR was forced to fire him by outrage that many of their vocal left leaning echo chamber activist caused. I am not convinced this was beneficial for google. He will probably won the case for compensation. And from PR perspective? Sure, regressive left, SJWs, hardcore hillary supporters... they will like this move. But conservative publications use this as perfect point to smear Google, accuse them of spreading left propaganda, accuse them of firing conservatives... I am not sure which camp is bigger and which brings more money.
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/steve-bannon-wants-faceb...
And I have to say that I agree with him. This platforms became global communication channel. This is not just private company website anymore. So decision to delete peoples accounts and posts cant be given in hands of some biased moderators with personal agenda.
What is going on now on twitter and facebook, is comparable to phone company disabling your line because you have been talking naughty things over the phone.
I will be interested to see if anyone follows his example.
No, he got fired for making himself impossible to work with. If he disagreed with Google's and his fellow Googler's values, he could've left and go somewhere where he felt welcome. Trying to go out with a bang is just a douchebag move.
> His language was very careful, his claims were sourced
Where are the sources to his claims, pray tell? People keep repeating this as fact, but this is not a paper, and there's no list of references at the end of it.
> He is guilty only of opening talking points SJWs and feminists dont want to talk about and use tactic of character assassination to dismiss messenger instead of debating his message.
Calling people "SJWs" and "feminists" and ascribing some conspiracy to them proves the point that this was a dogwhistling exercise. You, my friend, are barking madly right now.
> I am not convinced this was beneficial for google.
I can guarantee he'll get his ass handed to him in court if he tries to sue Google for discrimination. Any corporation that size has ways to resolve these matters slowly and completely under the radar. To me his sudden dismissal is a strong signal that their legal department gave them the go ahead. They wouldn't do that if they didn't feel they have a solid case.
The fact that a lot of people became hysterical instead of providing a simple calm response kind of proves his point - That a debate is not possible without people either slandering the author, or purposely assuming malicious intent when there was none. Are google employees so thin-skinned that someone simply questioning a company policy is cause for getting fired?
> If he disagreed with Google's and his fellow Googler's values, he could've left and go somewhere where he felt welcome.
What are you talking about? To the latter part, why should that be the only option? Who are we to tell someone what to do? What if he likes working at Google, and is merely annoyed at one small aspect and wanted to discuss it internally, or improve the situation?
Right. Seems like he valued his point more than his job. Well done, him!
> What if he likes working at Google, and is merely annoyed at one small aspect
Really? Calling the whole organization driven by "leftist ideals" is "a small aspect"? Give me a break. I can guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell me that with a straight face in person, but somehow expect me to take it at face value because you put it in writing.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
I never got that impression from the memo.
As an Asian male who once upon a time had to apply to colleges, I'd like to see some evidence for that assertion.
To be clear, I (and hopefully many other people commenting here) have no problem with outreach, anti-harrassment, and other such workplace training initiatives. It's unfortunate that we can't all achieve a baseline level of civility that abstracts away a person's biological character.
But I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place. This tends disturbingly towards institutionalized stereotyping (e.g. "all Asians are nerdy and softspoken, so we're going to lump them into the same cohort and exert an implicit negative bias against them"). It's also particularly vacuous in that our notion of 'diversity' is thereby premised chiefly on superficial appearances - 'you look different, therefore you must be the kind of different we need'.
One would think the more equitable philosophy would be to strive towards a world in which we stop making exactly those kinds of distinctions and instead judge people on the content of their character and the value they can create.
I find it highly reductionist to conflate people challenging biased hiring practices with people challenging diversity more generally. There are likely some in the tech world who are genuinely bigoted and misogynist. I would hope, however, that a larger share are simply perplexed that hiring practices in engineering would be predicated on anything other than an assessment of raw merit.
My final point is this: as long as we continue to perpetuate diversity practices that emphasize sex and race in any way, some classes of people are going to be harmed. Sometimes that's more obvious to the Asian male who grew up in a tough part of NYC under difficult circumstances than it is to the affluent Black female who grew up in a world willing to bias opportunities unfairly in her favor (when some other less fortunate Black female really needed the leg up).
The economic and social structure of the United States is the result of historical processes that were driven by racism and sexism; disparities in wealth and power between these groups continue to exist today due to that legacy.
To take one example, "If average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today." [0]
While it is a great sentiment that everyone should be treated purely as individuals and it is something to strive for, it completely ignores the economic reality of our country and is an ahistorical approach to public policy or the construction of a hiring pipeline.
We can argue about to what role public companies can or should play to reduce these historical inequities. I think that outreach and education at all levels to increase the number of candidates from underrepresented groups in the tech hiring pipeline is a great step and that reducing these inequities, beyond being ethical, will create a stronger workforce. Others might disagree and have good reasons to disagree. That is a conversation worth having, but it needs to happen in the historical context in which we find ourselves.
Writing a manifesto that claims that the disparity in tech is the result of biological differences that lead women to be inferior at performing in tech and leadership capacities is not the way to start this conversation. In fact this is the exact kind of sentiment that you call out by saying, "I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place."
* Google is a profit-motivated entity. They have to act in the interest of their shareholders. Correcting for historical imbalances - to the extent that it negatively perverts hiring standards - doesn't factor into the calculus of a responsible corporation.
* Jews were systematically exterminated in a historical event that was even more recent than slavery. Countless more were left destitute. Why are they any less deserving of positive bias?
* There are millions of White people across the Midwest who are dirt poor because manufacturing is no longer a meaningful economic sector in this country. What about them?
And more generally, believing that there's a contemporary responsibility to correct for historical imbalances leads you down a fantastically absurd rabbit hole. We should instead be addressing the present socioeconomic condition (which will indirectly benefit many of the historically disenfranchised). And that is the job of government. Not corporations.
Several states in the Midwest (Indiana, for example) are actually undergoing a manufacturing boom. Google may have just shot itself in the foot here by making it clear that Midwestern political views are not welcome. I would wager that a sizable chunk of Google's technical workforce hail from the Midwest.
Is this sarcasm or are you serious? Please don't normalize this memo as if it's rational American political thought.
Fwiw I grew up in and went to school in Indiana and it makes this google memo no less awful -.-
"Come work for us - where Senior SREs will publicly question whether or not you are capable of doing your job, based on your gender!" does not sound like a great recruiting pitch. Never mind that it is also an incredibly shitty thing to do.
"We put a policy in place that dictates that hiring should be on the basis of something other than capability"
"Oh my god why are employees questioning whether hires were made based on capability or something else?"
Seems pretty reasonable. It is far from the first time this point has been made: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/5...
"Senior SREs will privately doubt you are capable of doing your job, based on your gender/racial hiring preference" sounds so much better?
Based on my personal experience during my education I think his assumptions are quite accurate. Men are more inclined towards tech and science while women are more inclined towards education and social studies. But this is generalization. You also have women who excel in math and men who excel in education. Its just that there are less of them.
Imo James was very careful with his words and stated multiple times that generalizing is harmful. He even included graphical representations of that: https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1502146696203-S...
My view is that is many parts of the fields I am in is that we are only beginning to see the benefits of women entering engineering and similar fields in significant numbers over a decade or more ago. There simply are not enough woman who came up through that process twenty plus years ago to have the experience many companies assign to a role; this artificial inflation of requirements also pushes out a lot of men as well.
So diversity for the sake of diversity is wrong. not acknowledging we have a shortage of qualified candidates is wrong as well but try to remember this is because it took so long for society to accept women in these roles that it may not have been a dream of many until the last decade or two.
anecdotal, I remember my own sister expressing an interest in science only after Sally Ride (hence the 80s). Seeing a woman in space was a big deal. Before the age of the internet young women only had TV for examples to aspire to and TV still had/has an influence of young people.
Fact of the matter is: there's a small portion of women represented in computer science than the average. Anyone whom tries to "guess" why, either based upon fact or unproven postulate, is blackballed and/or fired.
As per "diversity hire" or many other mealy-mouth ways of saying it, comes back to political correctness and affirmative action.
Affirmative action means, for a decision right now, to use attributes you cannot change (sex, skin color, race, age, height) as an equal or primary stat in deciding policy - whether to give you money, whether to hire you, whether to rent to you. It also is an (sex/rac/age)-ism. That's because of X events in the past, and collective guilt or something tries to overcompensate.
The insulting part of this, is that if you, well, aren't a white male, then you might have been hired because of unchangeable attributes, and not because of your skill. Doubly so if you work in a position that entails "diversity" in its title. In those cases, the job was created for your attributes, and not intelligence.
The other half, is that you're not allowed to talk about it. Full stop. End of story. Do not mention the elephant. There is no elephant. Anyone who mentions the unmentionable is summarily disposed.
Tl;Dr. We need a hiring test equivalent to a Turing test. No race, no sex, no body-type, no nothing other than "Can you type the language we're using, and can you answer questions pertaining to the job at hand?"
Genuine question: are all of your co-workers who are best to work with, those that provide most value to yourself and the company, those with the greatest technical proficiency for the job in hand?
I'd suggest that for most jobs the ability to work well with other people in a team to approach the problem is as, if not more important, than the technical proficiencies of the individuals involved. The inter-personal stuff is really, really important.
The darker picture behind that. So we should choose for interpersonal communication and "getting along", no? Then I should hire fellow white males, since they share my culture. And I'll also choose from a similar age group, since I know we'll connect quick due to shared culture. And we can make wiseass cracks about women, share "conquests", make nasty jokes. (Hmm, just described Uber.)
Or I can hire from people whom are good at what they do, get down to work and finish a job, and go home where you make the culture you want there, and not a forced "culture" at work. I don't go to work for culture, or friends, or any social reason. I go to work because I get paid to do a job and I do it.
If working with/for someone is uncomfortable, I bite my tongue, grin and bear it. If it's past social norms and ventures into illegality, either talk with HR about harassing workplace (provide proof), or find somewhere else to work.
It amounts to collective guilt, which is generally considered to be a violation of human rights.
Isn't it more that "they choose to act [...]" because it makes life easier rather than "they have to act [...]"?
e.g. there's no legal or ethical strictures upon them to act in their shareholders interest, only financial.
* This isn't a competition. It seems that the Jewish people have collectively been more resilient to persecution and therefore need no assistance, but so what? Good for them, but it doesn't diminish the fact that other minority groups still wear old wounds that hurt them today. Are you seriously suggesting that we shouldn't help disadvantaged black Americans simply because disadvantaged Jewish Americans didn't need it?
* Millions of white people across the Midwest are in bad shape, you're right about that. I support programs and practices that will help them out. I also support programs and practices that support other disadvantaged race and gender groups. So I don't know what to make of the question "what about them?". I'd have to hand the question back to you: what about them?
* The government is definitely necessary to address much of this, but it's ridiculous to ignore the role of corporations as the backbone of our capitalist society. The private sector is responsible for the majority of economic activity and employment in many countries; they exist at the heart of the problem. Not to mention that some corporate diversity initiatives are actually attempts to comply with government policy. The wider context to this memo is Google's gender pay gap lawsuit filed by the US Department of Labor.
Perhaps he's suggesting that black, white, Jewish, etc aren't the characteristics that we should be using to classify people as needing help. You'd probably have a lot less pushback if you created a biased hiring process that gave favoritism to people who had attended lower-income high schools or people who are the first generation in their families to earn a college degree. That hiring process would, overwhelmingly, benefit minorities since, as many are pointing out, they've been historically disadvantaged and systemic roadblocks like poor schools contribute to the difficulties we have with social mobility. It's when you start using skin color or ethnic background as a discriminant that it starts to get uncomfortable for many people. I honestly find it kind of bizarre to say that I have more in common with my Russian coworkers, who grew up under communism and are also classified as white, than I do with the minorities who came to my birthday parties growing up.
Having grown up poor and now being fairly comfortable, it's easy for me to see many of the disadvantages poor people face. I attended a public middle school that was less than 10% white. Despite being part of a single-parent family just barely above the poverty line, I had a mother with a PhD who took an interest in my education. Many of my classmates had parents that simply didn't care. And I was lucky enough to test into a prep school and avoid the public high school. At that school, I saw the other side. Most of my classmates, both white and the few non-white, were rich and most had after-school tutors from the local university that would help them complete their homework. My mother worked long hours and I was largely on my own to tackle the very difficult workload (4-5 hours of homework each night). Of the few that I've stayed in touch with, I've seen former white classmates from middle school struggle. And I've seen the few minority classmates from my high school breeze through their schooling and find whatever jobs they've wanted. Their skin color didn't seem to be much of an impediment when they had successful parents standing behind them.
So my opinion is going to be biased by my experience, but I don't see skin color being the biggest factor when compared to socio-economic situation and parental education level. It's not really controversial to say there's a huge correlation between race/ethnicity and being disadvantaged in those two areas, but for some reason it's controversial to say that we should use areas like those instead of race/ethnicity for these kinds of diversity programs.
> In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.
> The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
This isn't just a poverty or education problem. This study suggests that even a well-educated, affluent black American would face discrimination simply because of his/her ethnic name.
Will Google know that they've "succeeded" at diversity when 50-odd percent of programmers are women, and the bulk of their workforce are Asian and Indian, since they make up the majority of people on the earth? Is Google's goal to have the best programmers they can find, but which fit within the global demographics, because they conclude that there is absolutely no correlation between gender, race, culture, or creed in the aptitude for, or desire to pursue, any given human endeavor?
Or, perhaps, to use your example, is the goal to actually increase the preference for non-white, non-males in order to "catch up" other genders and ethnicities until their population groups exhibit the same level of wealth?
There are a lot of tangents to all of this, but I'm trying to stick to the main point here: at what point will we know that American corporations have achieved "enough" diversity, and that outreach programs and hiring preferences are no longer necessary? What's the idealized situation look like? (Honest question.) What's the measure of success?
Also, are companies in other parts of the world trying to achieve the same thing? Are companies, say, in India and China, hiring white and black people like crazy because they also recognize the extreme and urgent need to diversify their workforces? The answer to that question might help clarify the first.
The whole reason diversity practices exist is because "some classes of people" are already being harmed. Without "diversity practices", we already have practices that emphasize and discriminate sex and race, except they happen to be the status quo.
Attacking diversity for harming "some classes of people" misses the point, because any change to the status quo is necessarily going to harm certain classes and benefit other classes.
But 'intertwined' means correlation, not causation. Being a woman is correlated with not doing software dev. in a tech company. It does not mean that tech discriminate against women, because correlation ≠ causation.
But you're also ignoring evidence that suggests tech actually does discriminate against women. Just to scratch the surface, we've just seen some high profile cases like the scandal at Uber and Google's court case on its wage gap.
Reverse discrimination is the easy way, but it is actually counterproductive in term of reducing biases. As case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law imo, of optimizing the easy metric of enrollment ratio instead of the hard goal of fairness.
Wrong. Everybody has an equal opportunity. Equal results are not guaranteed, nor should be guaranteed.
Citation needed.
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...
This is specifically about why women leave engineering, with a number of incidental measures about the egalitarian qualifications across gender (for the studied population).
Of course, next up is arguing about the epistemology of what "everyone" means, which is how you would have started if you weren't trolling. -1
It's pretty well established [0] that the circumstances of ones birth - race, wealth and, yes, gender are a key determining factor in your expected life outcomes. Equal opportunities are emphatically not available to all.
[0] - http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...
Second, any policy intervention to correct "discrimination" is itself discrimination. The alternative is freedom & liberty (which benefits everybody). There are countermeasures to correct the "bad actors" & reward the "good actors". Many people who will choose to not give a certain company business if the company is perceived to be against one's values.
> This is specifically about why women leave engineering, with a number of incidental measures about the egalitarian qualifications across gender (for the studied population).
My responses to the "Key Findings" on the report:
> Nearly half said they left because of working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary.
I don't have a study handy, but this is not a situation unique to women. Too much travel, lack of advancement and low salaries are a symptom of corporate culture & the inverted leadership pyramid. Being on the bottom is not as good as being on the top & there's less room at the top. Having quotas does not help the people at the bottom nor does it necessarily create better cultural dynamics.
> One-in-three women left because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture.
I didn't like the workplace climates of several of my jobs. Didn't like all of my bosses or all of the cultures as well. If there is harassment toward women in a workplace, it's probably indicative of deeper issues where others are not being respected as well (in ways related to the characteristics of that person). The solution is not to put certain politically ordained "victim" characteristics on a pedestal; in fact it's an anti-solution because it discourages organizations/people to explore root causes.
> One-in-four left to spend time with family.
Understandable as this has been a more traditional pattern for women. Having a child means focusing more on family & less on the profession.
> Those who left were not different from current engineers in their interests, confidence in their abilities, or the positive outcomes they expected from performing engineering related tasks.
The map is not the territory. Models are an imperfect distillation of reality; especially models aggregating the complexity of many different lives.
While I agree that there are different outcomes in gender, culture, race, etc. The point is everybody (as in all people) has the legal ability to succeed in a profession. If you want certain people to succeed more, address the tools that they have & work to give them better tools so they can succeed. The wrong thing to do is to encourage a victim mentality & a autocratic culture that enforces a certain predetermined outcome; that is the opposite of freedom & liberty.
> It's pretty well established [0] that the circumstances of ones birth - race, wealth and, yes, gender are a key determining factor in your expected life outcomes. Equal opportunities are emphatically not available to all.
The source you provided assumes unwarranted prejudice as a reason. There are other determining factors related to the circumstances such as ability, temperament, education, culture, intelligence.
Let me clarify. Everybody has equal opportunity but not everybody is equally fit to take advantage of the opportunity. The best way to improve everybody's situation is to make the participants more fit for the job.
Citation needed and it needs to be relevant in a liberal tech company environment.
Just the opposite as far as I can tell. Every great evil in history came from grouping people and punishing based on collective guilt (whether the guilt was real or imagined). This includes the crimes of the left and the right.
How is it even logically possible to disenfranchise a group of people by ignoring their group characteristics?
That is how it is possible to logically disenfranchise a group of individuals by ignoring their group characteristics. The disenfranchisement already happened.
Diversity programs are not about punishment it is about recognizing the historical context in which we are acting.
In this case, the action is to shift economic opportunity from one group to another based on visually-identifiable group characteristics. This is justified by the the idea you stated, which is that the group being disfavored is collectively guilty.
Of course, we ignore how many people in that targeted group have no present or past connection to the sins that are being "recognized" by denying them a way forward in life. I'm sure a white male Ukrainian refugee passed over at Google for "diversity" would not be impressed.
If you're in favor of a policy, you should be able to clearly state what that policy actually is, not hide it behind a linguistic smokescreen which minimizes and obscures what's really happening. Own it - the goals, the methods, the unintended consequences, and the victims. Every social policy has them, so own them.
All of those examples are the opposite of
>"treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group"
Do you have any women in tech in your life? Did any of them actually read it?
Disclaimer: I did not read the entire piece. From what I've seen over the past 24 hours, the vast majority of people with an opinion on it did not read all (or any) of it either.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
And regarding gender - let's consider the example of salary negotiation. Now, if you research, you'll see that statistically women are less likely to negotiate as high a salary as men. It would make sense, given that research, to create a women-only program for teaching salary negotiation skills, right?
Except what if the bell curve around those averages was wide? Well then there's a number of men that suck at negotiation, and a number of women for whom those classes would be a waste of time. So the likely better program would be one where negotiation ability was evaluated at the start, and only candidates that needed training received it. Statistically, this program would have more women than men in it, but an exclusive program would not have been ideal.
Maybe I missed the part where he called women inferior?? The gist of his document as I saw it was that only looking at deltas between averages is a myopic approach (makes sense), and that programs need to consider that there's often a wide spread between those averages (also makes sense).
There's a huge difference between creating a safe work environment so you don't alienate otherwise interested talent, versus artificially stacking the deck to create diversity for diversity's sake. The latter approach, particularly when poorly evaluating the data (as the author points out) can cause significant damage to an organization.
Case and point - how is it that a Googler discussing "White Male Persecution Complex" and "majority privilege" is contributing to the discussion of workplace diversity dynamics, but a (now ex-) Googler internally writing about dogmatic diversity and the need for nuance should be fired?
Are any of your co-workers white? Male? How is it that your assumption that they've had a silver spoon in their mouths their whole life not insensitive and inflamitory? Are your comments here not alienating?
Either no one should be able to write on the subject and any discussion a fireable offence, or perhaps rational, respectful, and data-driven discussion should be encouraged (and so far today I've only seen one Googler having written such on workplace diversity).
I have many white male coworkers (as you'd expect given the demographic statistics for tech) and I have nothing but the utmost respect for their ability. I don't harbor any assumption that, "that they've had a silver spoon in their mouths their whole life."
I don't think that believing that there are groups that have been more economically and socially marginalized than white males is alienating. I also don't think that it implies that I believe my white male coworkers have been given a free pass to the positions they are in today. Everyone I work with has had to pass the same bar.
As I've stated, all of the statements I've made here are my own, made on my own time, on a public site and do not represent the views of my employer. I leave my politics at home.
White/black/male/female/etc is a really bad proxy for a person's history and character. Something along the lines of "don't judge me by the color of my skin but by the content of my character" rings a bell.
If you are concerned about socio-economic advantages, look at tax returns, not skin color. I know a number of white males that had extremely rough histories and disadvantages, living homeless for a few years or growing up in a cult in Utah and being abused by the leaders of the cult. I have black friends from school who were growing up in one of the richest neighborhoods in the US and attending one of the best schools in the area, going on to Stanford.
Don't dance around the disadvantages you want to correct by using race/gender as a proxy. Measure the disadvantages directly. Broken home? Poverty? Juvinile criminal record? Non-contiguous educational history? All of these are directly measurable/verifiable.
If you want to give the less advantaged individuals more of a chance to fulfill their potential I'm all for it. But measure more accurately than skin color or gender, where the spread and distribution around the averages is far too wide to be valuable, and will exclude a large group of people that have suffered disadvantages and let in a significant number of people who haven't really suffered the disadvantages their group has suffered on average.
Regardless, I find such disclaimers cumbersome and unnecessary. I'd rather interact as adults who understand how to critically dissect each other's essays than instantly assume bigotry or privilege and infer the most insidious implications: "he is basically saying all women suck at their jobs amirite". It just feels so.. unsophisticated. (To be clear I'm not directing that at you I'm just lamenting the situation in general--oops there _I_ go.)
Do you really think the author would say anything different than you've said if you engaged directly?
No. It would make sense to implement other means of deciding fair compensation rather than through employer-employee negotiation. Because it is not fair that compensation should be based on negotiation skills.
The thing I think we have to accept is that the world is unfair. Evidence seem to be that the world is, on average, more unfair to women and minorities.
It is more fair. Employees are at a disadvantage relative to employers when they can't negotiate.
Negotiation skills are at least something anyone can learn, but nobody can learn to be of a different race or gender.
Several commenters have chalked the author up to basically being a privileged incumbent waking up to the existential crisis of watching one's privilege being slowly taken from them and trying to figure out a way to stem the tide. Do you see it as something similar and therefore it doesn't really make sense to engage or lend it any legitimacy?
It seems a lot behind the opposition to this guy is based on people's assumptions about his motivations. OP or anyone else willing to weigh in would be appreciated.
I did see a lot of partisanship and accusation of misogyny that I cant find in memo at all.
To me this looks like some smart guy saying that google doesnt tolerate views that are not perfectly aligned with left leaning echo chambers, and getting fired for exactly that. Looks like SJWs at google, like thy often do, forced HR to fire him.
I have read that he was chess champion, so I would call this forcing your opponent to check mate himself. I think he planned this since I am seeing this:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal.
Could you provide citations in the manifesto that were oppressive to women?
Manifesto was pretty neutral and pretty clear that this was not at all a text about the abilities of women and how they are inferior. It was about motivations women have given their biological traits.
Google, Facebook run unconscious bias training which has no support in scientific research. At best it does not work at all.
It really was not misogyny.
The manifesto is inspired by Jordan B Peterson, and that guy is not a misogynist or a racist or whatever. He's a psychologist that complains about HR departments of the world that are filled with other psychologists and sociologists. He thinks they have to start looking at science and get to the root of the issue. Unfortunately, they use methods that have no support in science and misuse their position to push their ideology.
One good example is Iran. Where women are oppressed. Yet they choose STEM more often than not. How come our free/tolerant culture allows women to move away from STEM fields, and their oppressive culture pushes women towards STEM fields? Maybe motivations of free and oppressed women are different and free women just don't want to work in STEM? Abilities of men and women are identical (or at least the bell curves overlap significantly). Motivations depend on biology and culture. Motivations are what is differing and no unconscious bias training will fix that.
For example, I know plenty IT women that don't want to work in offices that don't have dress code. They all went working in banks. How is anyone going to fix that bias if women just like dressing well (on average) and being in a dressed up fancy environment.
James just tried to point out that reasons for gender gab in tech might not be only sexism as current left leaning agenda dictates.
I understood memo more like complaining that employees with opinions that differ from "current left leaning agenda" are afraid to express them. And google proved him right by firing him.
This political correctness has brought us very close to Orwellian double think. Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote:
> “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it.”
And used this as basis to fire guy who expressed his concerns.
His appeal to replace diversity of gender and race with diversity of thought is completely valid and reasonable.
This incident seems like evidence that attempting a statistics based discussion about gender programs is dangerous - if you are wrong in your interpretation & work at Google you will be fired rather than have your mistakes explained.
EDIT for clarity: not that the memo mentioned Simpson's Paradox at all, but that paradox illuminates serious risk around interpreting clear-seeming evidence. I think that those style of risks where were the original author wanted to push discussion.
SJWs (feminists, PC culture, LGBT, pro-Muslim, BLM, antifa...) when faced with more or less factual data that questions one of their sacred cows (women are equal to men, there are more than two genders, minorities need to be privileged, white privilege, institutional racism and patriarchy still exists...), they overreact with outrage with character assassination and shaming of meagerness. Some call this virtue signalling.
Example of this is how trump supporters are often labeled as nazis, racists, sexists...
While this works well in "echo chambers", it doesnt work as well in court. And I suspect that this guy had law suit for being fired and defamation.
This blog mentions that he already complained to NLRB:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
http://motls.blogspot.si/2017/08/james-damore-deserves-1-mil...
Why don't you write one? Would that get you fired?
What if all you are achieving is rearranging the dirt (ignore the negative connotations to dirt)?
Skilled URM engineers who meet the Google hiring bar will find a place to work regardless of outreach efforts. The URM outreach efforts will just shift the talented URMs from other companies to its company.
I'm not so convinced that'd be true! If there are no concerted outreach efforts what's stopping the majority of companies from hiring their mediocre non-URM friends of friends instead?
Do you think women are so weak and inferior that any male who writes words you perceive to be against them should be fired, silenced, or not debated? I think grown-up men and women can handle the truth and don't need some "safe space" to insulate them from information.
Is there any way to discuss generalized differences that won't be perceived as absolute and insulting?
The memo clearly did not make any claims about all women, and the topic at hand (gender representation in roles) is a general one. If there are general differences between men and women, we could expect general differences in their representation in various roles. That doesn't mean any individual woman is inferior, or even different relative to men.
It's really confusing why so many media stories and comments race to phrase this as claiming women are worse at their job, or can't code as well. Did they read it?
Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it in an internal memo, I don't want to hear anyone's opinions in a memo unless it's about the product.
Honestly, in a workplace, if I didn't ask for your opinion on something and we're no talking about it in person, I don't care.
In this sense, it would have been a much better outcome for him to have ended up debating his views in front of a studio audience rather than packing his belongings into a box, because then we'd know exactly what he thinks, and google would have either a solid reason to fire him or a way of mitigating the PR damage.
To inverse the quotes:
Men, on average, are more closed towards feelings and aesthetics. Men are not social or artistic.
Men are more disagreeable, leading to men being more combative, getting into fights, and being argumentative.
Men are emotional cold and don't have positive emotions.
You can't have a "women are in comparison to men ..." without getting "men are thus in comparison to women". How is those statements promoting men over women?
The most disgusted I've ever felt at a workplace was when my boss, prior to me interviewing someone, said, "and she gets an extra point because she's a woman." The government punishes us on research tax breaks if we don't have enough diversity.
So what am I supposed to say to this person when she asks what set her apart from the other candidates to be hired? "No you weren't the best candidate, but you are a woman." That disgusts me and I refuse to do it.
My job is not to balance an arbitrary math equation that x% of engineers are supposed to be women. That's an issue far larger and more systemic. It can't be fixed this way.
What I can do is remind myself that my job is to pick the best candidate, and my definition of "best" may be fraught with bias, so I need to be exceptionally perceptive to question what capabilities each candidate might bring to the job that I don't naturally consider to be ideal.
Apologies for the ranting nature of this comment. I feel frustrated when faced with the reality that what the establishment wants are at such odds with my morals and convictions.
The example is: Your internal bias is already in effect before you even meet the people you are interviewing. You're only disgusted and aware of the explicit handicap example from your boss.
Do you know if there's any evidence that affirmative action would increase, or decrease our biases? I would expect them to increase them:
1. Our brains constantly build models of the world without us asking them to. They will pattern-match regardless of the PC-status of the patterns.
2. Affirmative action reduces the average quality of marginalized groups within an institution by design.
3. from (1) and (2) we should expect implicit bias to increase, barring opposing pressure from implicit bias education - which evidence shows doesn't work (google it).
In this scenario, if she ends up being hired, your feedback that she wasn't the best could lead you to the conclusion that maybe others saw something you didn't. Or perhaps, like anyone in an interview, they were off their game for a bit. It's not totally unsound of a conclusion to make.
It really sound like Goodhart's law. It no longer matters that corporations wanted to remove bias from hiring process and access mostly untapped pool of talents. Now it is important how well they are doing it, measured by single % value.
It's also true that your job is not to balance an arbitrary math equation that x% of engineers are supposed to be men either. Consequently, unless you can demonstrate that you're unbiased with regard to gender, it's entirely reasonable to introduce an external pressure to make sure any bias (conscious or otherwise) is mitigated. Ideally that would be blind interviews but that's very difficult to achieve, so diversity programmes are used instead.
I don't believe that a perfect world has every job populated by a even number of persons of all genders. To me, that would suggest that we believe all genders to be the same.
For example, Almost 100% of midwives in Ontario are female. Is this fundamentally wrong and needs to be addressed? What is the correct percentage of male, female, and other midwives? What is the measure of our policy's effectiveness?
It's certainly wrong if there are men who want to be midwives but are blocked from entering that career due to hiring biases. It's also wrong if the few male midwives that do exist are unable to progress in their careers due to sexism in their industry. It's yet more wrong if boys are put off that career at an early age by being told by their teachers (and parents) that being a midwife isn't an acceptable career for a man.
So, yes, it probably is fundamentally wrong and does need to be addressed.
This entire thing is a political tool being disguised as a moral crusade and it is playing off our collective desire to do the right thing. Absolutely disgusting.
The workplace is no place for politics like this. If you are going to strictly stick to narrow issues that are relevant to the job, then maybe, but as soon as you're writing a 10 page manifesto with phrases like "the Left's affinity for those it sees as weak" or "some on the Right deny science" or "the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics" you are way out of line. It doesn't matter if you are correct or not, politicising your workplace in that way shows a stunning lack of judgement.
That's ironic. Because the politics that he criticizes are without a doubt left wing policies that ARE applied in Google, from top-down. I'm not saying they are bad policies, but they are political in nature.
(Worse, this then attracts the worst kind of attention from the internet as culture warriors join the fray, regardless of whether they're interested in what the debate was ostensibly about.)
Whether this takes the screed into firing territory I have no opinion on, but I definitely think that the guy's left/right posturing served to preclude any productive debate that he might have inspired.
I agree, but I'm pretty sure political posts were already tolerated at Google. If employees are allowed to post to internal message boards that women are underrepresented because interviewers are sexist or suffer from unconcious bias and should adopt policy Y, then employees should also be allowed to post an argument that women are under-represented for some other reason X and argue against policy Y.
And even if the workplace does have a no politics rule, the proper response should be a reprimand and asking him to delete his post, not a firing.
If you say "interviewers are being sexist and so we should adopt policy Y", I think that would be acceptable. If you said "there is systemic bias against women so you should vote for Hillary Clinton", to me that would not be acceptable. Once you turn something into left/right liberal/conservative etc you are harming rational discussion and making a lot of trouble in a lot of different ways.
And I think this is the solution that the person who wrote the letter is ironically ruining. You can't have sane level headed discussions about these issues when its framed as left/right. You can if you take every issue on its merits individually. If you want people to be free to voice conservative opinions, then don't turn every issue into a 10 page manifesto dissecting the failures of marxism. Just discuss the policy.
No idea if this reasoning is shared by Google though. It's just my view.
I suspect that this memo wasn't any more political than much that gets shared in the message boards at Google. This issue was already politicized and the main gist of the politics stuff was, "Both sides bring insights and biases to the table, so we should do a better job making it comfortable for conservatives to speak up." By the standards of what I see going on the political discourse this was pretty tame stuff. The responses to the piece were 100X worse -- https://files.gab.ai/image/5986e3f03d1f1.jpeg
Just deleting the post won't magically fix those issues.
Sure, but if Google has already decided it is ok to discuss this issue on company message boards and that it wants to encourage debate and discussion (which it has), then it shouldn't then fire a guy just because he makes an argument other people don't like. The principled thing would be to stand for freedom of debate. Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies, ceding the message boards to the faction that is more willing to self-modify to be offended at opposing viewpoints. If anything, Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.
By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender, he put them in a position where they'd have to flag him as someone who couldn't manage a mixed-gender team.
He did not say this. He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.
He didn't "make an argument other people didn't like". An argument other people might not like could be "guys, I think everything in Google3 sucks and we should rewrite everything in Elixir." This was way beyond that.
I'll refer you to this article, because Yonatan puts it in way better terms than I ever could: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
> Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies
While I was at Alphabet we dealt with plenty of cry-bullies, mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech." Most of these self-styled Constitutional Scholars didn't realize that freedom of speech only applies to the government, not your employer. None got fired, as far as I can tell.
> Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.
And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded? Not sure I follow.
> He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.
Which is a completely specious claim to make, considering he most likely doesn't know the distribution of gender and ethnicity in the resumes the company receives and he's most likely not familiar with HR practices outside of interviewing. How can he claim there's an active conspiracy to discriminate candidates, when he doesn't know either of those things?
I don't ever recall seeing a diversity advocate say that the employee distribution should match the world 1 to 1. Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach, not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male. So he made up a straw-man, then he proceeded to attack it using cherry-picked science while making generalizations about political affiliations.
I read Zunger's article. Getting offended is in large part a choice. I apply the golden rule. If an Asian guy wrote a similar article for arguing why Asian people are over-represented at Google compared to white people, I would not take offense. Maybe he would be wrong, but if he wrote in the tone of the original article I would not call for his firing or say that I couldn't work with him.
mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech."
A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense. Did these conservatives call for people to get fired? Did they succeed? If not, then good, I'm gladd their cry-bullying attempts were ignored.
And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded?
There is a enormous difference between noticing on average differences and direct personally targeted invective against a specific employee.
not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male
You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing.
If a woman at Google had written this, the conversation would be similar to what you describe. This is a man making a generalization about women. Key difference.
> A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense.
That's exactly what they would do, taking offense on all kinds of "liberal messaging." And yes, I'm glad they were ignored.
> You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing
Then what is he claiming they are doing? (It's a trick question)
You were drawing a conclusion about how his comments are different from an Asian talking about how Asians are over-represented.
I haven't said anything else.
I take it from your somewhat insulting non-answer that you aren't sure if you agree with me.
This is factually inaccurate, for example the BBC recently advertised positions where white people were explicitly excluded.
Of course you were.
That's why you said "Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach" (my emphasis) and not "Diversity efforts have sometimes focused on outreach" or even "In this particular context, diversity efforts focused on outreach"
Actually, he wrote exactly the opposite.
I do not understand how what he actually advocates could be considered discriminatory. It seems to me that it would indeed "disproportionately affect particular demographics", but in a good way by making sure that no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox could induce any skill/gender bias in the workforce.
[0] I have no particular knowledge about ukip
It's a disingenuous argument which doesn't take into consideration the whole history of why the program exists in the first place. Not only that, by trying to justify it on biological terms, the author introduces the supposed existence of an inherent bias that Google is supposedly trying to ignore.
How about we try to achieve 1-1 parity with society's distribution and if after 30 years of encouraging people of all genders to participate in all professions there's solid evidence that some people don't care for X or Y reason, then we let the problem take care of itself? I mean if we truly are aiming for non-discrimination, that should be the metric, right?
Unlike the guy from Google, I won't speculate on the reasons but there are many gender imbalances that are clearly not the result of a discrimination. For instance a large majority of med and law students (80% in the case of law) in France are women. These are not low skill/low pay/low prestige professions, and I am not aware that there is any discrimination against men in these schools (nor that anyone complained there would). In the school of engineering I went to, the proportion was the reverse (20% women). Selection is purely based on a math and physics exam, very little room for discrimination either. Naturally this male/female imbalance makes its way from university to the profession.
I can't say exactly why we have these imbalances, there might be many reasons, some may be cultural, some may be biological, I don't know, and I very much doubt anyone on HN can pretend to have an authoritative answer, but I also very much doubt it has to do with discrimination.
Then you proceed to write two paragraphs essentially supporting my position that we really don't understand why the imbalances exist. But somehow, this guy stating as a matter of fact that it's a biological thing is not disingenuous. I'm not sure how you can hold both beliefs.
Can you point me to where he states this? The closest I found was
I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
which is still very much in the "we don't understand, but maybe this is an explanation" camp.
Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.
Because he thinks the focus on cultural context ignores some aspects of the problem and leads to bad decisions? I mean, I disagree with his conclusions, but I don't think he is trying to be deliberately misleading.
Much of this seems to be about people in positions of power being personally offended at the views of someone with whom they disagree. The proof is in your saying this was "rude" - who was that statement being rude to, Marxist intellectuals? Are there a lot of Communists at Google?
I don't think this reaction has anything to do with keeping some kind of social decorum, or keeping a company running smoothly. In this case the effect is a real-life ideological echo chamber, where the people in power fire anyone whose views they don't like, and fear of reprisal from voicing alternate views creates a groupthink mentality.
Several people have brought up the idea that because the manifesto author has shown his bias, that means there is no way he could work with someone of a different gender. But this is illogical; tons of people have the same bias! Just because they didn't write a manifesto doesn't mean they don't think some of the arguments might be valid. So really, what difference is there in keeping this guy around, whose bias they know and can clearly identify if it ever affects his work relations? Is it worse than the secret biases held by everyone else?
--
Obviously, as a man, I am not going to be subject to the kind of discrimination a woman would be, so if someone's views annoy me and I dismiss them, that's much different than when discrimination against a woman affects her livelihood and state of mind. In this regard we have to consider women as a particularly vulnerable population (in this industry, anyway) and act to protect them from the disproportionate negative effects of bias in the industry.
On top of that, the lack of women in the industry makes it very difficult to have a fair discussion of the issues. We should be trying to help men understand why women need special treatment, in order to help the industry grow out of its biases. But you can't help the industry get better if you fire anyone who questions the process. It's the white-collar equivalent of shooting anyone who doesn't tow the party line. This prevents establishing a dialogue, enforcing culture through fear. And a culture built on fear is never a good thing. It'll end up setting back the whole endeavor.
> The workplace is no place for politics like this.
You could argue that affirmative action, because that's what it is about, is essentially a political stance ,and business are totally free to engage into these recruitment practices, but it absolutely follows a specific ideological thus political framework.
IMHO When you introduces political activism in your work place you will transform your work environment into a political battleground. period.
Actually, it is, in California. Political affiliation is a protected class.
You have to make a different argument if you want him fired.
The key to large organization management is control: they are doing this quickly before anything else happens. His presence both legitimises his point of view, and acts as a rallying point. If others are sufficiently emboldened, they may also act out. If they start organizing together, this has the potential of rapidly turn into a long standing issue for google.
Is that so? Do the complaints of numerous other employees not demonstrate some level of toxicity?
Edit -- thanks for helping me earn my karma today. It's delicious the way y'all are so eager to downvote me instead of engaging. It's almost like you think I have an ulterior motive being masked by a veneer of good-faith engagement or something. I wonder where I might have gotten that idea from...
When you get laid off, they give you 30 days to find another department to work in. There's no reason why he wasn't afford the same, if his departure was due to co-workers not wanting to work with him any more.
Google didn't fire him for the reasons I gave.
All workplaces are political. The politics of founder/owners/executives are in every fiber of he workplace. Denying it is highly disingenuous.
Moreover, said denial is one of the root causes why we are having these issues. The tech industry likes to project an image of being "liberal", when in fact the culture is highly conservative. Until recently, people like the author felt perfectly at home in most tech companies, including Google, because its politics quietly aligned with their politics.
And now that he's making it explicit he is suddenly the one politicising the workplace?
To be clear, I vehemently disagree with the author. But until about ten years ago, most of the industry quietly agreed with these views, which is why we have these problems in the first place.
It was political then and it is political now. It took political resistance to put diversity on the corporate agenda in the first place.
The workplace culture is and will always be a primary political arena. Especially with a company like Google, that is actively involved in politics and shaping our society in general.
What people who claim that the workplace is no place for politics are basically saying is that the workplace is no place for politics they disagree with. (Ironically, the position that the workplace is no place for politics is a traditionally conservative position. Worker bees should keep their ideology at home, whereas corporations are free to politically indoctrinate workers through euphemisms like "culture" and "values".)
I applaud the author for standing up for his political believes as much as I applaud Google for firing him.
We have already accepted that de facto some speech is suppressed in the work place. That's why I think this story is a little hypocritical. Lots of people are arguing for this persons right to express his opinion that men are more suited than women to work in tech, but no one is defending workers rights to advocate for improved labor conditions.
Fwiw, I definitely don't think Google should be allowed to fire him. But I feel a little ambivalent about defending him, since "his side" wouldn't defend my rights to voice my opinion.
When you want them to go to company parties, the company gym, eat at the company cafeteria, and in the case of Facebook provide company housing, and generally spend a lot of time in the office, then at some point the company is going to discover that their employees have a diverse set of political beliefs as well as beliefs about gender/race/etc, and they will want to express these beliefs over lunch, and at the gym, and at parties, and in social media. They will also want to express those opinions to their friends, which happen to be colleagues. Now you have the big political debates that used to take place in bars and other recreational areas happening in the workplace. That's the cost of the all encompassing office.
Another ingredient in this toxic mix is that a lot of younger people blur the lines between social and professional, and this has been happening for a long time now. As soon as a critical mass lets their work life bleed into their personal life, this is going to end badly and lead to more oppressive workplace structures, as the company isn't going to suddenly democratize decision making. That's why management needs to be very circumspect about the scope of policies they mandate for their workers.
This tearing down of barriers is happening everywhere -- people do personal activities on their corporate laptops, they use their corporate phones for personal calls, they do personal projects on company time and company projects on personal time. They use their social media accounts to talk about company projects, etc.
The only viable option is for the company to retreat from these spheres and to focus on doing your job. They should not ask for social media accounts in the hiring process, nor should they focus so much on "culture". But that's inconsistent with also making the job a lifestyle and keeping the employees working long hours. If you are going to have people spend 50 and 60 hours working closely with each other, then things like political disagreements turn into HR concerns, and are addressed with the same intelligence and care for worker rights as you would expect from a typical HR department.
I think what you say is true about people searching for ways to express themselves when the lines between work and personal are blurred but fundamentally people have to attempt to be unbiased. It's pretty clear that this guy wasn't willing (or able) to do this and keeping him on would open up Google to a lot of bad PR and potentially lawsuits from people who's reviews/interviews etc that he was involved in.
Sure, why not?
I believe that the author is generally right, and that there are psychological differences between the sexes. And I have noticed that male bosses who believe that women are the same as men sometimes end up making their female subordinates cry a lot, because they don't realize the same harsh criticisms they would use on a guy are way too harsh for many women. They would be better bosses if they were aware of sex differences. For that reason, I believe knowing the truth is better even if that is "validating stereotypes."
Sadly, with the onsluaght of statism in the US, that's no longer the case.
Eric Schmidt (and a whole team from Google) played a crucial role in Team Hillary’s election tech.
https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...
Given this context, the firing of the guy only confirms his point about Google not tolerating dissenting opinions.
The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point. Honestly, Google might have even been rational to fire him, due to the toxic situation created by the mass outrage. How incredibly damning of our society.
A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
This is the closing of the American mind.
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
This is where I read up on it, and the letter was written very reasonably, IMO. That article also includes a response from google's brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance.
[EDIT] - original (as pointed out by the commenter below) is here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Read that instead
The original document is here (credit to lisper) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
The problem is that Google already does do this, for the most part. So what does it mean to say that Google ought to treat people as individuals, if that is already the current state of affairs? The argument, as coded in the document, was that Google ought to cease making any efforts to correct disparities in representation.
As a moral or rational argument, this falls flat on its face. Suppose that there was science to show that cognitive differences between men and women or different races is 100% inborn (there isn't, not even close). Even then, there's still the problem of whether the magnitude of those differences justifies the magnitude of differences in representation. There is not nearly enough data to make a case here, and by presenting the case as made, the author of the doc was doing more than just observing the state of the science. He was making an unsubstantiated claim that his coworkers, or at a minimum the sex and/or races they belong to, are inherently deficient at performing the work.
AFAIK the IQ difference between genders is negligible, but the spread of the IQ is much greater in the male group. This also means that there are more men who are above 130 IQ then women which is kind of necessary to be a programmer. This does not mean that a female can't be a genius! If you want to disprove this you can do two things: 1., Prove that the average female IQ is way higher than mens. 2., Prove that there are as much women who are intellectually retarded ( sorry, English is not my first language, I don't know a better word ) than woman.
Wait, what? What exactly do you think the IQ of the average programmer is?
Therefore it is not unreasonable to deduce that people who work as programmers in prestige companies are, on the average, from the very right-hand tail ends of the normal distribution curve, and the differences of men and women (on the average, again) are significant enough to cause an over-representation of men among this group.
The same thing that causes an over-representation of men among homeless alcoholics at the left-hand-side end of the normal distribution.
[0] https://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-is-a-pretty-good-in...
No, he said quite clearly that Google was hiring too many women and minorities (and also that said women and minorities suck at tech jobs, though not in so many words). It's the specifics of the argument that got him in trouble. Bland abstract stuff like you paraphrase above wouldn't get anyone fired.
https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/focusing-on-diversi...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-firms-borrow-football-play...
https://www.google.com/diversity/
https://qz.com/604723/when-google-increased-paid-maternity-l...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/technology/google-diversity-...
Google has long prided itself on rejecting large numbers of qualified candidates. Since decreasing the false-negative rate inherently means "hire a greater quantity of qualified candidates", I fail to see how the bar was lowered.
> - Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> - Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
> - Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
He is saying quite a bit more than that Google is hiring too many women and minorities: he's claiming, in straightforward terms, that Google is illegally discriminating when doing so.
Yes, in theory there's a world in which he's right (I'm pretty sure that's not this world) but he is definitely making the claim either way.
The programs are "set asides" for specific groups of people unrelated to "merit". Is that not a fair way to describe that?
That's _not_ to say that those who go are meritless, but that the programs differentiate on factors unrelated to merit for the purposes of admission to said program. Is that a factually incorrect description of those programs? Do they not differentiate "applicants" on characteristics unrelated to merit?
FWIW, he has said this more directly in an interview: https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw?t=331
"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity."
"What kind of practices?"
"Well, basically, treating people differently based on what their race is, or gender --"
"Oh, you mean racism."
"Yeah, basically."
"Mmhmm, I see. And it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?"
"So-- most meetings at Google are recorded, anyone at Google can watch it, we're trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things."
"Whoa, okay, why?"
"Because, I think, it's illegal. I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. And so if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism."
Previously, "the truth" was right leaning; it is now left leaning. Unfortunately, many people find (and have always found) that all it takes to dismiss an opposing moral position is to point out that their opponent's position is untruthful, and the discussion (or lack thereof) ends there.
A sibling poster has linked us to PG's essay on "What you can't say", which states my concerns more eloquently and thoroughly.
The claims in this document are FAR from "widely-believed" or "scientifically established". By count, most of his claims are just asserted. But even most of the claims with a link are highly debatable.
This is NOT a particularly good advocacy document on the core scientific questions surrounding inequality. It may have some points in the cultural commentary bits, but stop presenting this as good work (on diversity). It's shoddy and amateur.
Most of the links in the original document were removed, either by Gizmodo or the leaker.
But even most of the claims with a link are highly debatable.
Although apparently you are in fact not allowed to debate them...
I can't comment on how Google arrived at the decision or what their line is. Personally, I think these things should be debatable.
But the author didn't do a lot to help himself dull the predictable outcry. He hedged with some comments about his intentions, but a lot of the claims are pretty anachronistic. Given how controversial some of the claims (especially the biologically essentialist ones) were bound to be, I think he could've used a different tone and some better faith representation of the other side.
So it does, thank you. Yes, I agree that several of his claims could have used links to supporting evidence, in particular the bullet points under "These differences aren't just socially constructed". Not that the outcome would be any different.
But it's too late now. I don't know if there's any way he could have expressed his views without being crucified. But he definitely should have done a better job of reviewing it with the mindset of an ideological opponent determined to interpret everything in the worst possible light. (As another example, phrases like "PC authoritarians" and the bit about coal miner deaths are applause lights to the right, but aren't relevant to the core arguments and just serve to alienate the actual audience).
He didn't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. As the Supreme Court decided applies to the government, so should private industry use as their guideposts.
Google just took a public step forward in becoming an arbiter of morals. Which is frightening given how much of the de facto internet they control.
This is the largest point for me and what distinguishes them from "Know and repeat the company value statement." If they take an organizational position in promoting certain values past a certain degree, then they absolutely have a social responsibility to make space for those who would discuss counter-values.
At will employment has historically been a smokescreen for companies to fire people for all sorts of abusive / illegal / poorly intentioned reasons. The fact that they can fire people for saying anything doesn't mean they should.
Is this really the path we want to go down?
Also, Google has already shown it wants to be an arbiter of morals. For example, perhaps its lost in this topic, but on my conspiracy forums what people are upset about is Google apparently has been expanding censorship efforts and have hired certain groups to assist in deeming content innapropriate... Such "neutral" groups as the fucking ADL! So if you have a YouTube video calling Israels occupation of Palestine "apartheid" that's worthy of censorship. Don't even get me started about the Google execs shady relationship with the deep state and certain powerful politicians. Google turned evil a long time ago, and they are only getting worse.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
They seem not to agree with you.
In fact, all four of them conclude explicitly in favor of diversity initiatives.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Let's not Purity Test people for showing some humbleness in their beliefs. We could probably use more of that these days.
"Google doesn't think it has lowered the bar" is implied, not apparent.
There's an underlying assumption in these discussions that implementing a meritocracy is easy and examining every candidate without regard to their race and sex is the default state of affairs. In this view, any changes you make to the process is necessarily de-optimizing for merit.
But what is "merit"? This isn't a field where you can quantify it. If you were hiring people to lift heavy objects or something, you could test them all and hire the ones with the best numbers and be confident you got the best people for the job. There's no way to implement something like that for the jobs Google has.
So we approximate. We look at degrees and open source projects and do in-person interviews. We pretend that this results in a purely objective evaluation of the candidate's ability to do the job, free of any bias... not because there's any reason to think that's true, but because we really want it to be.
Techies often bemoan whiteboard interviews for being unfair: the skill being tested isn't really the skill you'd use on the job, and it discriminates against people who get nervous when put on the spot, or whatever. It's not outrageous to think that maybe some parts of the interview process, without ever intending to, discriminate against women and minorities in a similar way.
It seems more than a little quixotic if fixing every known flaw in the hiring process isn't enough - that the process must get a certain hiring outcome in order to be "fair".
It is very difficult to tell the difference between biased hiring and actual skew in the population. But when it's a trait that has no obvious connection to the job, it seems best to assume the process is biased, unless really good evidence exists to demonstrate a connection.
For example, let's say your interview process produces hires whose heights are substantially above average. If you're hiring for a basketball team then this would make perfect sense. If you're hiring Java programmers, it's highly likely that your interview process is screwed up. It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions.
Obviously, the first thing to do is to examine your interview process and eliminate any source of height bias you can find. But what if you do that and you're still hiring an abnormally large number of tall people? You could take this as sufficient evidence that tall people are better at this, but that's putting an awful lot of confidence in your interview program. It's more likely that you just haven't found all the sources of tall bias. If that's the case, then pushing for more short hires will improve the overall quality of your hires because you won't be artificially excluding good short ones.
But "we're somehow secretly and unknowingly discriminating in our hiring process" doesn't need such justification before using it to make decisions?
For example: does any part of your interview involve a subjective evaluation? If so, do any of the evaluators know the candidates' names? If so, congratulations, your process is probably biased! http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
That's literally all it takes: some human judgment and some way to guess at the applicant's race. The discrimination can happen subconsciously. You and I would probably fall victim to it despite our best intentions.
Since the manifesto we're discussing is mostly about gender, it's worth mentioning that the same thing happens there: http://m.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract
Nobody knows how to screen job applicants for pure merit without bias. If it's a choice between "our process is imperfect just like everybody else's" and "we stumbled upon the perfect unbiased screening process and all bias in the output is due to inherent variation in the population," bet on the first one every time. It's about a million times more likely.
The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. Google's approach probably assumes there are, and puts a burden on the hiring manager and recruiter to find and consider those candidates.
I don't work at Google and am wholly unfamiliar with their internal hiring practices. But in order to prove the author's specific "lowering the bar" claim, we'd need to see data not just on hiring numbers, but on success of the hired cohorts over time. (I'm willing to guess that Google does not try to hire unqualified candidates, period.)
"Lowering the bar" is a dangerous claim that offends the dignity and qualifications of every diverse employee at the company or ever hired by the company. A claim that bold would demand extraordinary evidence, which the author does not convincingly supply, and which I am taking a wild guess does not exist.
Of course, because of cultural and historical prejudices and biases, the pool of candidates that even apply to google is biased towards white males. Everything possible should be done to attract applications or seek out potential candidates from minority populations. But without suggesting any biological differences, it is still likely that because of cultural and historical prejudice, the distribution of talent among candidates will be skewed toward white males. Again, not because of any biological difference, but because they are more likely to have been encouraged or gone to rich universities or had parents who were engineers.
If we have a pool of 100 people and we want to hire the best five, then the bar is set by ranking the people by talent and qualification. If we want to hire everyone who is qualified, then wherever we set the bar, it is still likely that the population above the bar is skewed. So if we want to achieve a rebalancing or quota of employees from a certain sub-population, then it certainly does involve lowering the bar. We can argue over whether that is a good thing to want, or a fair thing, but I don't think you can logically argue that the bar isn't being lowered if you want to achieve a quota for a certain subpopulation. If you are suggesting that the population above the bar is not skewed, then you are suggesting that the terrible cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices against women and minorities in technical fields has had no effect on their ability to achieve talent and qualification above the level of the bar, which I find implausible.
No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_.
They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google?
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...
> Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
If this isn't the case and Google does actually hire people based on their skill and not skin color or gender, then Google needs to emphasize that, or else the majority of people will look upon women and such as "diversity hires" and build a disdain for them, thus hurting the cause.
He uses the phrase "effectively lower the bar" to mean something very different from what almost all of us think of as lowering the bar. The full quote is that one of Google's "discriminatory practices" is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."
That is, the bar isn't lowered, they're just trying to fail to hire qualified candidates (from certain groups) less than they currently do.
Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.
I don't know that I'd agree with the second part; one thing you can reasonably conclude is correlated with false negatives is diversity (there are studies that people form hire/no-hire opinions within seconds of meeting a candidate, and studies that people have immediate biases when meeting people based on race/gender; there's also the simple fact that's put to good use in small companies that hiring people like yourselves, although mostly in ideological bias etc., is a good means for team cohesion). I assume Google has done more research on this than I have. Handing out "more tickets" may just be a way to cancel out the fact that so-called diversity candidates are getting worse tickets.
However, even if they were simply giving out more tickets to diversity candidates, the average level of qualification of these candidates doesn't change. You just have more of them. Maybe that's a problem because you're discriminating in their favor, but it certainly does not "effectively lower the bar" or impugn the qualifications of this over-represented group. They're all qualified. They're all on the right side of the "bar". There's no alleged increase in the false positive rate.
The fact that he chose to interpret this as "effectively lower[ing] the bar" is not just insulting to his colleagues and unprofessional, but also a sign that he doesn't understand math enough to pass a well-tuned Google interview and got one of the rare false-positive lottery tickets.
I don't think that works. If the process is optimised for accuracy, then decreasing the false negative rate should increase the the false positive rate, right? Intuitively that's how it would work for most classification tasks. If you can decrease the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate then you're improving accuracy. The bar must be correlated with the false negative rate.
How large this effect is depends on just how noisy the first test is and on how widely above the bar people's abilities range.
* Child labor
* The facially legitimate grievances of Al Qaeda
* Universal suffrage
* The illegality of marital rape
Does it just happen that this particular issue, the one pertaining to nerds working for six-figure salaries at software firms, is the last straw?
You read all of this, and promptly summarize: "women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers."
What's happening here?
His facts aren't even controversial to anyone who knows the science at this point. Google has basically shown themselves as anti-science and evil.
More philosophically, there are compelling reasons to favor "equality of opportunity" and "freedom of choice" over any "equality of outcome" that can only be achieved through coercion and discrimination. At the very least, if someone doesn't want to do something of their own accord, it is hardly doing them a favor to coerce them into changing. And from where comes our moral standing to judge the preferences of other people anyway?
Do you mean black people or women? Or is this an attack on educated people regardless of their gender or racial orientation or identification?
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The Big-Five model which underpins most of the relevant research in psychology) dates to the mid-1990s. If you want to attack it for being unscientific, you will have to learn about it. Good luck.
If some women, on average, want to do things differently than men, on average, that will result in some apparent gap in the averages -- not because of advantage, disadvantage or bias, but because you're looking at a difference in average preference.
As an example, I could present a graph showing that most Italians are Catholic and argue that it shows a genetic predisposition. But, such an argument would clearly be absurd.
Clearly there are plenty of things we all (to a first approximation) agree that you cannot in earnest say at your workplace.
There are other ways to combat illogical ideas.
As an atheist I would not fire people for being believers (even if it were lawful to fire on that basis) --just because "I know better". If one of them tried proselytizing, by law I can't do anything about it, but even if I could, there would be better ways to combat irrational appeals and sowing of fear.
That said, what if the engineer has "only" presented the ideas as a private person at a "men's club"? If that's not okay, then this infringes upon people's speech outside of work as a citizen --that's chilling. There are Walmarts out there.
I believe in making tech an attractive career path for women --as a society we underutilize them and don't extract the value we could --as the soviets did from their women. But at the same time, I am sensitive to kerbing speech.
Instead, he had the poor judgement to publish in a workplace forum an argument that the women at Google tended to be there due to reduced standards for hiring women, because biologically women tended to be less suitable for the kind of work they were being hired to do.
Timothy Lister had a term for this kind of thing in _Peopleware_: he called it "teamicidal". If you do something teamicidal at your dev job, you should expect repercussions. You are paid to contribute to a team, not to fuck it up in an effort to remake it in your image.
(I think Google took the easy way out here, by the way, and that there were more productive ways they could have responded to this, rather than let it fester for days until they were cornered into a dramatic response. But: I don't work at Google, and my epistemological certainty about this is somewhat low.)
That said, I don't agree with sacking someone because they said something unproven and because it can make people feel bad. I know some Googlers, men and women, and they tell me stories about people getting fired over small indiscretions (a bar, for example) and about people getting called in an office for saying off-handedly "lady" or girl. While not getting the same reprimand for saying guy or boy.
On the other hand belittling "middle America" is kind of a pastime with many a Googler. (When you point out that South Florida is heavily Hispanic and that those Hispanics vote republican, they find it hard to believe, for example.)
In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document. Anybody could tell you that a lot of people would be hurt by this document, regardless of its scientific merit. As such, it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right". Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
That's the problem right there.
This is a ridiculous statement. Scientific merit should be the only consideration when you are saying something you believe is important. If you're engaged in small-talk, go ahead and throw scientific accuracy out the window, but not in anything substantial.
Does the length of such a list invalidate the items in the list? I don't see your point.
> in fact, it's kind of hard to think of something you can't six-degrees-of-science your way to defending.
Just because something is not directly implied by something else, doesn't mean there is no correlation. If you are working on a mathematical proof, would you give up if you cannot reach the end in 6 (or any arbitrary small number) of steps? Would you declare the assertion wrong? If yes, you're just a bad scientist.
More likely value to shareholders, in his setting.
Your (and presumably, the google employee that got fired) response?
"Nah, I am right, so fuck your rules"
It doesn't work that way.
Not really, he suggests replacing them with other diversity programs that he claims (whether correctly or incorrectly) would work better.
In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document.
Yes. He forgot his place and and committed heresy against the party line. That's always a dumb thing to attach your real name to.
Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
That's an interesting argument, that people's feelings should have precedence over seeking truth.
it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right"
It reads like he did try to be careful to the best of his ability; it's just that in such a hostile environment, not even professionals have sufficient ability.
I will strongly defend people's right to hold differing opinions, even extremely controversial ones.
But this guy did not take the right approach. He wrote a freaking 'manifesto' and published it fairly publicly.
Diversity initiatives are a very touchy subject, and if you are going to approach them, you need to do it as carefully and tactfully as possible.
What he did was neither careful, nor tactful, and whether he is 'right' or not is completely besides the point.
Unfairly is precisely the point on which your question turns. If you have interesting points to raise in favor of Al Qaeda, you should absolutely be allowed to raise them, and you should not be fired for so doing. I don't think your arguments will have much merit, but if they're cogent, i'm happy to hear them.
The whole point of his manifesto, and the reason why your post misses it, is that he wasn't fired because of the truth or falsehood of what he said. His arguments weren't evaluated on their merits, and presumed to be the wanderings of a mind ill-suited to the tasks at Google's hands. Nobody even bothered to directly address the question of whether he was right, because they were too invested in how it made them feel. That is the problem.
We should be open-minded about everything. Including child labor, ending universal suffrage, and the virtues of Al Qaeda. We should be able to reject bad ideas on their merits, each and every time, because we understand what and why we believe. We should embrace disagreement, because it makes concrete our own worldview. The fact that the VP of Diversity of at Google simply dismissed the arguments of a widely circulated (and therefore, likely, widely agreed with) memo speaks volumes. And it may be that he's wrong. It may be that his arguments are completely empty of substance, maybe the studies he cites are pseudoscience. But if a decent number of Googler's agree with him, as appears to be the case, then his arguments should be addressed directly, on even ground, on their merits - not shamed into silence. If he's wrong, it should be easy to demonstrate it.
* The suitability of African people for chattel slavery
* The historical reality of the Holocaust
* The criminality of child sexual exploitation
Obviously, having spent more than 15 minutes on the Internet, I'm aware that there is some doofus connected to a keyboard somewhere who is prepared to open a lively and spirited dialog about all three of those issues. But, like a lot of other reasonable people, I'm not open to that dialog, and attempting to engage me in it will have consequences: I will never work with or in any way associate with a Holocaust denier or a child pornography advocate.
This can bother you as much as you choose to let it bother you, but the degree to which it bothers you won't have much impact on my thinking.
People love linking to Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay in this context. I've never had a conversation of any sort with Paul Graham that led me to believe that he was a crazy Cheetoh-stained Holocaust denier, or an advocate for the rights of the Cheetoh-stained or Holocaust-history-averse. I think "What You Can't Say" is by far his worst essay. And I'm hopeful that tire-fire threads like these do a better job of illustrating why than anything I could write to explain my point further.
Why do you feel it's his worst essay? People generally regard it as one of his best. Jessica said it's her favorite, for example.
It's difficult to infer from this thread why it's his worst. Rather than guess, I thought I'd ask.
I'm pretty sure this isn't what Graham meant to write, but the only thing I ever see people take away from that essay is "the worst ideas are unfairly maligned". Judge the essay for its actual impact on the marketplace ideas. What's the good that's come of it?
One of my favorite parts of “What You Can’t Say”:
> Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
That's quite a bit different from calling it her favorite. Anyway, I was only curious.
One of the reasons why even gruesome speech is considered protected is so that people with such opinion can speak out and let everyone know who they are. If someone speaks in favorable terms about sexually abusing children, you will think twice about sending your children to that person's home. However, if such speech is prohibited, you will never know this person's intention and that would put the children living near that person at risk
You personally do not have to debate them, but their speech should still be protected
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
Are you in favor of censoring such speech?
I ask because the only way to get rid of the "consequences" you deride is to introduce large-scale censorship designed to privilege the person who speaks first. Which then turns any debate into nothing more than a race to be first to say something, after which one can censor one's critics under the guise of preventing boycotts, etc.
I am generally in favor of "refusing to associate" since that implies personal choice.
"Holding people accountable" is semantically meaningless since it can be applied to both appropriate and wildly inappropriate actions.
There are also different kinds of boycotts - like, there's a difference between boycotting a book, and boycotting the publishing company of a book. These are more on a spectrum and should be debated on a case-by-case basis. But these days, many social-media-driven boycotts are on the chilling-free-speech side, which is why I spoke generally about them above, even though there are exceptions.
There's a difference between speech, and seeking to punish someone for their speech. Failure to recognize that spirals us to an ever-more authoritarian atmosphere until you find yourself the one being punished.
The comment I initially replied to categorized "speech that demolishes the speech it is responding to". That's still speech. Trying to declare it off-limits, legally or socially, is still an attack on speech.
Similarly, your "punish someone for their speech" is... well, you're condemning people who responded to speech with more speech. Because you didn't like the speech they responded with. There is no way to be a free-speech absolutist and be against boycotts, blacklists, and all the other "authoritarian" stuff you're complaining about, because those things are just as much speech as what they're responding to.
It's illustrative to look at this form of definition when thinking about a boycott, which is an effort to discourage free speech.
"An effort to discourage free speech" is free speech.
"An effort to discourage tolerance" is tolerance. ("You must tolerate my intolerance!")
"An effort to discourage liberty" is liberty.
"An effort to discourage diversity" is diversity. (This is literally the form of argument that the manifesto author engaged in.)
I do not start from a position of absolutism on speech, or tolerance, or a good many other things, and so I happily get to think through the nuances and have a much better chance of avoiding self-contradiction.
This is where Google dude's free-speech defenders get in trouble; many of them want to be, or want to be seen as, free-speech absolutists (if for no other reason than to say they don't agree with Google dude but feel obligated to defend his right to say what he wants). But they also want to condemn people who spoke out against him, called for him to face consequences, called for boycotts and refusals to associate, etc., and cannot do so without being self-contradictory since they themselves need to engage in "speech to discourage free speech" in order to do that.
When the Reply page opened, I discovered at least one person had voted your comment down... rather ironic, that.
Being open-minded doesn't mean I'll sit still while someone endlessly or facetiously justifies an objectionable notion. If I've heard it before, or it's insincere, I'll dismiss it outright, as I imagine you would.
But on principle, I'll listen to an earnest attempt to demonstrate the merit of anything, even something I'd otherwise categorically reject. You might not influence my position in the slightest, but being open-minded doesn't mean easily persuaded, either. It just means being willing to incorporate new information or ideas in your decision-making process.
The examples you cite are obviously extreme, and so you obviously put me in a bit of an unfair position in having to defend them, so I will start out by unequivocally stating that I do not hold this belief, nor do I advocate it or believe it in any way.
With that out of the way, saying you would never countenance holocaust denial is in many ways equivalent to the Catholic church saying it would never countenance a heliocentric universe. The science up to that point was on their side. The 'known' facts and their religious scholarship were on their side. But they were wrong. Similarly, you know the holocaust happened because you've read it happened. You weren't there. You likely don't know anyone who was there, or if you do, their memories are quite old, and modern science knows quite a bit about how fickle memory can be. It is possible the the holocaust did not happen. Unlikely in the extreme, but possible.
Now, am I going to waste my time listening to a holocaust deniers argument? No, probably not. I put an extremely low prior on the holocaust being ahistorical. So low that it's unworthy of even the most passing consideration. However, that prior is not zero, and it should never be zero. If I started hearing enough people that I respect saying, "hey, you should really listen to this holocaust denier's argument, it's kind of interesting", I might start to pay attention.
My point in defending a non-zero prior for all beliefs is simply to illustrate that you have some prior belief about what this Google engineer has said. You either have or have not read what he actually wrote. I think it likely you haven't. Because what he actually says is fairly reasonable. Certainly not in the 'holocaust denial' realm of truth-probability.
If you have the time and inclination to post here about it, then you have the time and inclination to reject his arguments directly, rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. What is the point of that sort of dismissal? It convinces no one. It changes no opinions. It adds nothing to the universe. This guy made a rational, intelligent argument in support of his case. He cited studies, he explicitly embraced the ideals of diversity, but simply disagreed with a few of the methods. If you disagree, that's fine. But have the courage to do so substantively. Maybe you'll change some people's minds, and actually further the cause you seem to be arguing for.
That's the same as saying freedom is being allowed to do what we should do and not allowed to do what we shouldn't.
You're not anymore open-minded than anyone else.
Farm work is explicitly excluded from child labor laws for this purpose.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/ohio/articles/2017-0...
And in up to 7 other states: http://www.thedailybeast.com/marital-rape-is-semi-legal-in-8...
1. The rights of African Americans
2. The belief that women should be allowed the vote
3. The belief that homosexuality isn't a mental illness
4. Any expression of support for democratic socialism
And we could go on and on. Does anyone doubt, for example, that people weren't once fired for supporting socialist ideologies? Or for being gay?
Your response could have been posted without modification of intent in response to the firing of a gay person in 1952.
The existence of other off-limits topics tells us precisely nothing about this particular topic. Neither does the mere fact that a topic is currently off limits tell us anything about its Goodness or Rightness.
This post is manifestly obfuscatory.
I don't think this is an unfair reading. One of the bullet points in the conclusion is literally that the company's diversity programs are problematic because they alienate non-progressives.
Diversity through quotas or hiring preferences to X, Y, Z classes of people are bound to make people angry.
Diversity though increased access to education, recruitment efforts, and accommodation of different strengths and weaknesses, personalities, work styles, management styles, etc. would make people much happier.
Oh that alienates you? So you want to murder people and steal stuff? We are going to fire/blacklist you now as a thief.
But actually doing so is a fantasy. Building bias-free selection processes is really, really hard. I don't think anyone actually knows how. (At least not useful ones. You can trivially eliminate bias by never hiring anyone, for example.)
It looks to me like this is the fundamental agreement between the two sides here. Both sides want to hire the people who will be best at the job, full stop. People who think James Damore is correct believe that the typical hiring process, or at least some achievable tech hiring process, already achieves this, and any modification is necessarily selecting worse candidates. People on the other side, such as myself, believe that the hiring process selects for far more than just merit, and diversity programs are an attempt to fix that.
So, yes, let's pick the best of the best. How?
"Politicization" is quite vague and the author doesn't explain exactly how these programs are "politicized" or what that means. I suspect it comes down to their mere existence.
That's how far this has gone. I am saddened that more moderate voices have not spoken up like this brave ex-Googler but given the climate and the consequences, I understand it.
Vote with our feet, and our skills, and go elsewhere. They want to enforce their religion then they can do it without us.
There have to be plenty of people sick of watching what they say, walking on eggshells, and pretending to hold political views opposite of their true beliefs just to avoid the wrath of the regressive left.
This is only going to get worse, and I don't see why we all have to sit back and take it any more.
Censorship by any other name is still censorship, and they're not rights if you selectively protect them for "your" causes.
Openness, or simply indifference to personal or political beliefs I thought was the DEFAULT position of most people.
It is sadly not that way anymore... this and many many other examples have shown us all.
Just search twitter for hundreds of tech-industry employees railing against this guy for trying to present a statistical argument against conventional wisdom. They are no doubt celebrating at this moment that he was fired.
Anyone on the fence just needs to ask themselves... what would happen if these same people knew what was in your head? If they heard you speak about your own views? Would they have mercy? Of course not. Who's next?
You can ghettoize yourselves all you want but it will do you no favors.
If you truly believe in what you say you do you would live your life despite the travails, not wail and bemoan them.
Really it's just intellectualism versus a discomfort examining and considering ideas. Even though I have my personal politics, I don't expect many or most to share them and I don't seek to install them over others.
But I do agitate my viewpoint in ways I attempt to be persuasive with. Often I fail, but it's not about 'winning' as some would have it but integrating and synthesizing.
I personally am Left, Libertarian Left.
I disagree with many of the assertions in the memo, however I do not believe he should have been fired.
Most of the drum beating from SJW's and Diversity Police are from an Authoritarian World view, where tolerance of views they disagree with is not allowed, can not be openly discussed, and should be suppressed by any means necessary
We need to expand the conversation beyond Left / Right, to include what is means to be Authoritarian, or Libertarian
But, and this is important: you don't have any power.
People that are tolerant and acceptable are not the vocal minority. And those in power either agree with the SJW vocal minority, or they are afraid to oppose them.
So what I said above still stands unless their is some concerted effort to change these types of policies and expectations that result in what happened in this scenario.
Now, most people wont write a company wide memo outlining their "controversial" views because they have too strong of a self-preservation instinct.
What I'm pointing out is... are people going to get sick of holding back, keeping their thoughts to themselves, lying so as to avoid judgement. I bet there's a massive amount of readers just on this site that completely disagree with the outcome in this instance.
But they are irrelevant. Because nobody will do anything about it, and the next person to speak up will get fired also. So... nice tolerant open-minded liberals have no power in the face of motivated passionate regressive SJW liberals.
I do not see where that solves the discourse problem, all you end up with is a bunch of Authoritiarna Right companies in a Right Echo Chamber and a bunch of Authoritarian Left companies in a left Echo Chamber
The solution is to get back to promoting true free expression and the idea that "I disagree with what you have to say, but respect you for saying it"
Free Speech is under massive assault, but not from government but from societal sanction which is just as bad and just as dangerous
Societal sanction has a habit of becoming Government Censorship in short order
That won't happen. Because if company leadership, or basically just a group of employees within some company argued for "tolerance" of thought... for example with this Google employee, those individuals would be tarred and feathered just the same.
Does it look like SJW tech industry employees want to discuss and debate ideas?.....
https://twitter.com/polNewsForever/status/894741252977119232
Can you elaborate on the persecution and exclusion you personally experienced from being an American conservative?
Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them. Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them.
These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate. You have chosen to support virulent bigots and misogynists…but don’t want to be called one yourself? Methinks you protest a little too much.
I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions because its a right enumerated by the US constitution. I don't mind being called a bigot or misogynists myself if that's what is required to defend inalienable rights.
You have no right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion. And it is disgusting to see someone's livelihood jeopardized because of political correctness. The backlash started in November, and this is only going to dump gasoline on the raging dumpster fire.
Are you prepared to suppress and jail based on speech and words? Because that's what you're advocating for, and that's what authoritarian/totalitarian governments do.
Not everywhere. You don't have to allow the free discussion of ideas by anyone in your home.
Freedom of speech is not a right to voice such speech wherever and whenever you want, or to be free of the consequences of such. Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech.
This is false. Under the United Declaration of Human Rights:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." an extension of John Mill's:
"Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Societal sanction and interference include the loss of one's job, threats against the speaker, etc.
See: "The first step in assessing whether a particular measure or situation breaches the right to freedom of expression is to assess the threshold question of whether or not someone’s right to freedom of expression has been interfered with or restricted. ... The scope of what constitutes an interference with freedom of expression is very wide. The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, refers to any “formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” imposed on the exercise of the right. In many cases, it is fairly obvious that there has been an interference, for example where someone has been sanctioned for making a statement or prevented from establishing a media outlet. International courts take a wide view of this. For example, the UN Human Rights Committee held that removing a teacher from the classroom for racist statements made outside of the classroom, while keeping him employed on the same conditions, was an interference with his right to freedom of expression..."[0]
[0]http://www.law-democracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/10.0...
And no, being fired is not a societal sanction, just as someone asking you to leave their house isn't. A private company, just like a private house, is not "society".
Private homes are not sovereign lands and neither are companies.
>The nature of the public body is irrelevant. It could be legislative, executive or judicial, or a publicly owned enterprise
The source you provide, which is just an opinion, talks only about governments.
Citing your own source:
"The right to freedom of expression cannot be limited at the whim of a public official"
>"The source you provide, which is just an opinion, talks only about governments."
This is incorrect. Article 19 is a prominent humans right organization, specifically focusing on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is also the second source agreeing that you cannot fire someone for what they say.
Here, I'll add a third: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/SDecisionsVol7en... pg 54, Ross vs Canada. This is straight from the UN.
So again, your entire argument does not apply at all to Google, or any other non-government entity.
It's illegal to retaliate/discriminate (being fired is covered under this definition) on the basis of an employee's political activity.[0]
[0]http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/labor-code/lab-sect-1101.html
You could even argue that nothing in the essay was political activity, then, again, your point is moot.
Fairly, under the United Declaration of Human Rights, or if it were a just world, no.
"You could even argue that nothing in the essay was political activity, then, again, your point is moot."
I don't think so. Any topic that has a clear dichotomy between two political parties is in-itself a political issue. Again, the umbrella for political activity is a wide one.
You said "Freedom of speech is not a right to voice such speech wherever and whenever you want, or to be free of the consequences of such."
I rebutted with authority sources saying the opposite and your following rebuttals were all opinion.
I'm not going to point blame, but this is a two-way street and requires effort from both parties.
So, again, you have provided no argument regarding Google's case.
The first party was the Centre for Law and Democracy (based in Canada). The second party was Article 19 (registered in UK) -- however I was informed I misread the print on this one. The third party was the Office of the United Nations (based in USA/NY and SWI). The fourth party was the California Labor Code.
You have offered, in this entire comment chain:
1). Your opinion on how freedom of expression should be restricted (unsourced)
2). Your opinion on what constitutes a societal sanction (unsourced)
3). Your opinion on what constitutes fair grounds for dismissal (unsourced)
So I will rebut, once again, with sources countering your claims.
You: "They [Google] can [discriminate on what you say], except in some cases (protected speech). And being regulated by the government doesn't make you the government."
Employees are protected under "anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII, RCW 40.60 (the Washington Laws Against Discrimination or “WLAD”) and various local laws. "[0]
Local laws include California's Labor Code - LAB § 1101: "No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees."[1]
Google would also be in violation of "Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964"[2] for retaliation against objections of its discriminatory practices against men (section n, paragraph 1). Which Google, under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, did: "Sex discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of that person's sex...
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment."[3]
I ask of you to show me the courtesy of not wasting my time if you don't wish to take this seriously.
[0]http://corporate.findlaw.com/law-library/freedom-of-speech-i...
[1]http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/labor-code/lab-sect-1101.html
The argument came down to you saying that almost anything is a political activity, and that Google being regulated by the government makes it equivalent to a government entity. No matter how many sources are provided, only one can actually matter: the judge who will decide that.
That's the problem with legal interpretation, until a judge clears it, all discussion is just speculation.
Look at your own points:
> Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
Yes they can.
> Being fired is a societal sanction, a.k.a a limitation on freedom of expression
No, it isn't, your source only talks about a public entity.
> Societal sanction and interference include the loss of one's job
Again, no, it isn't.
And you keep mixing the law of different countries with opinions from the UN. Pick one. You wanna talk about ethics, let's talk about ethics. You wanna talk about laws, let's talk about laws. But stop switching from one to the other whenever your argument has no ground.
It doesn't matter if there was a legal case in Canada, it is completely irrelevant to the case being discussed here. Or even the UN. None of that matters to this context.
So if you really want to cite sources, a decision by a federal judge, the SCOTUS or the NLBR showing that an action by a company that is exactly like Google's falls into illegality will do. Anything else makes no difference here, either requiring your own interpretation, or being foreign to the laws of this country.
> Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
This was a simplified point and I have to apologize for being vague. Google, in certain circumstances covered under the law, cannot discriminate against someone for what they express or what they would otherwise express.
This is shown in under the EEOC links as "illegal to retaliate against employees that speak out against discrimination in the work place." Coincidentally, this is what Damore is suing Google for. Whether he wins or not, I agree, is a fruitless debate in semantics. However, this doesn't change that it is possible he has a case.
> Again, no, it isn't. And you keep mixing the law of different countries with opinions from the UN. Pick one. You wanna talk about laws, let's talk about laws. But stop switching from one to the other whenever your argument has no ground. It doesn't matter if there was a legal case in Canada, it is completely irrelevant to the case being discussed here. Or even the UN. None of that matters to this context.*
This is incorrect and I have to accuse you of not reading the sources I provided you. The legal case in Canada was set as precedent for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international law document, by the UN, which the U.S is a part of and an adopter of said document.
> So if you really want to cite sources, a decision by a federal judge, the SCOTUS or the NLBR showing that an action by a company that is exactly like Google's falls into illegality will do. Anything else makes no difference here, either requiring your own interpretation, or being foreign to the laws of this country.
Exactly is impossible and exactly is not how precedent is set. There are certain actions a company can take, no matter its size or circumstance, that illegal due to precedent. Here is an NLBR ruling against codes of conduct, which Google has violated: http://www.quarles.com/publications/employers-take-note-nlrb...
Is there a lawsuit already? I can't find any news about it.
> I agree, is a fruitless debate in semantics
That's my point about this discussion, it became about interpretation of laws. We can continue to argue forever here, but ultimately it will be up to the courts, if he pursues legal action, to decide the correct interpretation.
> The legal case in Canada was set as precedent for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international law document, by the UN, which the U.S is a part of and an adopter of said document.
"International law" is a vague term that carries little weight. It has no "law" power unless any country actually formally agrees and implements internal laws with the same effect.
So, again, it carries no weight here.
> There are certain actions a company can take, no matter its size or circumstance, that illegal due to precedent.
That could illegal due to precedent.
> Here is an NLBR ruling against codes of conduct, which Google has violated
Again, you make the claim that Google has violated, with nothing but your opinion to back it.
And from your own source:
A policy that is written in the context of unprotected comments toward coworkers (e.g., unlawfully harassing comments), rather than protected criticism of the employer, will be deemed lawful.
That's what Google claims that the author violated, and apparently was fired for.
Remember, California is an at-will employment state. You can fire someone for ANY reason except a few clearly defined reasons. The burden of proof is on you to show that Google has fired for one of those reasons, not on Google (or me) to show that the firing WASN'T for those reasons.
Google doesn't have to justify a firing at all.
And a correction on my part, Damore is filing a labor complaint.
A company can, for example, fire you for not liking the color red.
I had said: "Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech", by which I was talking that private people and organizations do not have to give you the space and time for you to voice your speech.
His/her reply was that governments kill people so you should be free of the consequences of your speech.
The implication of this argument (being free of the consequences) means, for example, that your family can't not invite you over for Christmas because you're racist. Or that your friends can't stop hanging out with you, or that someone can't stop employing you.
Those are all consequences of your speech, and you're not protected from them (with a few exceptions).
What do you think?
I'm ok with that, but I'd rephrase as "there is no absolute freedom of speech", or even better, "there is no absolute freedom" in our society, and I'm ok with that.
> Our society will take a long time before we can truly accept freedom of speech and all its consequences.
Do you mean
(1) (freedom of speech) and (freedom of the consequences of speech)
or
(2) accept (freedom of speech) and (consequences of speech)?
> What we have always seen in our society is if you think differently than the main stream thought you should be aware that will be consequences.
IMHO, there is no mainstream, only the immediate surroundings. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" next to that engineer who got fired will probably help you make a friend. Saying that in front of a woman will probably help you make an enemy.
Both are consequences of speech. You make, and lose, friends based on your speech. Why would someone find the positive consequences of your speech acceptable, but not the negative ones?
In life, there are always consequences. IMHO, the key part of being an adult is recognizing that your acts will have consequences, and being willing to face those consequences, positive or negative.
I think our opinions are much alike at this point.
> Do you mean
I mean 1. I think one day we should accept freedom of speech and freedom of the consequences. That will prevent bad/good ideas to gain further power and bad/good ideas to appear as an option. Offcourse which one is bad/good will depend on the judgment of the person who listens.
> IMHO, there is no mainstream, only the immediate surroundings. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" next to that engineer who got fired will probably help you make a friend. Saying that in front of a woman will probably help you make an enemy.
Mainstream = conventional, normal. So we could say we have both, the mainstream and your surrounds (probably your surrounding has more power than the mainstream, don't know)
> Both are consequences of speech. You make, and lose, friends based on your speech. Why would someone find the positive consequences of your speech acceptable, but not the negative ones?
Agree, both are. Usually, I often disagree with my best friends, sometimes our opinions are very, very different, and as far he doesn't act against my rights (settled by laws and our society), I'll accept and tolerate our divergence.If the opinion is too different, probably there will be no willingness to talk with each other. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" will make problems, I personally strongly disagree with that phrase, however, I wouldn't fire him because of that, is his opinion, and I respect that as far he doesn't break the law. (He would have a hard time trying to convince me of that, I would say that a warm discussion would happen)
> In life, there are always consequences. IMHO, the key part of being an adult is recognizing that your acts will have consequences, and be willing to face those consequences, positive or negative.
I also agree with that. I hope one day our society would be mature enough to separate opinions from consequences.
Oh, I found something to pick on:
> I'll accept and tolerate our divergence
Would you continue to be friends in the same way with someone who came out and said "I just joined the KKK!"?
An opinion does not cause physical harm.
This is the error with political correctness- as precisely defined-- it is the idea that you must be politically correct, otherwise you're causing a moral wrong.
I don't think this can be justified rigorously. But it is taken as an article of faith, almost, among its adherents.
From my perspective, it is used as a tool to control, by moving the overton window to exclude areas of thought that are different, and to rationalize actual actions that cause damage. (Firing someone isn't an atrocity, but it is harm.)
So, ironically you're advocating doing the harm you're using as justification to defend your ideology.
People suffer for other reasons too though, like societal inaction and economics. Do you hold yourself to the same standard, with your lifestyle choices affecting others as they do, in the same regard that you're holding others for their political ideas? Have you adopted dozens of children from third world countries instead of creating more mouths to feed? Do you ride a horse to work to reduce your climate impact? Have you optimized your entire life for the supremely calculated reduction of suffering? How would such a calculation even be verified correct? Where does that line get drawn in your world? Is it simply on people with philosophies that are convenient for you to criticize to make yourself the superior humanitarian?
This comes down to your views on a single question: do you have to be tolerant of opinions or actions that harm others? Right now, I think most progressives say no, conservatives obviously say yes. That is the actual gray area this comes down to.
This is an exaggeration, but it illustrates the argument of the left: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/223/669/6bc...
It should also be noted that the US constitution is being used very out of context here. The US constitution guarantees you the right to say what you want. It does not protect you from the repercussions of your speech, which is what is harming the livelihoods you cite. Whether that is moral is a valid debate, but misusing the constitution here is a broken crutch for the argument. The right has made common use of misusing the constitution, most recently in their abandonment of "states rights" during the current administration.
The debate and argument of ideas is non-negotiable if we desire a free society.
EDIT: I choose to be tolerant of ideas that may be abhorrent or cause harm, because the alternative is much worse.
EDIT: Wtf is wrong with people on HN today? I merely stated the law, it isn't even my opinion. It demonstrably passed Google's legal team, so it's unlikely that I'm wrong.
As may the government through statute. This is simply a matter of the constitution not going far enough, and additional law needed to prevent employment termination from expression not deemed "in fashion".
I don't have to hear obscenities on my private property.
There's also freedom of association. It seems weird to me that one would be against authoritarianism when it comes to freedom of speech but be blindly for authoritarianism when it comes to association. I won't and can't judge whether the firing of that googler was justified but shareholders of google should have the right to fire whoever they bloody want.
Would you hold the same argument if I decided to acquire 51% of Google stock and fire all female employees? Or just the ones that decided to exercise their free speech? What shareholders wants comes second to government regulations to protect workers, for good reason.
Firing someone is a harmful action. Progressives obviously support this.
As for your cartoon - Categorizing anyone who disagrees with your values as a cartoon villain of pure evil, deserving of no rights and no response but violence, is the foundation of evil. The cartoon glorifies harmful action - and it's a great representation of the far left now.
Progressives absolutely tolerate opinions and actions that harm others - they hold the opinions and commit the actions with great energy.
It is illogical to conclude that we give people certain rights if we were simply to abandon them to their persecutors when they choose to exercise their rights. What was theoretically protected becomes merely a facade and an illusion that people have rights when in fact they are at the mercy of those who would attempt to subvert their rights
The practical effect of legislation is at the core of even the most introductory and basic courses of any law degree whether it is from an Ivy League University or the most rundown backwater campus
The general statement that you don't benefit from a certain degree of protection when exercising a constitutional right without any sort of mention of what a reasonable limit on those rights would be completely ignores the fact that constitutions were drafted PRECISELY to protect individuals who wished to exercise those rights
The same protections that you demand exist for people expressing their right has to fall on both sides of a debate.
You can't draw a neat box around one person's thought and say "protect this from others".
The "chilling speech" effect is one of many reasons why anti-SLAPP statutes exist, a way to explicitly protect freedom of speech from specious attacks.
We certainly couldn't expect people to have no reaction to speech, in fact, no reaction to speech would mean the speech is worthless! But there are cases where we can decide that a certain retaliation to speech is explicitly prohibited, and this is uncontroversial enough to find many examples of laws and statutes doing just that.
Anti-SLAPP is about protecting people from the financial drain of a lawsuit by a third-party looking to intimidate. It does nothing to force anyone involved to continue to employ, or do business with, any individual.
The problem in this case, from an employer's perspective, is that they have one employee who is creating a toxic atmosphere not from a protected position, but from a hostile one.
And while you might believe that people who read his memo as "toxic" are over-reacting to it (and there is an argument there, though one I wouldn't agree with), they must be free to "overreact" and speak their mind.
It does get very, very tricky, since while unpopular racist/sexist opinions may necessarily create problematic dynamics in the work place, that could easily also be true of opinions those who decry this memo would think should be protected. If I work at a company with a steeped culture of faith, and I walk around talking about how Christian's are stupid, to what extent should the employer be forced to continue to employ me?
I tend to believe that, to the extent we have freedom of speech, we chose when and how to exercise that in public. Our choices have consequences, and it is on us to accept those.
I'm a small business owner. If tomorrow, I write a "memo" which says something as moronic as "Women don't make good clients", and I HAVE women as clients, I can't expect them to continue to want to do business with me. I can't demand any type of legal protection which would force them to continue to do business with me.
It is just as true that, at least with my company, I can see many types of clients who would not appreciate the libertine culture of my agency. I've had more than one potential client, who found out we used to take our employees to a regional Burning Man event, show extreme discomfort at it, and it likely cost me the account.
I've had job applicants turn down working here because they were more conservative (and one I remember who thought we were too conservative for them).
That's just the nature of the thing. People are free to say what they want, to associate with who they want, and must accept the social consequences for doing so.
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction
Not just from government censorship, but from SOCIETY censorship as well
Governments, at least Western Government, are a reflection of society in general often delayed by a generation or so. As such if society deems fit to Censor something often that translates into the government censoring the same thing just a few year later.
We must be always mindful of threats to free speech not just from government but from society at large.
It is incumbent upon everyone to respect everyone else's freedom of expression, individually
It sounds like a facile reading of Mills, without ever going to the back half where he talks about valid reasons for a society to put pressure on an individual, but I've been more on the Federalist papers this year for obvious reasons.
The US Constitution is a document that outlines what powers the people of the US have granted to the Federal government, it has no bearing on what I am talking about
If you think that's okay because of the views this engineer holds, you're a terrible human being.
For example, libel, slander, and harassment may all take the form of "speech" but are unquestionably firing offenses. Those are also criminal offenses because the balance of harms swings away from the person who's free speech rights might be violated, toward the person who's own rights are being violated due to the exercise of free speech itself.
As that old adage goes: My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
More likely than the lawyers saying the firing was legal, is that Google decided the cost of an illegal firing was less than the cost of keeping him onboard.
I guess you don't work in the United States? Because it's certainly fine for him to be fired for this.
freedom of speech is a far more general moral principle and social norm. we ought not conflate the two and there is much more utility in discussing the more general case of freedom of speech and not the narrower more legalistic case of the 1st amendment.
But the idea is bigger than the constitution. I think it is best expressed in The Friends of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
This is a deep idea. I think it is virtuous.
Silence no ideas.
I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions too.
I do not support tech companies that hire smart people continuing to employ people that argue for substantial changes in policy based on nonexistent science and personal feelings. It is not "political correctness" that gets someone fired for failing to test a change before deploying it in production and breaking the site; it is a lack of critical thinking skills. The memo displayed a lack of critical thinking skills.
If you try to claim that individuals in a free society should be averse to taking someone's opinions and words into account when deciding whether to associate with that person, you are essentially saying that opinions and words don't matter. That's a far greater threat to free speech than government censorship is. An oppressive government can be overthrown, subversive publications can be made, end-to-end encryption can get ideas across, etc. But a society that believes that opinions are of no consequence has lost all hope. It is not the government-enforced dystopia of 1984 but the self-imposed dystopia of Fahrenheit 451.
But his memo had extensive sourcing, including many scientific studies. Are you saying that those studies are nonsense?
> It is not "political correctness" that gets someone fired for failing to test a change before deploying it in production and breaking the site; it is a lack of critical thinking skills.
This is opposite the blameless culture laid out as best practices by the leaders in tech, so I don't know why you would assert it as a good reason to fire someone.
I too, like you, think words matter and think we should be able to take people's beliefs into account when choosing to associate with them. I'd like to note that our opinion is pretty controversial - it's actually illegal to do this for several wide ranges of people's beliefs, when it comes to employment! So perhaps there is a middle ground between "words don't matter" and "we must support all opinions", and in watering down the argument to these two simplistic extremes we're ignoring the complex reality evident before us.
"Extensive" seems like a stretch. Here are the scientific (i.e., non-Wikipedia, non-media) citations:
- women are more interested in people than things (DOI 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x)
- women score on average .4 sigma higher on "neuroticism" than men (DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168)
- the average woman is more interested in work-life balance than the average man (DOI 0.1080/03069880600769118)
- moralizing issues is sometimes bad (DOI 10.1111/1467-9280.00139)
- the concept of "microaggressions" lacks scientific backing (DOI 10.1177/1745691616659391)
Of those, only the last one is directly relevant to his policy proposals. (And it seems to be one researcher's position paper, anyway, but I'm happy to grant for the moment that it holds the weight of scientific consensus.)
The rest are all interesting scientific facts but the connection to his policy proposals is incredibly unclear. I said it's based on personal feelings because the idea that software engineering involves caring about things more than people, that neuroticism (in the psychological sense) makes one less suited for software engineering, and that advancement in tech requires giving up work-life balance. As many others have argued (e.g., https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man... ), these are opinions of an extremely junior engineer who has confused "software engineering" with "writing lines of code".
If we're going to take the logic in this article seriously, we should much more readily take seriously 'aphyr's (absurdist) suggestion that men perform better on technical tasks in societies where they're not allowed to own property: https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/894211417561341952 That one has a solid scientific citation and direct relevance to the policy proposal it's making!
> This is opposite the blameless culture laid out as best practices by the leaders in tech
The blameless postmortem relies on the fact that you trust everyone to be making the best decisions they can under the circumstances and you trust them all to be well-informed and qualified, and that sometimes mistakes happen anyway and the identity of the person who makes it is basically chance. Take GitLab's recent incident: if a company's practices don't involve testing backups, and someone is responding to an urgent production problem and deletes the wrong directory, it's not a sign that the person who got paged is particularly incompetent. There is incompetence, but it's a property of the entire team: backups should exist and be tested, runbooks should be clearer, production hosts should be more visible, etc.
But as a consequence, in order for the blameless postmortem to work, you have to actually trust your engineers to be competent. A person who writes a manifesto like this is also the sort of person who's going to read a half-complete answer on StackOverflow that offers a simplistic but enticing explanation, and conclude that it is 100% relevant to their problem despite evidence to the contrary, questioning relevant internal docs along the way. Someone who does that isn't someone you want responding to production incidents. You don't want to blame them - because you don't want to risk them causing problems in the first place.
Such a person is a mishire. The fact that certain people are rejected in the interview process (including false negatives!) does not violate the blameless culture. Once you conclude that someone was a false positive hire, you should promptly let them go with a generous severance.
You might just have a terrible organization or managers with no or poor experience. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But that doesn't imply that an organization or manager's job is to teach everyone everything. There exist non-junior roles, and very often there are people who are mishires for a senior role but great hires for a junior one, or mishires for a certain company but great hires for another one, etc. Sometimes what you're looking for is a senior engineer, and saying "This person isn't senior, they're not right for this role" isn't a failing of management or of the organization.
Damore was a senior engineer (L5) at Google, which is definitely not a junior role (it's the first level where they don't expect you to be getting promoted within 1-2 years, IIRC).
(Let's also be clear, everything I've said about dealing with mishires promptly also applies to mishires in management or mis-promotions into management. There are a lot of people in management who have no business there, and should get either a promotion to a highly-ranked IC role or a generous severance so they can find one elsewhere, before they do more harm to their team.)
I'm personally outraged by people who think it's okay to write emails and chat messages with improper punctuation and spelling mistakes. Mixed case sentences, emojis, and made up capitalized abbreviations make my blood boil. But none of that is grounds for me getting those people terminated.
If I don't want to deal them I can go work somewhere else. That's the right I have. Not the right to silence them.
It's the same if they decide to express their political opinions or sports affiliations.
For another example: It would be the same as saying Blacks are inferior to 2. political opinions.
That is NOT OK. It is not a question of being outraged, it is a question of a hostile workplace.
No I'm not. I'm saying that there is a distinction between being offended/outraged and being harassed. Just because someone is offended by something doesn't mean it's harassment. My examples were explicitly meant to be silly to demonstrate the point.
What?
Harassment is different and can be objectively defined in the scope of the business and/or role.
But outrage/offense is subjective. You can change your views from one day to the next, or flip perspectives over lunch. You don't get to come back from lunch with a new view, and have a 'right not to be offended'.
You come across as very entitled.
What. Of course there is a right to be offended and outraged by someone's opinion. It's the same right that allows someone to share a dumb opinion in the first place.
Should the ACA - or health insurance in general - simply be abolished due to defects that you dislike, without a replacement? If the VP of inclusion isn't doing a good job up to your standards, should they just be fired? When Mr. Damore advocated for the removal of all these programs without providing concrete suggestions on how to replace them with better programs, he committed a similar error. (This is aside from the reasoning he used to try to justify it, which is another set of issues)
Can you justify this with data?
Come on. It's self evident that it's working.
Whether that results in effective outcomes for the business is a different matter; but if your KPI is just 'ratio of XXX in employees' there's no question its doing what it's literally designed to do.
No, this is the topic that is being debated in this chain and "It's self evident that it's working" is not sufficient to refute the point.
There can certainly be a blurry line in some places that makes it difficult to identify whether a given program has an (unintentional or otherwise) discriminatory effect but a lot of the stuff he objected to is very clearly positive assistance for people who need it, and not anything that harms men in his position.
So evidently Google can demonstrate modest improvement. And it sure seems like the Guy Who Got Fired felt like he was seeing the undeserving and huddled masses approaching his ivory tower.
But I'm not sure exactly what you'd like. On the one hand, "Someone needs to do something" and on the other "this blatantly favors one class of people." But I'm not entirely sure that last part is true. Google has quietly improved a lot of feminist hot-button issues that benefit men disproportionately in the last 3 years as well.
For example, Google increased its paternity leave policy. I know because one of the folks I met while interviewing there was ecstatic about it. They've also taken a lot of steps to improve life for families. I know because while interviewing I toured the day care facilities. Hell, Google quietly helps employee kids get into nearby schools and funds (and even runs) after school activities. You don't even need a woman involved to trigger them, Google offers its -ternity leave to adopters as well.
These things disproportionately benefit men by the simple fact that there are many more men in the workforce at Google, so any family related benefits or policies (and these are important, real issues that deserve to be solved) are really a massive win for men who want offspring.
So this whole angle about biases towards "specific groups" is really just a terrible prism. While I'm not saying this is your angle, it's all too often used as a way to shut down any sort of concessions for minorities with unique challenges.
And the business value is really, really clear: a larger workforce means more supply and less demand. From a large business's perspective, the 5 year operating costs of these programs is tiny compared to the savings a 5% reduction in minimum hiring costs would be.
But you can google search for articles from previous years (google controls the comparisons so you can't free query the data).
It looks like there's been a steady up trend for gender diversity (starting from 2014), even if women to men in tech positions are 2:8.
Although, the racial diversity is abysmal.
And once you normalize that kind of environment as "balanced", an attempts to correct it are going to appear to be a new bias. With few exceptions, this is something like a Mystery Spot illusion where you're normalized to such a skewed perception that even balanced and fair ideas can appear to be unfair.
So how do you propose to move forward?
If you leave to them, they're going to do nothing, and leave it as is, because objectively, by the metric, it's working, and increasing the relevant ratios.
So you're basically advocating to someone that a) does not agree with you, and b) can demonstrate that their KPIs are excellent, to change their behaviour.
Why would they?
The only meaningful way to move forward to come up with a different solution, if you feel this one isn't working, because if since it seems to be working, just complaining won't change anything.
You don't get change by just complaining and making sad faces; change happens by meaningful engagement with the problem; if you're not prepared to do that, face the facts; there won't be any change.
(...and meaningful engagement obviously does not include distributing internal manifestos)
> (...and meaningful engagement obviously does not include distributing internal manifestos)
I agree that change happens with meaningful engagement. The first step to meaningful engagement on complex issues is usually a discussion. Setting aside that it's incorrect to refer to the memo as a "manifesto", it is very much not obvious to me that this doesn't count as meaningful engagement.
While I disagree personally with much of what was written in the memo, I find the response equally disheartening if not more-so. The backlash clearly displays that so many of those claiming to want meaningful engagement are interested in no such thing.
Unfortunately you can't call posting a document full of your opinions and conclusions meaningful engagement.
That's just meaningful self indulgence.
To be fair, perhaps he thought it was, and was trying to do the right thing, and did it wrong? I'm prepared to go as far as giving him the benefit of the doubt on that front.
...but it was wrong. For all the reasons that have been posted extensively on this topic; but, specifically: engaging meaningfully with a topic means discussion; and although we're having a discussion now, that's because this forum allows it, which is not something that that internal memo allowed.
Basically, tldr: Posting documents != meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means actually talking to people, organizing people into groups and delivering your message to the right people. All of that project managery stuff that people don't want to do.
I get it. ...but you gotta do it. That's life. You don't just get to sit in a cave and pontificate and call it engagement.
Feel free to comment (they aren’t disabled, the doc may just be overloaded). For longer form discussions see g/pc-harmful-discuss
Apparently he posted the document in a way that did allow internal discussion.
Edit: Positive discrimination in hiring policies doesn't do much to make tech more diverse, it can only shift the diversity within individual companies. Once someone is already a software engineer, they're almost certainly going to be hired somewhere if they're any good. Giving them preferential treatment does next to nothing for all of the members of their demographic group who aren't software engineers.
Working with a specific class of students (based on gender/race) is highly discriminatory, IMO. I think it is unfair to the people not included in the group you want to encourage, specially when it is children we're talking about. Why not have STEM grooming programs for any student who wants to join? Why exclude some? I live in India. We have a history of casteism. Measures like this were instituted 70 years ago to help the downtrodden. Now it prevents people like me from getting a place in the country's most prestigious colleges while other less-deserving people are admitted because of their lower caste. I was born in the 90s. I did not even once witness an incident of casteism in my life. Except the one perpetrated against me. Your suggestion seems to me like a similar measure. It isn't much different from a quota system.
I do agree that there are ways to implement this incorrectly, and my support is contingent on the following:
* Working with minorities in a field does not mean refusing to work with the majority. To ground this in the world of tech, reaching out to girls and underrepresented minorities does not mean turning away Asian & white boys.
* Steering them towards STEM should leave the agency in their hands. Even in the absence of all social and cultural pressure, it's a stretch to assume that we'll have gender parity in all fields. I'm confident in saying that software development(I specifically point out software development since some STEM fields have parity or even a slight majority representation of women) would have a greater representation than it does now, but I don't think it's 50%. If diversity initiatives end up pressuring people into fields they don't want to be in, then that's a failure in and of itself.
A bigot is precisely, "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group with hatred and intolerance."
Citation?
Supporting a GOP candidate isn't necessarily making you a bigot. Not all candidates are bigots. I personally am a libertarian, and I get made fun of so often it's pretty insane.
Repeatedly, I've been yelled at (yes yelled at) by liberals claiming I "helped elect the next Hitler". This has happened more than once. At work, at social events, etc. and it's insane that just not supporting what I feel is also bigotry (liberal ideals) that I'm treated that way[1].
Not exactly, but it is saying that bigotry is not a deal-breaker for your support and that's a distinction with a marginal difference. See also http://time.com/4405018/gop-platform-lgbt-issues/
There was perhaps a glimmer of hope, thinking "Ok, now the left will rethink its position, will turn the DNC upside down and a new and vibrant left will appear in the American politics, possibly running with many of the idea that Sanders ran" and then nothing much happened.
The main political message so far is being "anti - whatever the president is or does". They botched a nice PR initiative about Russia, it was going so well, until they went to far and now they have nothing left. At last someone there raised the alarm and so they limply came up with the new slogan "Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future" "https://www.vox.com/2017/7/23/16016676/chuck-schumer-democra... but I think it is too little, too late. It's doing to be an uphill battle. I just expected more, not sure why.. Instead I got a stream of nonsense about Russia, a bunch of anti Trump rallies, how many scoops of ice creams he had and so on.
OT of course!
The issue is that the left equates denying preferential treatment as 'denying people civil rights'. That makes it close to impossible for liberal-minded and conservative-minded folks to debate many topics.
> Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate.
Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
> Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate.
Another instance of the first point. Who's saying they shouldn't? Again, the other side wants the same thing--they simply disagree with means to achieve it. But you happen think those means are 'sanctioning violence' against them.
And...'sanctioning violence' against women? What does that even mean? Who is doing this?
The left always tends to fall back on this argument of 'basic human rights' as if the sky is falling because the right wants to take them all away & punish anyone who isn't a straight white male.
It's just a ludicrous mindset that, again, makes it almost impossible to have a rational debate. The nonsensical language in your comment makes that clear.
Suggesting that hires be made based on merit and function rather than the "diversity quota" published by some federal bureaucrat trying to justify their department's existence is so far away from threatening anyone's "right to exist" that they're not even in the same universe.
People holding such distant frames of reference cannot have a reasonable conversation. And that's exactly the point.
A lot of opinions around trans people are centered around it being a mental delusion that shouldn't be accommodated. That leaves them unable to transition and live in society without mental harm. If that isn't persecution, not sure what is!
But those people aren't Fortune 500 material so not pertinent to the discussion. Those people are on the extreme side of the right. It wouldn't be fair if I started to draw conclusions about the left from what you hear people say on /r/latestagecapitalism either.
Trump tries to get rid of unnecessary regulations
"Guys, I think Trump might actually have a point here..."
"OH MY GOD YOU MUST BE A CLIMATE DENIER!"
Your information is out of date. Being transgender itself is no longer considered a mental disorder. Gender dysphoria, discomfort and dysfunction caused by society and by being in the wrong body is the diagnosable condition. Once transgender people have been treated, there isn't any more dysphoria and there is no disorder.
Keep in mind that authoritarianism isn't "people I disagree with that have power", it's when democratic elections stop mattering.
But to your point, authoritarianism is thrown around too often. Better terms for the identity-politicking left include "repressive" or "censorious".
Please, remind me how "being able to have visitation rights to the person you love" or "being able to vote while black" are "special privileges"?
> Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
Yes, let me introduce you to the Republican Party:
- http://www.washingtonblade.com/2017/04/05/va-gop-gubernatori...
- http://www.hrc.org/blog/republican-national-convention-2016-...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-27/republica...
> And...'sanctioning violence' against women? What does that even mean? Who is doing this?
Let me guess: you'd feel pretty upset if all the people in HN today that you are persona non-grata and that they'll make sure not a single person they know hires you. Would you say that removing your ability to make a living doing what you love is violence? Violence doesn't need to mean "punching in the face."
> punish anyone who isn't a straight white male.
And yet, straight white males are the only ones whose rights are never in question. When was the last time you heard of an anti-white male legislation passing in the Deep South? And yet here they are, full internet forums complaining about their waning rights in the hands of females/blacks/LGBT/immigrants. Makes you wonder, huh?
Your view that an opinion can be equated with violence is unethical, but I'm convinced a stronger historical reading would make you blush. It's a terrible and thin rationization. It's so easy to do, here are examples from right and left, with varying degrees of extremeness, quite like yours.
Not your or my opinions, but historical (if abstracted) examples:
- Your opinion that the military in this country should be replaced with an elected government is counter-revolutionary, and your poisonous ideas should be ceased before the imperialist hordes ruin our independence.
- Your opinion that our military intervention was wrong in such and such country is unpatriotic, and therefore illegal.
- Your opinion that God doesn't exist deeply offends religious people and therefore you should not say it, and people like you should be prevented from these deeply offensive opinions.
- Your opinion that drugs should be legalized is illegal because children can view it as a condoning and get hurt.
- Your opinion that this first world war is wrong is sedition, and will lead to prison time. It's harmful to this country and the war.
I hope I illustrated my point. The last was the Sedition Act, the others are more than just one incident.
I've been Left all my life and I'm deeply, deeply ashamed and nervous about the new generation's disregard of free speech and opinions that contrast their own. It's due to a lack of historical knowledge. I am convinced.
It's fine to argue about where the line should be drawn, but pretending the line doesn't exist is just as dangerous.
It's not just a feature of social media comments. This line of thinking is heavily promoted by once-respectable newspapers like the Washington Post in their opinion sections. I raised my eyebrows the first time I ever heard Trump refer to WaPo as "fake news" but two years of daily reading later, I tend to agree with him.
There also exist people who think forbidding abortion is a violation of the human rights of the mothers.
There exist people who think that taxing them and using the money to pay for things they find abhorrent (e.g. war) is a violation of their fundamental rights.
There exist people who think that compulsory education is a violation of children's rights.
Should all these people say the following: "These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate", "If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them", "attempts to deny people fair civil rights ... [are] institutionalized violence"? And then feel justified in, say, campaigning to get anyone who disagrees with them fired?
I do agree, by the way, that advocating laws that violate people's rights is not much morally different from doing the violation oneself. As an anarcho-capitalist, I conclude that probably >99% of political discourse consists of people advocating laws that violate people's rights. I sigh, shrug, and try to make a difference in the places where I can.
And this position is exactly what causes sane people to say "Left is embracing insanity. I do not like those I affiliate with embracing insanity. I guess I'm just going to avoid participating"
Yes it is. You mean it's not a moral precept that you value.
> I do not falsely equate attempts to deny people fair civil rights (as the modern GOP does routinely, in terms of race, gender, gender identity, and so many other ways) as “opinion” so much as institutionalized violence.
Welcome to the logic of the left wing extremist: speech that he or she disagrees with isn't actually speech, it's violence. After all his politics are self-evidently synonymous with justice, therefore any criticism is synonymous with hatred and bigotry. There will never be any criticism of his politics, no matter how measured, no matter how tame, that he will not consider hate speech.
Tolerance is only tolerance if it's voluntary.
Otherwise it is coercion at best, tyranny at worst.
If you have to impose it, it's not tolerance anymore.
You very clearly do not.
Imagine if pro-life people said that "No your pro-choice belief isn't an opinion, it's institutionalized murder and it triggers me as a parent, and makes me feel unsafe, and so if you express that opinion you are violating my safe space and may need to be fired for your deliberately offensive remarks."
Person over party.
I also didn't make any value judgments. I didn't say that my views were "much better," I just said that I don't identify with leftist political views.
So Google Corporate HR has gone socialist, then? Or perhaps they've adopted anarcho-syndicalism?
I eagerly await the next Google Doodle featuring Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist uprising.
They should have taken the mature approach and dealt with it more precisely --even if that would have upset a number of people who simply want to see revenge or feel wronged by an opinion.
After the last election, though, I'm done with making predictions :)
He goes on about how things turned out in Malaysia (from more or less unified country to one divided along racial lines due to overblown identity politics). He concludes that one way to combat that is to remove the first-past-the-goalpost-wins political system in the US. Although in his example LKY combats it via authoritarianism. I don't think we want to go down that route.
Even if you want to separate out a modern social justice movement, it certainly dates back decades.
It's fun to consider it in terms of the foundation of the United States and documents like the Declaration of Independence. The wealthy landholders that declared themselves to be free articulated things so clearly that a bunch of other people decided that they wanted in on that shit.
http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-gro...
http://www.socialjusticetoolbox.com/
^ from just the first page of a google search.
I doubt it.
(one of them compares a modern movement to the civil rights movement...)
IMO the meaning of the term has changed. The "social" in the contemporary definition of "social justice" stands for social media. When I see "social justice", I think of people having their careers and personal lives put on trial, and the court is the internet itself.
Trump inspires a special "rules no longer apply" insanity in far-leftists. They enjoy feeling like the normal rules of conduct don't apply, so they lean into it.
My personal experience with "far-leftists" as you would call them have been large peaceful protests.
It's really that easy. Or have the courage of your convictions and try not to freak out when you live in a place where the majority do not share your views. I say this as a very lefty person in a very red state. I don't hide my views even though I know my neighbors and coworkers may be disapproving.
http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...
Liberals are more likely to defriend someone over politics. Extrapolate that as you will.
This sort of "reframing" doesn't really work as well as you think it does.
I do. Well, brave or stupid.
And I'm far from a GOP voter.
Which human rights specifically do you believe he was attempting to debate?
EDIT: Actually, probably both brave and stupid.
From my admittedly distant viewpoint (I'm not from your country), the GOP has changed substantially in recent years. It used to be a responsible political party that respected democracy. Then it seemed to start believing the ends justify the means - redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc. And at the same time accepting support from seriously racist and misogynist groups.
For example, the Obama birth certificate thing was simply a racist joke when it started. The GOP rank and file should have refused any association with those who suggested it, but because it served their purposes they embraced both the meme and the people promulgating it. The result of that (and more - Clinton trafficking children in a pizza parlour? I'm surprised they didn't add aliens just for good measure...) is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.
I sympathise that your political system provides just two big boats, so you are forced to row with people you aren't comfortable with. In New Zealand we have proportional representation which lets the more... colourful... people have their own boats, which is very healthy because they quickly realise how few people want to join them, and that their views are unpopular.
There's something missing in your perspective which is that redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc are political strategies that have been used by every party in the USA since the late 1700s. Gerrymandering was named after one of the signers of the constitution. The Democratic Party had a solid control of congress for several decades in the 1900s due to gerrymandering (voting districts redrawing). The filibuster was used by democrats as well and as the senate passed back and forth between GOP and Democratic control, each side used it more than the last time.
Now, a lot of noise has been made in recent years in the media about these tactics because the GOP happened to be in a position in 2000 and 2010 to gerrymander the districts themselves, but it's nothing new.
I guess regarding the birth certificate thing, credulity for conspiracies is nothing new among the GOP party base. In the 1990s they were convinced that Bill Clinton had dozens of people murdered to cover up his crimes ("Clinton body count").
Both parties have.
Both have gotten more extreme and more polarized.
From Antifa to the "Alt-Right"
Saying that only the GOP has changed is only looking at one side.
>is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.
That is largely due to media coverage which only highlights the nutters from the GOP, never the Left, and never any Sensible Members. For example you spoke of Obama and how the GOp embraced the "racial joke" birther non-sense, did you ever see this video on your news of John McCain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrnRU3ocIH4
Granted this is from the 2008 election and maybe that is outside your scope of "recent years"
There are just as many crazy people in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. and I say that as a supporter of the King of Crazy parties, Libertarian party, where we had a guy strip on the stage of the National Convention last year....
American Politics... when it stops being crazy I will be worried
You seem to be arguing that we need to create a safe space for conservatives to espouse debunked bio-truth garbage that women or blacks are less suited to being engineers or are somehow inferior. Or that conservatives should have "safe fact-free zone" where they can spout nonsense without having anyone call them on it.
I'm not sure why so many people are willing to take this Google engineer's statements at face value. Actually I think I know why: because it confirms pre-existing beliefs. But even an hour on Google will provide ample evidence that his premises are simply not true. I'm not taking about J. Random Engineer's ramblings on some blog but actual research undertaken by actual sociologists performing experiments and crunching reams and reams of data.
Let me repeat that for everyone: His entire argument is based in a long-debunked flawed premise. It isn't true and no amount of philosophizing about it will make it true. Your feelings don't make it true. The facts are clear. Counter-examples about: look at CS enrollment rates in India for example. The modern western world, especially the United States, socializes women out of computer science and software engineering. It has nothing to do with biological aptitude.
Everyone I know of is desperately trying to find qualified candidates to hire. The idea that more-qualified white men are being excluded to fill a "diversity" quota is laughable. Diversity is about expanding the candidate pipeline and providing some support to those people once hired. Maybe if the industry goes through a huge crunch and programmers are being laid-off left and right then there would be an argument there?
The other thing I'll say is you have to be extremely dense not to either a) understand that you're making extraordinary claims or b) touching a potentially controversial topic that could result in massive bad PR if nothing else. Under those circumstances a competent engineer should take some time to gather evidence and make proper citations to peer-reviewed research. It would also be greatly beneficial to present multiple sides to the argument and make fewer sweeping claims. If you're going to say something that could easily be interpreted as "my coworkers are less-qualified diversity hires" then approach the topic with some humility, especially if you don't have a PhD in sociology.
This would be the equivalent of penning a memo claiming people who believe in God are suffering delusions and they are lowering the bar because they go to church on Sunday or for special events when they could be working. Mention that they're obviously gullible and represent a security risk to other employees. Go ahead - write that memo and route it around a large employer. See if you're still employed a week later (hint: you won't be).
What flawed premise? That men and women are different? For all your insistence that "bio-truths" are wrong, I've never met anyone who actually bothered to cite any studies that contradict them.
>Counter-examples about: look at CS enrollment rates in India for example
That actually supports the author's argument. Given India's notorious treatment of women, it would seem counter-intuitive that they're less sexist. An alternative explanation is that people in poorer countries are more desperate, so they'll take a lucrative job at the expense of their preferences. In wealthier countries, women can afford to pursue their passions.
> Under those circumstances a competent engineer should take some time to gather evidence and make proper citations to peer-reviewed research
The author did make citations (hyperlinks) to most, though not all, of his controversial statements. However, Gizmodo removed them for formatting purposes and possibly to discredit the memo.
(By the way, I think it is reasonable for some individual rights to be protected within the walls of a corporation, but as far as I understand it, many US citizen's rights, like free speech, do not cross over into private domains. I wish it was different.)
Oh you must be joking. He'll never, ever work in the valley again.
If he spends the next couple months on a non-stop apology tour and participate in however many struggle sessions the various women's groups deem necessary, perhaps one day he'll be left alone and Twitter campaigns won't be started up every time he finds stable employment.
Maybe.
I don't remember why, but I recently read some old blog posts about Joe the plumber (2008 election), so I've been thinking about how the public has a very short memory.
The market for developers is very very good, right now. Especially ex-googlers.
Maybe the big 5 tech companies won't hire him, because of the PR disaster that it would be, but any number of startups and small companies would be willing to do so.
Many companies wouldn't even bother to Google his name (personally, I've never seen anyone do that. I just get handed a resume). And even if they did, others would just keep it on the hush hush. Many small startups would be ecstatic to get a Google engineer for cheap.
Other engineers that have been on the receiving end of major scandals, have had no real long term consequences. EX: the donglegate guy was quickly employed elsewhere after he got fired.
Judging by many of the comments in this thread, there seems to be a lot of tech people HERE who are defending him, and would be willing to hire him if they were a hiring manager.
Michael Vick got picked up by an NFL team after dog fighting. It will be similar to that only this guy won't be a celeb.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/oculus-palmer-lu...
Believe or not, he is going to be a figure, the anti-PC figure that certain group always wish to see, and shall be welcomed by them as a hero. Maybe not big companies, but his future might not be that difficult after all.
If he had instead said that Google should focus on addressing these biases that hurt minorities and women and as they take affect and demonstrate their effectiveness allow the affirmative action style discrimination to be reduced. He would have gotten a much better reception.
What are these well known and scientifically established differences in the distribution of traits between men and women?
The research linked in the the document are based on The Big Five Personality Traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.
Having read Mr. Damore's document, I can find very little in it of substance. It deals with politics and gender in only the very broadest of terms. It does not delve deeply into the scientific issues at hand, instead sprinkling his platitudes with wikipedia links to give them weight.
That being said, I completely agree that the US's nasty brand of liberalism is in a sad state. Our response to this manifesto should have been a cold critique of its many flaws, not the blind hysteria we've apparently opted for instead.
Let's say I want to measure ability in chess. I give everyone a self report survey: how good are you at chess, 1 to 10? Group A averages a 6, Group B averages a 5. Reproduced across time and regions. Is group a better at chess? We have no idea. All we know is that they report a high average than group b.
Switch to big five: "I feel comfortable around people." Rate the accuracy. Even if group a rates more accurate than group b, what do we really known from this? Comfortable is a relative term. Do group a and b have different perceptions or different experiences?
It's same for Big Five. Self-reported neuroticism correlates with, say, diagnosis of depression. It's not just perception because it correlates with outcomes of interest.
But that's not your example. If your example was self reported depression correlates with clinically diagnosed depression, we now know that people can self-perceive depression the same as clinicians diagnose it.
Your example is self-reported neuroticism corresponds with depression. So what? How are we any closer to knowing if we measured neuroticism? Is there a pre-existing link between neuroticism and depression? How did they measure neuroticism to establish that link?
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value.
Next, he says:
"These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics"
No citations, no nothing, just: X may lead to Y because it feels like it's true to me! And there are people actually taking the arguments presenting in this document seriously? Can we please take a step back and try to read critically what is presented in this doc? Because these arguments are just embarrassingly weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
A meta-analysis of scientific studies concluded that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people. When interests were classified by RIASEC type Holland Codes (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional), Men showed stronger Realistic and Investigative interests, and women showed stronger Artistic, Social, and Conventional interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering, science, and mathematics interests.[77]
The wikipedia article in turn cites:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140
Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests.
Not exactly the same point he made above but you can at least see how he is coming up with "women prefer jobs in social or artistic areas", "men prefer [coding]". I wish for his sake that he hadn't gotten into the differences between front end / back end code because it does sound particularly speculative and presumptuous - but if you can take a step back and take a broader look at his arguments there does seem to be some scientific evidence in support of his main thesis that "that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership".
Note: I just wanted to point out that I am appreciative that you are attacking his memo on the merits of his arguments. I apologize if that comes across as a patronizing thing to say, but for me the big scandal here has really been the way that dissenters have warped, twisted, and outright dismissed his memo as wrong without even attempting to counter any of his points. To me it feels like the liberal left (of which I self identify, btw) are dismissing his argument not because it is wrong, but because it contradicts their beliefs or because they are afraid of where a serious exploration of the subject might lead us. I don't personally have any issues with affirmative action (although I can understand how it might upset some people) - but I do care greatly about protecting the free and open exchange of ideas. And the calls for the this guy to be fired feel like a disturbing form of censorship to me.
Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team:
- The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote?
- The next time he's peer reviewed by a woman, how does that review get interpreted?
- The next time he peer reviews a woman, how does that review get interpreted?
- The next time a female candidate interviews with the author and is denied, how likely is it that the candidate will believe they had a fair interview, or is the organization perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever?
Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Why MUST we have 50% of male and female in any industry? Have you noticed how almost every media outlet ignores female dominated industries (such as veterinary science) [0], where over 85% of vets in the western world are female? The strongest argument in this thread appears to be that there must be equal numbers for equality, but it's only EVER applied to male dominated industries (Google it if you doubt me). However, not only is this argument unjustified, it's continually selectively applied by most mainstream media outlets, again and again. There is no challenge or balance to any of these arguments from the mainstream media.
I am disappointed that Google sacked this engineer. To understand this mindset, you really need to watch this video on Yale. People being shut down from talking because they're male or white [1] or because angry mobs don't like what they have to say. People in this thread talk about sexism and yet they struggle to provide any evidence (while I can point at truck loads of evidence of misandry, eg. domestic violence, veterinary science, etc). This Yale video talks about this exact problem i'm describing. We have a society where you are no longer allowed to express selective views (even with evidence). Google have confirmed this with their dismissal of this engineer. What we've become concerns me deeply.
To all of the people who have stood up for free speech (and you're in the clear minority in this thread), I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you want to be able to sort out the media that's worth listening to, watch reporting on this topic closely over the next few days. Look for extreme prejudice and emotive language from the media. To quote an excellent quote from the Yale video, "these are moves of power, not reason" (3 minutes in, [1]).
So where are the rational arguments? What about the percentage of female university graduates with relevant skills? What about Dr Simon Baran Cohen's findings on very young children and trends to their thinking patterns? Where are the facts? Why are most people side-stepping facts?
Now please re-read this entire thread and ask yourself about freedom of speech. Ask yourself about democracy. Ask yourself about how many people have presented facts. There is something seriously wrong. You should be deeply concerned about the lack of debate, the lack of evidence, the number of emotive arguments and the message Google has sent to anyone who doesn't toe the politically correct line.
[0] http://career-advice.careerone.com.au/career-development/pro... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM
I think that your argument needs further refinement.
1. The fact you have to dig to find a rare prestigious, yet women-dominated field (veterinary science) demonstrates the lack of equivalence between software engineering or any other men-dominated field. Most high-paying fields are dominated by men in most states. The essence of this controversy is not that there are men being kept out of veterinary science and nursing. It's that women are actively and passively discouraged from entering, staying, and succeeding in the field.
2. I don't think any of the credible stakeholders expects a 50%/50% women to men ratio in software engineering. I think this is a misrepresentation of your opponents.
3. Linking this to freedom of speech and democracy is going to generate "but freedom of speech is just from the government, not from consequences" responses.
4. Claiming this is a trend in Fortune 500 companies is likely to yield from your opponents a considerable amount of examples of liberal workers being terminated from Conservative-style companies for political actions taken on-the-job. Even excluding union agitation, there are many examples from the past ten years.
4. So what? discrimination at conservative companies doesn't justify discrimination at liberal ones.
I disagree with your premise; termination for political activity on-the-job is easily justifiable. I doubt you want to hear non-stop tirades from a PETA activist coworker.
I think your criticism of #2 is facile; which policies in particular are vague? Every corporate anti-discrimination policy I've ever encountered was essentially "don't discriminate against people in a way that will get us in trouble with the Feds."
But in general, he's right that we're in a scary age with the aggressive and dogmatic ideology that favors political correctness over intelligent debate and will defend that ideology with mob rule (even leading to professors being told by police that it's not safe for them to be present on campus).
I'm not looking forward to seeing the political result of this movement becoming a tea party to the left, which I fear is inevitable in the next few years.
> Part of my work this year has resulted in 42% of the LargeCo engineering staff in WestCoastCity are women.
Bingo. Feelings have replaced facts as a measure of righteousness. And, sadly, there are entire industries plugging feelings of injustice by "white cis-males" or some other group of people who are oppressors by dint of simply being a majority.
It's such a mess. And if you give a sht about the Western tradition of reasoning*, it's a cultural shame. Entire national narratives are being powered by lies and mistruths.
The least we could do is talk about it.
But look at what happens when you question this insanity? You're fired and ostracized.
Genuinely sad.
But a counter-point to the focus on male-dominated industries: I suspect it has a heck of a lot to do with the average salary of male-dominated industries compared to the salaries of female dominated industries. If vets were paid like anesthesiologists and vice versa (and across all industries), I think you'd see a lot more articles about equality in female-saturated careers.
Of course, personally I'd rather see a reduced pay gap between gender dominated industries instead of women being forced into jobs they aren't as interested in simply to earn as much as men who gravitate towards those fields. But I've no idea how you actually follow through on that, and "girl-code camps" are a heck of a lot easier to run and self-serving for the runners than "restructure the supply/demand labor market for 20-40% of all industries)".
Affirmative action is legal in the United States.
I work at a large SV tech company and was recently privy to an affirmative action policy that was almost certainly illegal. The wording of the policy was quickly changed after a couple folks spoke up so as to make it conform with the law. If the policy had made it to a news outlet, I guarantee you it would have been on the front page of the NYT the next day.
In short, quotas are illegal. With some exceptions, hiring based on race is illegal. However, taking race into account among many factors is legal. The on-the-ground reality of these policies is exceedingly grey.
It does not mean you get to decide anything for others, but it is a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say, and it is an even more basic sign of respect to not attempt to defame them.
This guy clearly isn't perfect. He was naive about what the effect of releasing his memo would be. However he was respectful and seemed to be trying to temper his perspective. He doesn't deserve the raw hatred and condemnation he is receiving. I think we should be compassionate and try our best to tolerate our differences.
Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say. I am tired of guys not listening to me saying I'm a boring, normal woman who likes math/tech/computers, not a freak or a biological anomaly, some evolutionary mistake.
And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.
He provides no evidence to back the conclusions he draws from that data though. It reminds me of some articles or posts you might see briefly gain traction on the internet where the author starts from a point backed by one or two reputable sources and proceeds to use those references to back an argument that lies well outside the bounds of the original data.
As one of the authors of a paper cited in the memo puts it:
> In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large [1]
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that when people feel singled out because of statistical differences b it leads them to take things personally, which leads to perpetuating disproportionate reactions and a non-existing platform for actual discussion.
> This stuff has been hashed, rehashed, refried, deep fried... and he got all the biology research wrong. It just seems that he did no research, instead thinking about his feelings a lot and claiming he got somewhere original without engaging the existing scholarship at all.
Please provide examples. Your statement is incorrect. Looks like you didn't bother to listen correctly to what he said.
Vets are 80% female. Is the industry closed to men that might want to be a vet? Do we need more outreach programs for men to be vets?
Or maybe is it that men are less likely to want to medically treat animals than women, and the gender discrepancy is one of preference? And yes, men who do become vets are statistical outliers, but certainly not "freaks". It's likely the same for tech and women - you are a statistical outlier, and from your perspective things are the norm, but the majority of women are not interested in the same things that you are interested in professionally. (The majority of men aren't either, but there's a larger minority of men sharing your professional interests than a minority of women).
And as for "not getting somewhere original" - the author's point about the difference between comparing averages vs the overlap of bell curves around the averages is a great point and not one I'd seen highlighted that way before. Perhaps you have, but it was novel to me.
They should have included him on the diversity and inclusion leadership team. Sad that Google went the route they did.
Need it be either/or? Can't we listen to all the stakeholders in this attempt to change the culture for the better?
EDIT: Quoted relevant section of parent for context.
His argument is that the under-representation of women in tech can be explained by biological differences that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny that still echoes in work culture today.
But you are right, "The point is to treat people with respect by building an environment where they can be their best (whatever individual skillset they have), instead of insulting them", which is antithetical to what the author did by writing the pseudo scientific trash and then widely distributing it to his colleagues.
[disclaimer: I work at Google, my views are my own and not those of my employer]
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.
> Nobody is being insulted by this.
[0] https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a-wom...
> I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
> I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.
> You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most
> likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female.
> By creating special awards for women I think you’re belittling the impact
> and effort a group of humans are having in their field – just because of
> their gender.
We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.
The ensuing comments thread on HN also had many similar stories.
So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?
1. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
I get the feeling that this document is what Scott Adams talks about when he writes that two people can sit in the same movie theater, look at the same screen, and watch two different movies play out.
Utterly ahistorical nonsense.
At various times (in the United States) men have been able to opt out of war by: hiring a replacement to take their place; being a conscientious objector and taking a non-combat role; being born at the right time to not be drafted, and choosing not to volunteer; enlisting in a branch of the service unlikely to see combat; pleading a hardship; finding a doctor to claim you are medically unfit; just walking away (desertion, as long as it was not during combat, has historically be inconsistently punished).
At colleges, lowering the bar is in fact how they have often been implemented. This article has some decent numbers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
Lowering the bar is also the easiest way for a mid-level manager to achieve a target percentage. It's probably also the first method that may come to mind for many people.
Also, if you spend 3x the resources to find 3x the number of candidates (is it linear? I dunno), conduct normal interview processes, and then randomly throw out 2/3 of the male candidates that passed, while keeping all the women that passed, that is one way to triple the number of women you hire while having the same bar for men and women. However, the step where you throw out a random 2/3 of the male candidates might strike someone as highly irrational. Why not throw out the bottom 2/3 of male candidates? But then you end up with male candidates that passed a higher bar. You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate. But it would probably be difficult to convince the people involved that avoiding the "unfortunate" outcome is worth throwing away 2/3 of the very best male candidates.
It might be possible to spend 3x the resources in such a way that all the new candidates you find are women. That would be a way to avoid the above problems. How would this be accomplished? Perhaps you send a recruiter to a university, and have them only talk to the female students. Hmm, that might be a little weird. How about a female-only university? That would be great. Likewise any female-only programming meetup groups. And of course any qualified female engineers that anyone knows—they'll never be wanting for a job.
How well will a company perform that spends significant resources recruiting from female-only groups, compared to one that recruits from groups that simply take the best candidates? How significant a fraction of company resources are normally spent on recruiting? And I did see a study indicating that demographic diversity (measured as age and sex) improved morale. I guess we'll see.
What would really help is if universities published the CS accomplishments of all their female students, but not of their male students. I wonder if they'd be willing to do it.
In any case, my original point was, even if a company does in fact implement its diversity program with one of the methods that does not systematically lead to higher-quality male hires than female hires, I think it is natural for someone to assume until proven otherwise that it is implemented by shifting the bar.
No process is ever random. All processes have side effects, that make some kind of memory/feed back loop.
If there are two groups of uniform set of people A and B. And you if make it harder for A to succeed. Set of people in A will have to work way harder, than set B over very long periods of time to win consistently. You will end up making A far more stronger than B. While your intention was to make B at least as good as A over time, you have now achieved the very exact opposite of what you set out of achieve.
This is common in sports, and even competitive exams. Candidates are trained to take on difficult problems than the baseline so that they can get better than the baseline.
At this point the bar for winning is largely to subject to interpretation. Did you raise the bar for A, or did you decrease the bar for B? It depends on what you consider the baseline.
If women are really worth more to the company, for diversity purposes - if not literal diversity of people, at least diversity of opinion and experiences - it would make perfect sense to just actively headhunt women from other companies and simply pay them more than the other people.
Companies never want to actually pay employees more money though.
I didn't see that in the "manifesto" at all. The assertions that "biological differences exist" and that they contribute to the under-representation of women in tech don't at all imply the conclusion that the under-representation is due to biologically-caused inferiority.
There's good evidence, summarized in this blog post, that on the average across society, equally gifted and capable girls tend to choose non-STEM careers more than their male counterparts simply because of differences in preference, combined with the fact that a wider array of career options is open to them due to their higher verbal skills (this was featured on HN a couple of weeks ago): https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Furthermore, it seems that unlike men, women who are capable in math also tend to be capable in both math and verbal skills (whereas on the average, men have less capability in verbal skills), thus giving women more career options. Unlike men (on the average, again), women that do choose STEM careers tend to excel at all levels, including management.
> pseudo scientific trash
See the above article. It references highly cited studies that seem to clearly indicate innate differences in preference (in even 2-day-old infants and primates).
This is completely false! He absolutely does not say that, he says women to not prefer to compete for those jobs. He might still be wrong but you are grossly misrepresenting his statement in an attempt to demonize his lack of PC orthodoxy.
However, if the number of hires is kept constant, and a given process is claimed to be flawed, then you are implicitly stating that one or more offers should have gone to what was a non-hire instead of what was a hire.
[my opinion, not my employer's.]
To be fair to you, I don't think you actually think that. But it's almost like the author of the diversity memo touched a third rail by suggesting that perhaps "lowered standards" could be an outcome from such diversity efforts. Is that a fair consideration to raise or is that beyond the pale now?
Please take care not to deceptively quote the author in question. This is the full sentence:
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
The author deliberately crafted this statement to make it clear that he is referring to qualified, non-diverse, candidates being rejected at greater rates than qualified and diverse candidates - not that unqualified diverse candidates are accepted at a higher rate.
I'm going to guess it is the later: Lawsuit from him would cause discovery. Unlike other government lawsuit, he would actually be able to say who at Google has access to the needed paperwork/email/etc to demonstrate that he is correct in his assertion. The government would love to piggy back on him. So I'm guessing Google is cutting a very large check now.
Government lawsuit against Google right now means that he has the leverage. The odds are the same people who are tasked with the programs to promote whatever the author carefully worded in his post are the people who received/sent emails/edited internal presentations that mentioned something that a good lawyer would be able to twist into a Google's managers admitting that Google does in fact systematically pays women less than men to do the same job. Google has a lot more to lose from that lawsuit than from the author of the memo.
[Edit: typos/clarity]
I would think, with all they have on their plate right now, they can't be bothered about some idiot who couldn't keep his mouth shut in public and just do the job he was hired for.
Government's problem in this case is the same kind of problem that government had in the US v. IBM: IBM buried government in the paperwork and government did not know where to look at to dig itself out.
Here comes the author who seems to have a very good idea of the remediation programs that Google has. The odds are extremely high the people in charge of the remediation programs/diversity programs/etc are the ones who are familiar with the issues that Google has: it is fairly logical. The author probably knows who these people are. He probably talked to them. Probably those people told him whatever he used as the basis for his manifesto. If he drags those people out into the spotlight, the government would suddenly have a beacon for their case.
That's why I, personally, think Google made a gigantic mistake firing the guy.
Whether he was right or wrong, he has hurt the company. I think he is wrong to be sure. But it doesn't matter.
It is also interesting because, a loss in a major legal case may throw up interesting possibilities in the stock market. Of course, one needs to be much more legally aware, than I am, to take full advantage of these possibilities.
However, Damore did file a NLRB claim before he was fired. So he seems prepped to sue, or perhaps to negotiate a private settlement.
Without a lawsuit: DOL gets two million "records" (emails/docs/memos) related to hiring/performance evaluation/etc. It needs to sift through those two million records trying to find the ones that support its case.
With this lawsuit: author knows who in the organization deals with this exact issue. Those people probably had emails from their managers/sent emails to others that can be made to support governments position in DOL lawsuit. Now instead of sifting through the two million records that they got, DOL focuses on 20,000 records authored by those likely to have the kind of information.
That's why such dismissals are dangerous to the company engaged in a costly/high-stakes litigation with the government.
I imagine this ex-employee will get a generous severance or expect good lawyers knocking soon.
Now whether he is able to successfully sue google and make big bucks is difficult to predict at this point. But it's certain that his career is finished for the foreseeable future.
It is a profoundly stupid thing to do for anyone who likes their job as an engineer. Maybe this guy doesn't and wants to start a new career in blogging or some similar shit. In that case, this may be a great new start for him.
If Pao could sue KPC&B, I think he stands a chance, unrelated as they are, it suggests suits can go forward on slim allegations and here he has evidence clear as day they fired him for having a difference in opinion on their hiring practices. He personally didn't discriminate nor personally conduct himself untowards anyone. He offered some (unconvincing evidence about how women don't have the same aptitude as men --but you are likely to find evidence Google does have internal hiring goals and allows a culture which virtue signals against the majority culture) and they didn't like it.
Thing is, if this had been a woman or minority citing some dubious data about how more women and minorities should be hired (which I agree with but on other principles), we would not even blink at it, if it even would have surfaced)
People in general can sue anyone if there's any possibility they might win. The only way her lawsuit would be thrown out if she had never worked for them, or something like that. Otherwise, the way to find out if her claims have merit is the lawsuit.
Which she lost, and was forced to pay $276k to KPC&B. So not exactly a good omen.
Here they fired him not for perf (defensible) but for difference in opinion (maybe defensible but icky) not anything bad he did. I think he stands a better chance than Pao's retaliatory suit.
He wrote the manifesto and distributed it within the workplace. That's absolutely an action he took at work, that's a thing he did.
See also the Shoe Rebellion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022280
You don't have freedom of speech at work. Apparently in the US that's not a freedom of speech issue until the Government says you can't say certain things at work.
Pao's issue was shown to be a non-issue, yet "it brought the issue to light" ok...
I wonder why the author didn't mention the resolution of the lawsuit? I wonder why she mentioned it all? Oh right, peddling falsehoods, both explicitly and implicitly.
You don't have free speech rights at work, or more to the point you can say whatever you want and the company can do just about whatever it wants in response to this speech. To go full Godwin here, if this employee had, instead of talking about how women and minorities "lowered the bar", wrote and distributed interally a manifesto about how Google had too many Jewish employees and how these employees were mostly hired because of post-Holocaust western guilt and maybe we need to reexamine whether this whole Holocaust thing really happened I can assure you that he would have been shown the door within the hour. No one is locking him up for his speech act, but Google would have had no problem in firing him for that same speech act.
Others have pointed out in great detail all of the unpleasant future consequences for any potential interaction that leads to conflict between this employee and his peers. This situation was created entirely by the employee who posted the manifesto. He can sue Google, but he will lose.
It could easily be defeated as it presumes the author would not be able to demonstrate that he could be a member ( does not have to be ) of a protected class. Remember, should that be the case authors goal is not to score a touch down, it is to get a new set of downs i.e. move forward with a lawsuit.
Judges are very reluctant to toss something out that early if there's even an ounce of a possibility there could be a merit in a case.
California law has very strong protections for employees. And it seems that firing him for the memo may actually be illegal.
The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punished an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.
Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."
Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".
Read here for more:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
I think this comes down to is affirmative action policy a workplace condition. Discussion about workplace conditions is separate from discrimination law entirely so 'protected class' becomes a red herring here. I'm not sure this is the best article but I tried to find something from a left leaning source I find reasonably fair given that this seems to be an anti-right topic.
Of course the punishment for violating this is a fine of no more than $5k, per http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
That said, it _may_ open the door for a civil lawsuit per http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
Whether any of that applies in this situation is entirely unclear to me, because it hinges on the definitions of "engaging or participating in politics" and so forth. You'd probably need to talk to a competent labor lawyer in California for anything resembling clarity here.
I don't know about the discovery argument. If he was an HR insider and acting as a whistleblower to disclose an illegal practice, sure. But a regular employee can't voice opinions about something that's common knowledge and force the company to disclose a bunch of confidential information.
What are they going to do when someone else steps up and makes the same assertions with more tact? Fire him too? What about the person after them? They gave extraordinary leverage not to the person that they fired, but to the people that have not been fired yet.
It's uncharacteristically nontechnical of Google to think that of the anywhere between 30-50% of the US population that leans conservatively, there is only one of them working for Google in Mountain View and that any dissenting thoughts within the company will end with him, and that the liberal employees threatening to quit will be happy and sated just to see these few drops of blood.
It doesn't matter the size of the check Google cuts this guy, nor the next 100 individuals if they choose to also speak out. Google made a mountain out if a molehill, and they just left a very a long way for the snowball they just threw to gather some mass while rolling down.
While I think that many outlets are misrepresenting and selectively quoting the piece to make it seem more offensive than it is, the reality is that the author used a lot of loaded language and created many opportunities for misinterpretation.
If this were at my company and the article didn't blow up online I'd probably have a talk with the author to point out all the ways that this piece could easily be misinterpreted and construed as offensive and that the same ideas can be conveyed in ways that are a lot less likely to blow up in your face. If this were at my company the article did go viral like it did in real life, I'd probably let this employee go. While I would say this is placing the interests of the company over the psychological safety of my employees, the pragmatic reality is that PR and potentially internal dissent caused by retaining the employee does not outweigh the moral win of retaining an employee who wrote a tone-deaf article that went viral and was widely perceived as offensive - even if the underlying ideas aren't ourageous.
His presence inside google both legitimises his behaviour and acts a rallying point. They might not be able to prevent like minded people from seeking each other out, but they can prevent them from doing it openly. They might not be able to prevent others from acting in a similar manner, but they will do all they can to avoid emboldening them.
They are willing to deal with the external flack and legal ramifications of a contentious firing, if it helps them avoid an insurrection.
Um, that's one possibility I suppose. But I am reminded of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfv32dmVFw
[I work for Google, but have no insider information about this.]
For what it's worth, I do think that taking steps to decrease the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an okay system and I explain my company's process of doing this in another comment in this page. That said, pointing out that this system is increasing the false-negative rate for non-diverse candidates is 1) factually correct, and 2) not at all the same thing as calling my underrepresented co-workers unqualified. If somebody claimed that our interview process increased the false positive rate for underrepresented groups I would object to such a statement - but that is not what is said in this document.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, but his argument clearly suggests that less qualified 'diversity' candidates are being hired.
On a broader note, the way you're injecting a completely different message into the author's text is exactly the kind of behavior that makes these discussions toxic. I realize that might sound accusatory, but if people can't make a statement without people stuffing contradictory or unrelated words into their mouths there's no possibility of civil discussion.
This isn't a pharmaceutical trial but there's no reason why we can't follow along with the author's analogy of 'false negatives'.
Here are his words from 'The Harm of Google's Biases':
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and
I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve
a more equal gender and race representation, Google has
created several discriminatory practices:
Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar
for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false
negative rate
EDIT:
Didn't see your statistical comment. Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.
The fact that the author uses the phrase 'lowering the bar' suggests that he is also thinking of this statistical requirement.
Here's one:
* Phone screens have a 50% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
Non-diverse candidates do one phone screen, and if passed, do an onsite. Diverse candidates do two phone screens, and if either passes, they go on to the onsite. For all candidates, if the onsite is passed, the candidate gets an offer.
* Unqualified candidates, regardless of diversity, never get an offer.
* Qualified, non-diverse candidates get an offer 50% of the time (the other 50% are erroneously eliminated at the phone interview stage).
* Qualified, diverse candidates get an offer 75% of the time (25% eliminated at the phone interview stage due to false negatives).
It seems to me that the author is advocating either doing two phone interviews for all candidates, or one phone interview for all candidates. Neither change would alter false positive rates, since false positive rates are 0% at all times.
If you're inclined to point out that all tests have a false positive rate >0%, substitute 0% for 0.00000001% and note that I stated the change in false positive rates could be trivially small to the point of omission in the comment above.
His statement about 'lowering the bar' with respect to decreasing false negatives directly implies a relationship between candidate quality and the false negative rate.
I can't comment on your hiring analogy, as you have more experience in this area than I do. My responses were only to highlight the subtle negative character of the author's statement.
For your last sentence, I did not write, and did not mean to imply anything about the number of false-positive (FP) 'diversity' candidates vs FP non-'diversity' candidates. It's true that the author hints at this comparison.
I meant to convey that, per the author's statement about 'lowering the bar', Google's practices increase the FP rate in 'diversity' candidates as compared to what would have happened without the practices.
From this perspective, the author is stating that the 'diversity' hires have a higher FP rate than might have occurred otherwise. I think this conclusion - I think it's a fair one, though we may disagree - is what people find somewhat problematic.
Does your recruitment process have a 0% false positive rate? If not, giving more opportunities will yield more false positives unless it's proven that the extra opportunities have a 0% false positive rate.
This has been shown across society, including applications for housing, police stops, punishments in school, etc. I don't know why employment would be the one exception.
https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-goi...
We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates
...
Overall, the results indicate the need for caution when moving towards ’blind’ recruitment processes in the Australian Public Service, as de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.
Hiring the best and diverse workplaces are both virtues, but sometimes competing virtues. The problem with this entire discussion is that too many people are overly certain that one virtue is more important than the other.
Imagine it this way: You're a fisher. The Law says that you can only catch fish which are >= 12" long. If you're caught with < 12" fish, bad things happen, but otherwise you want to maximize the amount of fish you catch.
You have two ways of measuring length: a crude wooden stick with some fat lines on it which mark approximately 12" - this is quick but only approximate. You also have a high precision caliper which can tell you the length down to .001", but it takes 2x as long to make the measurement.
You're interested in catching lots of fish, so if any fish you catch are a little close to that line, you just throw them back with one measurement.
90% of the fish you catch are red, but about 10% of the times you catch a green fish, which are really sparkly and fun, so you change your standard: if the green fish on first measurement is really close to 12"(not close enough to keep), instead of throwing it back like a red fish, you bust out the caliper and measure it more precisely, and throw out anything < 12".
So, at the end of the day, assuming red and green fish are distributed equally across lengths in the ocean, what would the distribution of kept fish look like? Would the mean and median length of your green fish be higher or lower than the mean and median of your red fish?
Even in its most generous reading (yours), this sentence makes zero sense.
The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
I'm inherently saying some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired.
Edit: just to be clear, my point is that Google has, to my knowledge, expressed this sentiment and made changes to their interview process to rely less on brainteasers. They did so without controversy. No one said "hey Google is saying some of its employees shouldn't have been hired by changing their hiring process".
And then what happens to freedom of speech? To me this sounds like a totalerian regime.
From your quote:
> Our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back.
I would not infer that you meant: The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
The most likely case is that someone saying the above quote would be a co-worker of mine. Someone I'm cooperating with in a common endeavor. I would assume they are trying to help us achieve our goals more readily. I would have heard something like: We're turning down highly qualified candidates for software engineering roles because of their failure to answer non-software-engineering questions. Is there any evidence that these non-software-engineering questions contribute meaningfully to our assessment of candidates? If not, we should drop the questions. Turning down qualified candidates makes it harder for to hire the great people that coming through our pipeline.
To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.
That's exactly my point.
Replace "brainteaser" with "being an underrepresented minority" and you'll see why it's absurd to suggest his manifesto is tantamount to saying "some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired".
If we would like to stop using an irrelevant but unchangeable trait (such as gender or race) as a basis for hiring and recruiting, what should we do?
The first guy is not necessarily "unqualified", but he would relative to the other guy. People who were hired for their weightlifting abilities wouldn't have had to reach a higher score on coding in order to get hired. So on average, you would expect them to be less qualified.
I'm actually okay with Google seeking women across the country (when they could find a local candidate), but we should not pretend that they don't have internal targets their recruiters need to meet.
A startup I once worked for sent out a memo asking that HR be involved before rejecting a "borderline" female candidate. As a generally apolitical junior employee this seemed really concerning -- we had pretty strict hiring standards and from that point on I wondered if each new female employee would have made it if they were born male.
I can't say if Google's practices are discriminatory (I don't really know what they are) but it's a very important thing to have open, honest discussion about. At the time, I kept my mouth shut because I was pretty low on the totem pole. If I were an employee at Google I would now know to do the same.
Bias is real. The exact same resume is, on average, considered more qualified if there's a typically male name at the top versus a female name. Did you ever wonder how many of your male colleagues unfairly benefitted from that sort of thing?
No, I didn't consider it about anyone until they gave me a reason to. Prior to that email I had no reason to think that anyone working there was anything other than the best of the best. Well-intentioned policies can have resounding negative effects.
To your second point -- I'm not saying bias isn't real. I'm saying certain methods of counteracting bias have a strong potential for collateral damage.
From http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... :
After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
At least one recent study found the exact opposite: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
I've experienced this as an engineer, where I've been in environments where I was totally over my head. In retrospect I'm grateful for the rejections as much as the postitions I've landed, because they've pushed me to learn and advance my skill set.
If someone claims their employer discriminates against black candidates, you must equally infer they think some of their white coworkers have been let in because of weakened standards, and out they go...
I mean, I'll admit there is a small core of logic there, but I think it's pushed absurdly far. Wouldn't it make more sense if hiring standards could be discussed without firing anyone who wants to change them?
The implications of that worldview are totally toxic.
And therefore it is false?
The author has a popular science level understanding of gender differences. Based on that he concludes women are unsuited to be engineers compared to men.
Well, then make that argument.
If you wanted to pick out any argument out of those 10 pages to disassemble, you could have chosen any one of his arguments that haven't been corroborated by hundreds of years of scientific consensus.
> The Harm of Google’s biases:
...
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
...
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
Do you really not see the concerns this engineer has introduced for Google over his ability to objectively judge his peers who are women or members of an underrepresented group or at least how such coworkers might now have these concerns if they find themselves working with him? Do you not see how the long-term detriment and risk to Google could be (substantially) greater than the value the engineer brings to the company? Even if you remove the high-mindedness and virtues that tech companies like to project in their PR, do you not see how this is the only rational business choice for a Fortune 50 company?
You are in the position where you want to constantly hire a lot of qualified candidates. If you have discovered a way to decrease false negative rate, why would you not apply that across the board? It's like you have learned how to fix hiring but then carry it out only with some arbitrary cohorts.
Sounds irrational to me.
Ok, but how do you propose the paper to be rewritten taking those into consideration.
Or do you suggest that Google force every employee go through a medical exam to determine their sex and make sure no one chooses to identify as a different gender to pass through the hiring process easier...
Sorry, I don't quite see what you're getting at there basically, it can interpreted in a few ways.
It should absolutely be ok, if it's true. Which it unequivocally is.
> (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).
What about his post was pseudo-scientific? He cited studies, and to my knowledge, the actual facts of what he said are fairly uncontroversial.
> - The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote?
Did you read the document? He explicitly embraces diversity. He even says he's in favor of programs to help promote diversity.
Employees are free to say whatever they want on a personal blog on their own time.
"Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was 'misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.' He added that it was 'illegal to retaliate' against an N.L.R.B. charge."
Maybe this is why he was fired? It sounds like he was becoming pro-actively hostile toward Google. And there may be more than we outsiders know going on.
Attitudes like yours have polarized me to the extent that now I just say, "I'm super racist, here's what I think:" just to see people's confused reactions.
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value. No dispute here.
Next, he says:
"These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics"
No studies, no evidence, no nothing for this claim. X may lead to Y, because... the author feels in his gut that it may be true? This is not science. This is an unsupported assertion. The rest of the doc is littered with these claims, which I could happily go point by point through.
He may have gotten the science about biological differences between men and women correctly, but the conclusions that he drew using that science is totally unsubstantiated. And frankly, it is extremely deceptive to defend him by saying that "he cited studies" without examining how he linked those studies to his own pure speculation.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read your comment! What about my comment are you replying to? Did you perhaps reply to the wrong comment?
EDIT: And as has come out, the author of this memo has a PhD in Biology. Here are comments from four PhD scientists in Sociology on the issue, if you'd like some credentials to go with it:
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
What are the costs/benefits of having this "debate" at work over a hypothesis that cannot be proven, as you state?
Look again at what the author was doing. He was using scientifically demonstrated biological and psychological differences between men and women (women have "higher agreeableness") to hypothesize about how that affects their work choices and, notably, their performance ("This leads to women generally having a harder time ... speaking up, and leading.").
What this is doing is connecting a gender stereotype (which, sure, is scientifically supported in aggregate - that's true for a lot of stereotypes!) to work practices and outcomes. The authors claimed benefits of presuming that this connection is true are basically a) this will make conservatives feel more accepted at work, and b) diversity is "bad for business" (which is just provably wrong by an enormous amount of evidence that the author ignores). I think a) is absolutely a worthy benefit, but there are lots of other ways to do this without linking gender stereotypes to work performance!
Now let's look at the harms of having this "debate", particularly at work, which are numerous and measurable. While there are no studies demonstrating the link between biology and STEM job performance, there are many studies demonstrating the impact of widespread gender bias in STEM fields (classic recent reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract) and how it affects hiring and advancement. The memo's author correctly acknowledges these types of biases. So the harm is perpetuating gender biases in the workplace that affects people's careers. Not to mention the harms of opening up Google to gender discrimination lawsuits (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Waterhouse_v._Hopkins), the productivity cost of employees who don't want to work with people with publicly broadcasted unproven gender biases that could affect their decision making ("hostile work environment"), etc. And not to mention losing the many economic benefits that a company reaps with a diverse, inclusive workplace.
So no, I don't think it's worth having this "debate", especially at work, where the benefits are negligible at best, and the harms are clear. If you want to have this debate, go write a medium article or something. Don't send this around your workplace. It's not that hard, really. People call this thought policing, or groupthink or whatever, but it's just harmful and a waste of time at work.
If bias exists it is culturally and biologically motivated and that can only be fixed by changing the culture significantly.
Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact. In countries where gender roles are being silenced (that's a good thing) women dislike STEM even more!
I went to a STEM focused high-school that had equal numbers of women and men (3000 students). Not the same percentage went for STEM fields after graduation. Women were also more successful during high-school. Every year the questionnaire confirms that women just aren't interested in STEM and go to fields that deal with people much more (medicine and similar social fields - rehabilitation, working with children with disabilities, social work etc.))
Interesting assertion without a citation! Unfortunately, you are wrong. A good meta analysis reference: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publicati.... I can provide more if you like. I encourage you to review the literature.
> Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact.
Another interesting assertion! I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
> I went to a STEM focused high-school ... blah blah blah
Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308926636_A_Meta-An...
I can provide more if you like.
Show me a study that measures gender bias, does an educational intervention and succeeds in improving that measure significantly. None exist. At best they do not work.
> I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
Cool, good thing I did my homework. I'm quite aware that percentage of women in STEM is increasing every year. Check out research for countries that have successfully removed gender roles.
> Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
Good thing that there's research confirming the same thing. Although I was not generalizing. The 3000 students and the results of questionnaire every year are pretty consistent. I'm sure someone will do a study on the data, will link to it surely when it happens. Although, I'm sure it will not matter given that you value meta-analysis but only those that confirm your bias.
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm."
That pretty succinctly summarizes my view.
No, he doesn't; he lied about it on his linkedin page: http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-stud...
a) Men and women should be hired based on merit, and ability to perform required tasks.
b) Men and women are unable to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
The author of the manifesto was arguing for (a) and against (b).
Humans, contrary to what they may tell themselves, are not effective, impartial judges of "merit". Diversity initiatives correct for this deficiency.
Even the SATs struggles/d with making sure their tears didn't implicit strengthen the scores of any one group of students.
Engineering has large degrees of opinion mixed into any non-rudimentary implementation.
If a programming exercise is subjective, from what perspective is it subjective in bias of? Likely the author's, who's bias will be derived somewhat from their race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, background, peer group, etc.
Code is correct if it works. But plenty of "working" solutions will be rejected as being "incorrect" based on current trends, internalized philosophy, preferred approach, etc. etc.
As someone who hires engineers, it is difficult if not impossible to separate personal bias and preference from an evaluation.
But there's a billion ways to write that code. Which ones will the evaluator prefer and/or reject? That's where subjective opinion comes in.
The result, even just the code itself, is also not judged on a binary yes/no scale, which again leaves a lot of room for opinions and bias to muddy the water.
I've done hundreds of engineering interviews. Conducting objective interviews is very hard. Anybody thinking they are objective either has never done interviews or is fooling themselves.
You are judged and reviewed on a myriad different factors other than this. Are you a "team player?" Do you mentor others well? Do people like you? Were you picked to do complex projects this review cycle? Are you too loud? Too timid? Do you ask insightful questions? Is your coding style "normal"? Do you dress professionally? Can you be asked to interface with clients?
Every little thing that can be used will be used to form a composite picture of you as a person. It's wrong to expect a foreigner like me to be judged on whether I know baseball stats but I'm sure someone somewhere has made an inside reference about baseball around me and written me off when didn't even acknowledge it.
That's what diversity programs and affirmative action programs try to short circuit.
c) Human beings are poor judges of merit due to cognitive bias, poor intuition for statistics, prejudices based on emotional reactions to irrelevant past experiences, and perverse incentives. It is therefore justifiable to apply a post correction.
I'm a bit surprised that techies don't see this as obvious. How often do inferior products win due to superior marketing that plays on these biases?
I am also surprised programmers have such confidence in absolute meritocracy in code shops given that every coder knows how hard it can be to evaluate the performance of coders on a team. Let's say one coder closes tons of tickets but does shoddy work while another works more slowly and creates things of beauty. The former often looks better but the latter might be the real MVP. I've seen coders who add little code but are indispensable on a team due to things like deep domain knowledge, great judgement, spooky horse whisperer debugging skills, etc.
Yet suddenly some are convinced of the infallibility of our ideas of merit as soon as someone tosses a culture war grenade in the room.
I don't even want to bring up the softness of some of the areas of science cited by that manifesto or the reproducibility crisis they've had but... Oops I just did.
Personally I am on the fence about diversity measures such as the ones I've heard exist at Google for practical reasons. I am not convinced they work very well and as an engineer I prefer things that work. My sentiment is on their side though, and I have become deeply repelled by the opposing movement (now generally called the alt-right) ever since it unmasked itself. Head over to alt-right subs on Reddit or worse Voat if you want to see what they really stand for. So if I were forced to pick a side I would begrudgingly pick the diversity nazis over the actual Nazis.
But if your premise is that (essentially) people are wrong, how do you know that the post-correction will be appied "correctly" (i.e. not make things even more wrong)?
You can fix it by changing it to
b) Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
edit: HN comments eat double asterisks???
The strawman is much better than the actual argument.
A lot of clumping happens in fields. Tell me why women are better at symplectic geometry than symplectic topology (or not). Tell me why women are better combinatorists than number theorists -- I want to hear something about counting the tubers they gathered. Tell me why women are so much more suited to advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology than interventional cardiology (https://www.aamc.org/data/448482/b3table.html). I kinda love all the post hoc analysis that goes into explaining these differences, especially when you have to explain then why Portuguese and Italian women are great in algebraic geometry but French women aren't (except for the notable exceptions like Claire Voisin).
Most people aren't pioneers; most people follow the pioneers into situations in which they feel mildly more comfortable than the alternative. Sexism plays a huge role, while not being the only factor. Is it really surprising that if you put up a "girls r dum" sign on a clubhouse many will find somewhere else to go?
Women electing into different fields is pretty much tautological here. The question is why, and whether it's for reasons we want to support and/or perpetuate. The whole point of the memo at issue is that he figures it's built into women biologically because computers aren't cuddly and that it is thus justifiable and right to perpetuate or support the current set of social roles. I don't know that the guy should have been fired, but it's clear he's not going to be a great team player or supervisor for women.
This article [0] presents a good argument about how and why men and women self-select in to different fields.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Of course it isn't because then it would expose the hypocrisy of what they advocate. It's white-knighting at its finest.
> Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
I agree there is sexism in tech, both overt and casual that discourages women from entering tech and/or causes them to leave. The question is, does increasing diversity actually fix this problem?
The author of the memo specifically addresses this, and states that the focus should be on providing psychological safety for people of all groups, rather than forced diversity that may not end up addressing the problem.
It means that applying is no longer first-come, first-serve.
Also, who decides on "merit" and "ability?" Most real-world problems are not math equations with clear answers. In that case, a homogeneous group is going to decide that merit is based on their group's definition. A diverse group will create a broader definition that accounts for a wider array of ideas and approaches.
Diversity in tech has essentially become people who look different but think the same way.
I've seen these arguments rehashed over and over by the very same people who overly critcized the manifesto.
Yet I have never seen any argument or document written as well as the manifesto supporting these arguments.
> Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic
Isn't this how every Inquisition is justified?
A private company firing someone over their views is a long, long way from an Inquisition. Your right to say and believe things is not a right for continued employment. The same libertarian argument that you seem to be making has been made the other way many times -- that companies should never be compelled to retain an employee for any reason.
Is this the first firing that was perhaps an overly sensitive reaction concerned with appeasing a very touchy ideological base? Because I can think of a number of other people railroaded out of a job because of online "outrage."
We aren't all that far from an Inquisition (not prongs and tongs type Inquisition, but a "your job depends on agreement" type Inquisition). The most significant thing missing from the equation is that the most vocal social justice voices lack political influence and power. If you see this movement organize politically and get candidates in office, any student of history should recognize that things will get worse for open expression of ideas before things get better.
Such a claim would, after all, be an insult to many of his coworkers, who might feel as if he believes they're only at Google because society lowered the bar for them.
Personally I'd like it if people could make both arguments in a reasonable fashion and not jump immediately to outrage and calls for termination.
Dodging the question by saying you don't find the principle "interesting" when applied on the other end of the argument is effectively admitting that you know the principle is flawed.
To be clearer, white privilege exists. Male privilege exists. That is a power dynamic over women and minorities, enjoyed by men and non-minorities.
To deny those privileges exist increases the privilege. To deny that existing bias exists helps to increase the bias.
To admit those privileges exist decreases the privilege. To admit that existing biases exist helps to decrease the bias.
So, writing a manifesto (that admits white privilege) does not put white people into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (no one).
But, writing a manifesto (that denies sexism) does put women into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (men).
Is that clearer?
This doesn't necessarily follow, because insofar as male privilege exists, so does female privilege (such as no draft, "women and children first", the "women are wonderful " effect and the fact that women represent the majority of the voting base), so it's really hard to say one sex is more privileged than the other, rather than just privileged differently.
> where male privilege exceeds female privilege.
I'm not sure I can categorically agree with this. While male privilege exists over women, I find it ludicrous to suggest that white women are less privileged overall than black men, despite black men benefiting from male privilege. I think many of the misunderstandings that occur when discussing privilege come about due to using only a few easily categorized traits in defining privileges, rather than a broader set that also include things like socio-economic conditions, health, upbringing, and a variety of personality or physical traits.
I don't think it's that hard. There are unfair privileges to either gender, but the male ones are vastly larger.
This kind of claim (regardless of which direction you're making the claim in) ony makes sense if you reduce "privilege" into a single dimension. Which I don't think you can.
Should a son of a several-year unemployed coal miner be discriminated against because of his gender and race, just because other people with that same gender and race have done better than average?
The entire summary was "consider the individual not the statistic."
If you are concerned about socio-economic advantages, look at tax returns not skin color - the whole point of some prior civil rights movements was that skin color is a terrible proxy for evaluating the person underneath.
Honestly the graph examples of the overlapping bell curves vs the plotted averages in his document was such an excellent point, and yet the extremely salient points that should be discussed are being railroaded over by misrepresented hyperbole - your straw man theoretical imcluded. There's a great deal of nuance he paid attention to, and I really wish his detractors had the same consideration for nuance in their counter-points.
Edit: I didn't realize on first read that you were creating a hyperbole to highlight the bias in the calls for his firing. Leaving the comment as is though, as in general there needs to be a lot more nuance considered, particularly by his detractors. Apologies for misreading your comment's intention.
It only hurts because it is plausible and causes self-doubt.
But Google can prove this conclusively just by plotting the distribution of performance reviews between "diversity hires" and the regular pool of employees. You either show that there are negligible differences (the diversity program works) or the guy is right (the average bar did get lowered).
Google will never publish this data because they are cowards.
You take a lot of really smart people and get them to work together, and most of them are going to feel like they're not as smart as their peers.
Anything that creates self-doubt is going to really fuck up their retention.
Anyone who writes a manifesto to do just that should expect they'll be promptly walked out of the building.
"I work at the world's most powerful tech company, get paid embarrassing sums of money to do it, and get good reviews from my manager. But I don't feel super smart, so I quit."
When you come in as a newbie, and you see all these people seemingly directing themselves effortlessly, and creating cool shit day in and day out, it can be seriously soul crushing. You're still on your tricycle trying to figure out how to do anything at Google, and aside from your laptop, virtually everything is a technology that is Google specific and shares almost nothing with anything you've touched before.
Between those two things, a lot of people feel like they'll never make it. They hold on for their 1 year anniversary if they can and then shop their new Google experience around to find a good exit.
Can you elaborate on that one? I'm really curious, as my naive assumption would be that impostor syndrome should improve retention (something like "I'm not as good as my current employer and coworkers think I am, so I better not change jobs because this is the best I could get").
That makes it pretty easy to take a new gig and make that nagging imposter voice in your head quiet down.
Should a female doctor avoid mentioning this article to a male colleague to avoid getting fired?
The employee in this case deserved a reprimand, not termination.
It's ironic that the two countries who not so long ago were horrific totalitarian regimes now are more free (at least in this aspect) than USA - "the land of the free".
If an organization does, at any time, use hiring priorities besides work ability, and thus hires people whose work ability was not as good as it could be - from henceforth on, nobody can ever criticize those hiring policies, because that would imply criticizing the people hired under those policies.
>Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team
Funny, lots of people I've worked with have alienated me, and others, and various groups of people (different teams, specialties, ages, men, conservatives, etc). We somehow still manage to keep functioning in the same building. You, with bigotry of low expectations, seem to think women don't have the maturity for that.
It seems pretty extraordinary and I'd like to see more before I believe it.
This argument only work is every woman can only see themselves as part of the group and are incapable of seeing themselves as individuals.
I would be willing to bet that there are women (and other diversity hires) at Google that know they are capable of doing their jobs and deserving of being hired. Some of those people might object to being lumped in with the whole and not being seen as individuals.
I can already visualize the intense white hot responses over at /r/mensrights and other such places. Where they already freak out, and "virtue signal" as you put it, over much much much milder stuff from feminists. Many people would call for the author's head, and I suspect we wouldn't hear so much about "free speech" from the MRA and other conservative outlets.
Edit: If any of the downvoters doubt my hypothetical, just think about what happened to Anita Sarkeesian. There were no statements about her bravery or defenses of her free speech rights from the conservatives. Just a wall of criticism and boycotts (and worse) in an attempt to get her to shut up. Whole lot of virtue signalling from men on the right, many of whom self-admitted to never watching her videos.
I think I first heard it while studying sociology in 2006; signals were also a common topic in my econ degree.
If you say "People aren't going to like what I say" and then say something offensive about 50% of the population, well then sure, consider the author's point proven...
This person created a toxic work environment in which women and people of color will not feel comfortable working with him, being interviewed by him, have him as their tech lead or have him on their promotion committee.
Why the hysterical cries of virtue signaling and suppression? What is authoritarian dogma that this author dared to question?
I think you mean "illiberalism".
> This is the closing of the American mind.
I've just switched to Duck Duck Go. Others, I have no doubt, will also be making decisions on which technology companies they wish to support.
His constant protestations that he's really interested in promoting diversity BUT is just the new "some of my best friends are X, but".
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
This isn't just in America. This is happening all over the world.
Right wing politics is now the only refuge for people who want to speak their mind.
As much as scary this is, this is the truth.
Look at the right wing movements in history. Fascism, Nazism or any other right wing movements. These largely arise because there is too much politically correct talk going on, and at some point a guy comes along and musters the courage to say all the things openly what others had been wanting to say for years. What he says could be totally wrong and may be even absurd. But the fact that people just need a vent to release years worth of accumulated pressure will buy a lot of public validity.
Once this happens the public support, mood and direction swings too much to the other end. At this point PC won't even matter.
He's saying "Isn't it kind of strange that everyone else seems to have completely lost their minds?"
There was quite a bit of PC. Germany was paying huge war reparations to France and UK. It was sort of portrayed as 'atonement of sins'. Economy was in tatters. There was insane levels of humiliation dumped on German populace for losing WW1. People were expected to simply eat it up as moral punishment.
None of this justifies WW2 or Nazism of course.
We're experiencing a polarization and lack of an ability to abide other's beliefs.
Now that firing someone for their beliefs has been demonstrated, how surprised will we be when bosses fire more people for their beliefs?
As aware humans, we should all be able to be better than this.
Events like firing people for holding a belief, only reinforces their belief further that they are being marginalized for merely holding an idea in their head. Of course they will now keep quiet until somebody comes along and generates way more groundswell support for their belief.
You have unwittingly provided an example of the "unconscious bias" against women that Google's programs seek to unpack and correct.
The term "virtue signal" implies that one's reaction is motivated by a desire to make an impression on others, a superficial and calculated response. But to a woman, reading an essay full of gender stereotypes can create a real sense of pain and outrage. So when you're saying "virtue signal", you're really mostly talking about men.
He was right about one thing.
From the article:
> Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance
A brand of religion with its own sheriff no less.
Who seriously believe you have freedom of speech and thought in such a monocultural place?
Freedom of speech, as in the legal right protected by the First Amendment in the United States, is indeed only against the government.
But free discourse, as an ideal and virtue for the citizens of a republic, is a much broader concept. The citizens of a democratic republic should be open to hearing new ideas and engaging in reasoned debate with each other.
We can have a discussion about the merits of public companies engaging in diversity programs without starting from that premise though.
If you think he said that, you didn't read the article.
I read a good chunk in agreement, but then it just took a left turn. Between its thinly-vieled promotion for 'conservative values' and some very thin 'therefore' conclusions midway through, it would never be able to stand up to the heights of intellect that its author probably intended it for.
This is always the case. Even companies who are sane need to respond to the foaming-at-the-mouth lunacy of Twitter and related cesspools. As disgusting as the Brendan Eich thing was, I never really blamed Mozilla. I'm just not sure how tech in particular ended up so strongly under the influence of a relatively small amount of loud, shitty people.
His points were that some diversity policies were misguided and may even cause harm but are impossible to correct because they are taboo.
His memo was well-argumented and he was open to contradiction, which on several points could have been brought.
It was not aggressive, not dismissive, not sexist. I personally view his firing as totally excessive and downright anti-intellectual.
Critics, we are not yet in a post-sexist society. We have to improve many things for women and minorities, we have many efforts to make to reach true equality. Shutting down debate on your tactics will not help.
Trying to justify discrimination by referring to the direct result of discriminatory behavior is obscene.
"But beware of this particular subgroup, because they are biologically inclined to not be as interested or good in the subject."
> Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought
No, people are pissed that it's 2017 and people are still trying to make an argument for the superiority of testosterone as a predictor for success in a particular field. Can't we just give everyone a chance, instead of trying to pigeonhole them right away?
> A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.
> This is the closing of the American mind.
The closing of the American mind started happening when a political party decided to take over religion and anti-intellectualism as their platform. That's why we've gotten to the point where being called an "expert" is paramount to an insult in certain contexts.
The enginner did not say women can't be engineers, merely implied that the gender imbalance in the field may not be entirely the result of society. There are very real, very definite emotional and psychological differences between men and women overall[1]. Why is it so weird to think that those differences might lead to different career paths?
>Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.
Just that the other side is crazy too doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the possible weaknesses of the left. Extreme political polarization on both sides combined with a decline in peoples' willingness to consider the opinions of those who oppose them is part of what is causing all this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
And this is where he should've exercised better judgement. You can hold that view personally, you can discuss it with your friends, maybe you can go and try to run a study on it with some actual sociologists. Don't go around pushing pseudoscience in the work place to justify your views, then expect everyone to applaud you.
> Just because the other side is crazy
The other side is deeply integrated with their crazier part and now they hold Congress and the presidency. But somehow, we need to focus on how Google firing someone for saying shit he knew was going to be controversial and would generate a reaction is "the leftist religion."
is it really pseudoscience though? it seems reasonable to acknowledge psychological differences between men and women (from your gender identity - not biologically), and he cited sources (I didn't read them, I would hope for his sake that they're credible)
there's no precedent for acknowledging and addressing psychological differences in the workplace though (at least for professional office work). I think basic professionalism is based on ignoring our differences for the sake of having a sterile "just the facts" meritocratic environment conducive to business.
giving the guy every possible benefit of the doubt, I think he's just guilty of being unprofessional, not misogynist. he's also guilty of being stupid for not realizing this was a minefield in the first place and walking right into it without being extremely careful with his phrasing and more sensitive to mainstream points of view. I can get behind firing him for being unprofessional/stupid, but I feel bad for him for the amount of negative press he's getting.
I would hope that a more narrowly focused document written in more formal language (math) with clearly-stated assumptions and a faq that addresses common misinterpretations will have fared better but these days even expecting this might be too much (which is sad!).
The one thing I feel that lost out on all this brouhaha was the author's point that companies should value "diversity of thoughts" rather than diversity of <the current hot topic class>!
I read the article which attempts to establish as fact very clearly unsubstantiated subjective claims. Never mind the toxicity -- the dude is just flat wrong.
"Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group."
I totally agree, and this individual got his due.
Indeed. I also felt reminded of dynamics in the realm of religion.
Regardless of whether you agreed with the letter or not, it's 100% correct in asserting that it's super difficult to have productive, rational conversations about the issue of diversity. Google just reinforced that fact.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
Which might be easy. After all, he just alleged the Google workplace is clearly hostile to conservatives ... and they fired him for it. The argument that he was creating a hostile workplace is very weak. The argument that Pichai is, is very strong.
Mature organisations and cultures can tackle controversial topics. Google used to be able to do that too. It obviously cannot anymore.
You do realize that it wasn't the controversy that landed this guy in hot water, but rather the veiled attempt at using pseudo-science to create a conspiracy theory about Google discriminating against males, right?
The way in which you describe actual science as pseudo-science because you don't like the conclusions is very scary, by the way.
> The way in which you describe actual science as pseudo-science because you don't like the conclusions is very scary, by the way.
The way you describe cherry-picked papers on a single field of science as definite proof of your world view is really scary too. How low will you lower your bar to explain the world in terms you like?
If you have hard scientific evidence with scientists willing to go on the record and say, no, in fact, there are no innate differences between the preferences of men and women, it's all just lies and in fact girls love computers when they are children just as much as boys and here's why the other studies are all flawed ... sure. Show them to us.
As it is, you look like someone who is scrabbling around for an excuse to ignore perfectly valid scientific debating by disclaiming entire fields as "pseudo science" and "cherry picked". Please debate properly - make real rebuttals with evidence.
He isn't citing anyone, he just stated "facts." Please show me the citations? Where are all these papers? Where are the peer reviews on the "facts" he mentions?
> Are you saying that no psychological finding, no matter how reproducible, can ever be used if it's related to gender?
Going back to the absolute lack of references, I am not dismissing any particular study, but rather the right-wing knee-jerk reaction that "the world is fine the way it is, and people trying to change it are just destroying the perfect equilibrium we live in." It's almost like the last century of social changes hasn't happened. Talk about disregard for evidence.
> If you have hard scientific evidence with scientists willing to go on the record and say, no, in fact, there are no innate differences between the preferences of men and women
Cute, asking to prove a negative. Let's use the same idea: do you have hard scientific proof and scientists willing to back it in public that a push for increasing diversity in engineering will go nowhere because the field is already in perfect balance? No? Didn't think so.
Also, I'm not saying there are no innate differences, but that ignoring the current societal context by pushing a theory that explains all behavior using genetic traits is ridiculous. By using the same standard, going back to pre-WW2 (which forced women into the workforce) we could assume that "women are only interested in domestic tasks".
> Show them to us.
Nice. I like that you identify with this group. I'm tired of people pussyfooting around trying to push the rhetoric, while at the same time trying to divorce themselves from the author. Good on you.
> As it is, you look like someone who is scrabbling around for an excuse to ignore perfectly valid scientific debating by disclaiming entire fields as "pseudo science" and "cherry picked". Please debate properly - make real rebuttals with evidence.
Again, show me the paper, show me how they play in the whole context of current society, and maybe I'll take you seriously. Until then, you look like someone cherry-picking data to paint the world to their liking.
Here are 4 scientists who work in the field discussing the memo, at least one of whom was cited by Damore:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170808013732/http://quillette....
Now, here's the trick. You got what you asked for. Will you change your perspective? I find myself somehow dubious because the root cause of the disagreement is you believe the world both is and should be entirely malleable, and that forced social engineering (e.g. by firing people with particular worldviews from influential organisations like Google) is a legitimate way to achieve particular ends.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Google is going to attempt to pay him a lot of hush money in hopes of avoiding a public lawsuit.
If you want to have a rational conversation, have it rationally.
Everything beyond that was wrong and wandered into the realm of offensive, and creating a hostile environment.
As an engineer who's done a fair bit of volunteer recruiting work as well as conducted interviews, my experience has been that race- and gender-specific programs are used exclusively as outreach, sourcing, and mentorship tools. James claims there are "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate," which strikes me as untrue. Regardless of how they are sourced, once candidates are in the interview pipeline their are all treated exactly as rigorously as one another.
In other words, recruiters are responsible for finding, reaching out to, and advocating for candidates. Once they source the candidate they "throw them over the fence" to the cold, hard interview process, which involves experienced interviewers and a hiring committee of senior-tenure engineers. The aim is to ensure you can trust that those who make it out how the hiring committee to be top-notch.
After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring. After working with people of all stripes I can say I haven't met a single person where I thought to myself "how did this loser get through the filter."
That point is less persuasive after Google has demonstrated it will terminate people who complain - even if they do so in a reasoned manner.
To add to that, it wasn't a constructive argument with a new solution -- the only proposition was regressive action. I'd posit that it's akin to someone arguing that since civil rights were not smoothly implemented, we may as well roll back the clock because some members of society had it easier that way. It's pretty weak, and certainly not what I'd call a well-reasoned manner.
To your second point, the document proposed multiple steps at investigating or remediating the problem, such as the author saw it. Regardless, I hope you would agree that applying the standard of "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" seems suboptimal.
This isn't what happened though; this guy circulated an authoritative sounding memo accusing the women in Google's workforce as being held to a lower bar as the men, and outright stating that their "biological differences" was holding back engineering productivity.
But I guess the brigading has commenced- I would invite you to read the thing without bias and read it's citations and sources. Even if you disagree that we could do more to remove things like, stress and status to make tech less appealing to men.. you might find out why people are agreeing with him and why this piece circulated internally.
Mostly, it seems, scientists agree[0] with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific. So dismissing it outright without having the discussion is only doing the women in tech a disservice.
[0]: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Really? Yonatan Zunger[1] seems to disagree with you.
[1] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
> nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.
Except it turned out James Damore of the DM has a Masters in Biological Systems from Harvard. And is experienced engineer working in Search (he disputed the author's chops there too).
At just about every opportunity he used words and phrases like "average" and "in general" to make it clear that these metrics are just that, average.
He clearly points out that any individual woman may be more suitable to leadership and tech than any individual man, but when forced to generalize, then we must be honest about the averages.
> "Women, on average, have more:"
> - "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs"
> - "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness"
> - "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men..." (Ironically, this is a good thing for an engineer to have)
He provides no source for this.
> "Google has created several discriminatory practices: Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race, a high priority queue and special treatment for 'diversity' candidates, hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."
And blatant disregard for the social context that these groups exist in.
As for your comment on his "blatant disregard for social context", he explicitly mentions that he believes that biases should be corrected and that society probably also is to blame [3], he just doesn't believe that biological factors does not play any role at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
So he believes in decreasing the false negative rate? I'm confused.
Regarding the first point, about women being higher in neuroticism, the author does provide a source - wikipedia. I understand there are different versions of the document, some of which omit sources or links. The version I'm using as a reference [1] maintains a hyperlink to Wikipedia's page on sex differences in psychology. Wikipedia may not be the most reputable source, although I've always thought quite highly of it, but in this instance, Wikipedia, which does seem to support the author's contention, has it's source, an academic psychology paper. The paper's abstract [2] does also repeat the Google author's claim, that women are higher in neuroticism.
As far as the Google author's sourcing goes, I believe linking to a well sourced article on Wikipedia should be a sufficient citation for the document (which wasn't intended as an academic paper but something more like an argument on a forum - per my understanding).
I don't see how this claim, that women are higher in neuroticism, leads to what you alleged the author was claiming - that the biology of women hurts productivity at Google. This seems to me like a possible explanation of why there are not as many women in leadership positions, and not an argument that the women who are in leadership positions have any defect.
By analogy, suppose I was asked why there were few Chinese basketball players, and I answered that height is useful in basketball, and Chinese people are shorter on average than white and black players. This may be a suitable explanation for the observed phenomenon, or it may not be, but either way you should not interpret me as claiming that Yao Ming is a short person.
For your second point, this seems obviously true. The "false negative rate" presumably refers to when candidates who would be good hires are rejected for some undesirable reason. In other words, the test is generating an incorrect negative (your interview comes back "Do not hire" on a person who would make a good candidate).
This false negative rate effectively "raises the bar" to get hired at Google, albeit in an undesirable way. The initiatives that the author links to in this section are presumably aimed at reducing the false negative rate for women, and thereby lowering the bar that women need to clear to get hired.
Obviously it's a good thing to reduce your false negative rate. You get more qualified employees and people who are qualified get a good job. The discriminatory part of this, which the Google author is highlighting, is that Google wants to reduce the false negative rate FOR WOMEN and isn't applying these same initiatives to hiring in general.
I agree that the author did not have enough regard for the social context of his post. He seems to have believed Google's lies that they cared about letting employees express themselves and share ideas to improve the company - when, of course, Google is a soulless corporation that will fire anyone with the temerity to criticize their sacred cows. I think that says roughly that the employee was a bit naive.
[1] - https://www.scribd.com/document/355823379/Google-s-Ideologic...
You (he) can't say that you are lowering the bar since a false negative is positive like any other positive. Widening the bar is a more apt analogy.
Someone says maybe we aren't hiring enough women because women have been socialized not to be engineers and are therefore nervous when applying. Let's work on a program to help women be less nervous, then we'll hire more.
Now the DM author says "let's apply that program to everyone, not just women, otherwise we'll be lowering the bar for women." And Google immediately fires him. Your observation is that he shouldn't have said "lowering the bar" but it's objectively true.
In this example, the bar for women is 90 + the likelihood of being nervous * 5. If you remove the second term for women and not men, you are lowering the bar for women.
A "memo" thats primary focus was to have an open discussion based on statistical evidence and ideally foster a more welcoming environment to people who are not currently represented as well as Google would like.
I get it. Some of the points in the memo were reasonable.
But just because the bread and cheese on your shit sandwich look delicious, doesn't mean it's not still a gross shit sandwich.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. _______________________________________________________
Suppose someone asked why it is that Jews are overrepresented in things like winning nobel prizes, being millionaires, working as a college professor, or working in politics. My answer would be that Jews tend to have higher than average intelligence, so it is only natural that they are overrepresented in fields that require higher intelligence. But wait - some of my colleagues are not Jewish! Am I suggesting that my colleagues are less biologically suited to their work? Oh dear, that can't be right. Maybe the politically correct answer is that there is a secret cabal of Jews who run society and try to elevate their own into positions of power... but, come to think of it, that doesn't sound like such a good answer either. Maybe the real PC answer would be to accuse whoever asked of being a racist.
To your point about some of the arguments in the document being gross and terrible, I'd like to discuss those points in particular. I read the document and didn't see anything obviously wrong or objectionable. If there is something wrong, it seems to me the thing to do is correct with a better argument or better evidence, not fire the author for having the wrong opinion.
He makes it clear at the beginning that individuals must be judged as individuals separate from their race or gender.
But, when talking about groups of people, the only way to do it is to use averages.
Girls like to play with dolls more than boys on average. Agree or disagree?
If you agree you're a sexist these days.
Which is a shame because real sexism is walking up to a girl playing with Legos and saying "here sweetie, play with this doll, it's more lady like."
We're now to the point where main stream thought has conflated real sexism perpetrated on an individual with the very mention of statistics of a group.
I went to an HBCU in undergrad and one of the most frustrating experiences I had was when Microsoft sent an employee to talk to our group about what they were doing with regards to increasing diversity instead of what we could do to become better candidates.
Why Google hasn't said publicly the same as you?
- "Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races."
- "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."
- "I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."
If this is not the case he should apologize for it.
Note: I mostly agree with his arguments.
Even if your understanding is correct for which of the 3 points he should apologize for. My opinion is none.
The top comment says the diversity programs only focus in increasing the amount of people in the hiring process but the selection is the same for all. The author of the manifesto says there is positive discrimination (artificial bias) to hire minorities, the lower the bar for them. So if Google doesn't lower the bar for anyone there is no way to say anything against them, everybody is treated equal.
Can I quote a specific sentence for this? No, I would have to quote the whole manifesto.
"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
Sure, there are statistical differences between genders. This is a total non-sequitur from that, with no citation in sight to try allay blame. This is just the 1950s calling with its stereotypes.
Women may be more agreeable, and more less assertive. However you had better provide fairly convincing proof that we are speaking up too little, rather than merely less than men do.
Bear in mind the published doc don't have the references the original work had. They removed them when they made it public (not the author)
You said "women may be more..."
What he said is fine, what you said is sexist.
He is talking about a distribution curve, you are talking about an entire gender.
I'm discussing the inference that people who possess more traditionally feminine traits are any less good at leading.
Good for you. That's a consistent philosophy. Something to be discussed and debated.
But this guy just got fired for this discussion, which puts google in the evil camp for me.
He got fired for the other bits, the casually implying 40% of the workforce were, onr average, somehow inferior and less suited to their work than men, and for not taking it down but stirring the pot, when he realised that he'd wildly misjudged the reaction people would have to it.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
Just to clear things up. A false negative is someone qualified who gets rejected. A false positive is someone unqualified who gets hired. He claimed that diversity candidates have a lower false negative, not a higher false positive. The "cold, hard interview process" you refer to is both technically challenging but also has a degree of arbitrariness to it. Google gets so many applicants that it makes sense to design a process that has as few false positives as possible without regard to the false negatives.
I knew someone that applied to Google because our former manager had gone to Google and wanted to hire him again. He did really well in the interviews (he was recommended by all of them) but was rejected because the hiring committee felt his GPA, for an art degree unrelated to the work he'd be doing at Google, was too low. Our former manager brought him on as a contractor instead and he eventually transitioned to full-time and he has been very successful there for almost a decade since. Most people never find out the reason they weren't hired. The only reason he ever did is because he knew the hiring manager personally and, even then, he didn't learn the reasoning until after he'd transitioned to FTE. Aside from the fact that his manager was able to circumvent the hiring process to, over the course of a year, bring someone he wanted in, this is a rare example of a known false negative.
As an outsider with no access to Google's hiring records, I can't say for sure how many false negatives there are, but I have to assume there are a lot more people like him that don't get hired. I've met good engineers during my career that were rejected by Google. And I've worked with enough former-Google engineers that weren't that impressive. The only thing I can say is that I've never met an engineer who worked or works for Google that I felt was terrible, which is more than I can say for most companies.
It sounds like the complaint being made is that Google used a situation almost no other company has, a constant surplus of people passing their interview process and took the expedient route to increasing their minority hiring...they're just ensuring that minorities aren't cut from that last, somewhat arbitrary stage of the hiring process. They know that committee is mostly deciding between candidates who would all be good hires because the process up to that point will have already eliminated the unqualified candidates. It's both a reasonable strategy to quickly increase the number of minority hires without sacrificing on quality and it's a lower bar.
You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level.
This depends on the size of your sample and the positions to fill. It is easier to find one good candidate from 100 individuals than 100 from 1000.
1. Sourcing programs with race/gender restrictions are unfair to those excluded, and bad for business because they restrict the funnel of participants. (The same criticism would apply if Google had a while-males-only program -- it would be bad business since it would restrict the funnel without a good business reason.)
2. Google's hiring process gives special treatment to certain "diversity" candidates. He doesn't give any details, and I don't know the context, but he linked to an internal discussion which seems to imply that a "more accurate" process might be applied with the intention of reducing false negatives. (Of course anyone reading a public copy won't see this.)
Everybody blames the author for creating a disturbance, but you can't create a disturbance without people being interested in what you say. The fact that it was so widely circulated (instead of ignored like 99% of blog posts) suggests to me that a number of people at the company feel like he had some really good points.
It's scary to me that the "safe space" crowd gets to define what views are offensive, and inherently make it an unsafe (even firable) place for those who disagree to express who they are and what they believe.
This. This is the core of what's going on.
I wish this was the #1 reply on this thread.
Seems like it must have gotten a few reshares to go viral enough for somebody to feel the need to leak it. I don't think we really know how widely it was read before it leaked though -- it might have been a big raging controversy inside Google, or it might not.
I think any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims. Regrettably for him, I don't think there's much to most of it.
All good, except he did not make that argument or anything similar to it. He did not state that women inherently suffer from biological weaknesses of any sort. And no, his ideas did not harm anyone (except perhaps indirectly himself). Literally nobody got hurt except him, he is the sole victim of the ordeal.
I hope that you have read the document in its original form, which is a PDF with some (admittedly weak) references.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
It's hard to see a fair and general principle underlying this. People who publish false or mistaken things internally should be fired?
> Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
In many way, it was not an unfamiliar sort of rant for the internet, and I was struck by the author's earnestness and apparent sincerity. It's possible that I make too many allowances for behaviour, and it's possible that I'm easily mislead.
I thought his ideas were not in any way useful, or actionable, even had he been correct;
That the ideas were poorly expressed, and full of such fringe 'truths' as are derived, insincerely, from cherry-picked science in order to be sold as snake-oil cures for the cognitive dissonance of the conservative and vulnerable;
That the expression of these ideas was immensely foolish, especially appearing in the context of what I took to have been his initial intent, an appeal of tolerance of diverse viewpoints at Google.
However, I'm always most disturbed by vitriol online when it's in service of beliefs that I share. It makes me deeply uneasy.
However, he went much further. He stated that the fundamental problem was due to biological determinism in a way that did not mitigate a non-statistician reading of his words. Casting implicit doubt on the competence of every female gendered person in his workplace.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph. Totally not what the memo was saying.
If you would have recognized his opening paragraph as hyperbole, you would have gone on to read a comprehensive opinion from a former Google HR employee on the ramifications of publishing such a memo. He makes very good points that are worth consideration, or at least reading for the detailed insight into why Google's hand was played and forced to fire him.
You should visit Europe- we're taking on SV hiring biases due to being so in love with the US, but "Bro" culture is not a thing I've ever seen. Ever.
The most sexist thing I've ever seen in tech is a sales guy being a bit over confident with his flirting. But then, he did it with guys to (not that I'm justifying it).
The inability to even discuss what is happening with hiring biases leads centrists to wish to discuss things; and the only people who are even open to discussion are the right wing. Who most centrists generally disagree with too.
I'm a classic liberal, left by many definitions. But the extreme left will very happily crucify me as right wing if I open my mouth with an opinion. Double so if I'm a white hetero man.
That attitude is much worse than any "bro" culture that may exist, not that I believe it does, and if that did exist then we can all rally against it and let those companies fail.
Relevant parts:
> (3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
...
> These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come. But our company is committed to maintaining a good environment for all of its people, and if one person is determined to thwart that, the solution is pretty clear.[2]
...
>[2] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...
In India/Russia, there are way more women represented in tech then in US. Do you think that these cultures are more welcoming/less sexist to women than US? It should be so in your world view.
I suspect that the companies in these countries doesn't have a diversity program, and they hire everyone for purely business reasons. Why do you think that diversity problems solve anything on the long term?
I live in Eastern EU and many people are actually sexist here ( men and women are favor of enforced gender roles ), unlike in Top 20 countries. But I suspect the gender disparity in tech is better than in the us, or largely the same. Isn't this kind of disproves the notion that gender differences are caused by sexism?
My sympathies are with those who work in more precarious situations. I'm no authoritarian, but I'm ok with this guy getting fired - he used his platform unwisely and at this point the damage control gained by firing him probably outweighs whatever benefit the company might get by keeping him.
However, I'm plenty perturbed by the willful lack of understanding all around these parts about (at the very least) - how diversity programs work / what they do - how hiring works - how oppression works - how public words can affect others
How do you know this for sure? They may not want to speak out.
I can mind my own business. I'm not really into the 'dig through someone's life history to find the one objectionable thing and then destroy their lives for it' trope.
You very clearly cannot tolerate people who disagree with you: you just expressed support for firing him. That means people around you absolutely WILL hide their true feelings from you because they will perceive you as a witch-hunter who is out to get them.
You are making a hostile workplace environment and you can't even see it.
I'm not a witch hunter but I'm flattered you want to assume I'm one simply because I'd rather hunker down and do my job than be forced into a debate about the perception of hiring policies.
> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.
I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt that there were probably sources. As has been noted in the original YC post about this, it seems like he gets a lot of his info from this study:
Further evidence that Google and the other large institutions don't actually give a rat's ass about "diversity". Diversity has absolutely nothing to do with diversity of thought, and is only concerned with normalizing racial/gender composition to present the illusion that discrimination and biological variation are non-existent (except for discrimination against males, whites, and Asians, because for some reason it's not considered discrimination if it affects them). It's not about doing the right thing, it's about PR - hence the decision to cave in to whatever the pitchforks are demanding.
It's a shame that honest criticism of diversity policies and gender issues is considered taboo enough to get someone fired. If we really cared about diversity, then we'd welcome opposing viewpoints and counter them with facts, not silencing. We have a culture of anti-intellectualism and dogmatism around certain topics that for whatever reason are considered sacred and not allowed to be challenged (ie. political correctness), and its disgraceful.
Relevant video: Peter Thiel: What is Multiculturalism Really About? [1996] https://youtu.be/E6cxRYgqfHY
From a personal perspective I get where you are coming from, but from a professional perspective it makes no sense. There are ways to present opposing viewpoints in a workplace without offending half of the people who work there.
Ways like not sharing your opposing viewing at all? From a professional perspective Google's management should have ignored the note. It's unprofessional to become wrapped up in minor drama (posting a note to a message board threatens nobody) and to act in carelessly hurried manner.
It's unfair in the sense that this progressive or far left ideal is allowed to be pushed onto entire organizations and by the media as de facto "right" or "correct", which is inherently a political position and would likely offend anyone who disagrees with it. If these processes and programs should be publicly enacted on people who disagree with them, it's unfair then to disallow any discussion about them under an implicit threat of termination. Google just confirmed that threat is very real. I know many conservatives here (a classical liberal / libertarian mostly myself, which is far too "right leaning" for this area) who are actually scared of any political discussion due to this exact threat, even though those with the "correct" opinions can openly discuss them without any fear of repercussions. I don't think they should because inherently politics brings out discussion and debate, often vigorous forms of it, and that's not generally the best thing for the office, but because that discussion/debate is effectively banned here, it's completely fine to express leftist and socialist ideals publicly, even if in extremely poor taste.
Secondly, if you were to decide to bring up issues with these programs with a person responsible (for instance in Google's case, this VP of diversity) you'd get a predictable dismissal, or they'd silently drop whatever issue you raise, which means you have no actual means with which to present these viewpoints. She publicly dismissed the entire thing without actually refuting any argument that was made, with language that effectively sounded something like "this is wrong think, and Google doesn't agree with this wrong think." You could do it outside of work, but you lose the context and the specifics of the program, and more importantly the impact any such discussion could have on your immediate environment.
These discussions do need to be had, and where they're being had, the majority of even liberal minded people tend to agree with the author of this piece, but it's hard to know if that's a consensus (even at 500,000+ views for instance on each video on YouTube) or if it's just an echo chamber because even demanding rigor and evidence of the ideas behind diversity is taboo in far too many places. For instance tptacek can be found in these very comments essentially arguing that this topic of discussion isn't open because it's been decided. By whom? How can any discussion of highly debatable topics like this be had if people like him and Google are just going to say "it's not up for debate because I'm right" in order to shut down any discussion before it can even begin, hilariously in this case by likening this to discussing child labor or marital rape? It's nice to see logical fallacies are alive and very well with people who otherwise seem fairly intelligent.
http://motls.blogspot.si/2017/08/james-damore-deserves-1-mil...
> As Damore reminded us, most of the people who agree with him only dare to agree privately.
> What do they answer when their opinions are measured through a poll run on Google-plus – which the SJW officials in charge could still hypothetically access? Some other Google employees gave us the following pie chart:
> 14% strongly agree, 22% almost agree with Damore's letter. That's some 36% if you combine it – over 20,000 employees of Google. If you add the 13% of neutral folks, you will get almost 49%, a slightly greater percentage than 48.5% of those who almost disagree or strongly disagree. Clearly, even if the participants of the poll face some risks that their vote could be used against them, the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents.
PC culture? regressive left? feminsts? LGBTQIAPK? lefties?
This is just not how you analyze a poll and maintain the impression of honesty. Although I agree with the conclusion that "the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents" (based on the 36%/48.5% split), the obvious willingness of the author to exaggerate support for his side is just despicable.
I agree, but (and call me old fashioned) I don't think these kind of discussions should happen at work and I definitely don't think an employee should be publishing opinionated documents naming the company they work for.
If you read it, it was about his opinions about damage that Ideological Echo Chamber causes to company.
This discussion needs to happen at google. And he made it clear that this arent his opinions but he sourced most of controversial claims in memo.
His paper was completely aligned with section 1.5 of Google's code of conduct that says “Any time you feel our users aren’t being well-served, don’t be bashful - let someone in the company know about it. Continually improving our products and services takes all of us, and we’re proud that Googlers champion our users and take the initiative to step forward when the interests of our users are at stake.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in memo “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it.”
...and fired him anyways. It seems to me that he will easily win on court saying he was fired for political reasons and accuse them of defamation.
"However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace"[1]
[1] https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees-ceo-...
Our mistake is prioritizing offense mitigation. So long as a person's primary intent isn't to offend then they should be able to say anything without being fired.
I strongly disagree. If I want to cement my advantages of being a white male I'll propose anything that furthers that goal. My aim wouldn't be to offend someone, but it is still very real side effect of my goal.
Discussing gender differences should obviously not be taboo, nor should other topics, but the motives behind the discussions should likewise be freely scrutinized.
Pandering to offense takers encourages them to seek motives they deem aggressive.
What I mean isn't that I should be able to in practice be offended with what I disagree with, but that blatant agenda pushing behind science that doesn't quite fit your agenda should be questioned.
I'm not offended by facts, I'm offended by dishonesty. We probably don't disagree in concept, but perhaps on this specific case.
Marked down for spreading alternative facts.
Sounds like this memo is exactly what that board was for.
Imagine if we weren't allowed to debate, say, programming languages or SQL vs. NoSQL because one side needs to be coddled and can't take the heat. That's essentially what we're doing with "diversity" policies and gender dynamics.
There is a market force pushing software companies into leftist positions (since influential demographics in the industry are strongly pro-left; also this creates positive feedback loop).
In this context Google’s behavior is rational, and this guy tried to fight it with reason and argument (I was laughing hard when I was reading the manifesto) and got steamrolled in the process, proving the argument made in his memo by personal example.
Yes, if you oppose or even voice disagreement you lose your job.
I expect Googles behaviour in this instance was illegal.
In this case it seems that James planned all this to happen and is gonna sue Google:
> "$1 million in bonuses" was changed to "$100 million as a compensation" after Damore was "fired" by a Mr Kunda Píča whom I have never heard of; Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
And about PR, while vocal left leaning activists might cheer decision to fire him, conservative and centrists media used this as great point to smear Google as leftist propaganda. This is great talking point for proving accusations that google manipulates search results to prefer certain political agenda. Recently Jordan Peterson caused quite a stir when his youtube and gmail accounts were revoked, YouTube decided it will start isolating videos with controversial views even if they dont brake ToS...
This moves will be used by anti PC camp a lot to steer users to alternatives to googles products.
Facebook and Twitter already pushed a lot of potential users away by similar behavior, alternative platforms are getting more and more relevant. Its hard to say if this vocal PC SJW activists are just vocal minority or actually majority talking with their wallets. Based on results of recent US elections and financial problems of some feminists and left leaning publications, and on majority of comments on uncensored pages; I would say that PC ship is probably sinking fast.
Then he tweeted that they reviewed revocation it and still didnt restore account.
He then tweeted few influencers like Rubin, Rogan and Harris.
And then he tweeted that his accounts were restored, again with no explanation.
Right media and Youtube anti-SJWs blame this on one Youtube policy to isolate contradicting videos and authors, but I think this was probably mistake by some bot. Maybe Peterson account was mass flagged by some fringe group.
You tube isnt doing themselves a favor with keeping all the details, since this allow those who accuse them of being biased, to use this as an example of censoring anti-SJW personalities.
That's bullshit. Write a "manifesto" about how senior executive compensations are to high, the company should be taken over by the employees and that private ownership of properties is a crime. That's the REAL leftist position. Then send that manifesto out to thousands of employees on the company's internal mailing list and see how long you last.
People fail to see the point... Yes, there are many "leftist" positions. The above is one of them. The point is that expressing that position on an internal mailing list most certainly puts your employment in jeopardy. It doesn't matter what the position is (abortion, drug legalization, gay weddings, military attacks on civilians, foreign relations, ...), what matter is where you express it.
Just to clarify: I do have some respect for some ideas of the class-based left, unlike for the identity-based one. Roughly speaking, I do agree (though for a different reason) with the idea that the intellectual property should not exist.
FFS, this story itself is a perfect example. Here we have a corporation firing an employee for 'wrong' speech - and the left is in full support.
That's a class issue, and the left has clearly sided with corporations over the working class.
It is a current left wing argument in the United States for "diversity".
It is an old argument that one's ethnicity determines one's personality. I can't say one that I support.
These gender ideologies and the application of positive discrimination are an affront to left position. Since more than a hundred years, the left strongest identification trait was the fight to end discrimination. When now discrimination is applied in the name of diversity, that can't be a left value. This is something else, and it comes from somewhere else.
I'm not saying the position does not exist, and I'm not saying the groups purporting them don't look like left groups. But talk with some communists or socialists. They can't get behind this. My point is that this gender movement is its own political/ideological thing, that has just a very small overlap with left identification markers. It uses their style, not more.
This is probably part of the usual problem, that the left-right distinction doesn't really capture the political landscape.
[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/161217-paul...
[2] http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0701-whitehea...
In Germany, with which politics I'm more familiar, it is similar: The political organized left (which is marginal) is for affirmative actions (in the form of quotas for women). The only organization speaking out against them which has some left traits is the (sadly mostly neo-)liberal party.
Interestingly, and that is maybe a good description of my point, the parties implementing quotas for women over here are not left nor progressive. It's the SPD, which is a conservative central party, and the greens, which is a conservative party which fought for environmental protection in the eighties. However, the one remaining left party is also for them. My point may be weak when applied to organized political parties, but I stand behind the ideological argumentation that it is an affront to left values.
If that was (still) a thing Hillary would've won in a landslide. There's a lot more dissent in the left than the right.
Are you saying that Bernie endorsing Hillary is proof that there aren't conflicting views within the Democratic party?
Are you saying that Ron endorsing Trump would've been equal to Bernie supporting Hillary? Qualifications and platform doesn't factor in?
Here's an example of GOP acting as a herd and DNC acting on policy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-2...
It is a proof that that the Democrats knows where their real opponents are, and that is in the Republican party.
>Are you saying that Ron endorsing Trump would've been equal to Bernie supporting Hillary?
Pretty much, yes. Both have a non-mainstream and dedicated following. Both were screwed by their respective parties when they tried to get the nomination.
>Qualifications and platform doesn't factor in?
I'm not sure what do you mean by that, unless you are trying to imply that Ron Paul has a serious ideological foundation deriving from the Mises Institute and based largely on Murray Rothbard's 20th century interpretation of classical liberalism upon which the United States were founded in the 18th century, while Bernie Sanders is pushing USA towards the fate of USSR and other similar implementations of socialist ideas that always end in a disaster.
>Here's an example of GOP acting as a herd and DNC acting on policy:
I knew it's war-related even before I clicked the link. Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply in other areas.
> But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm.
> Again, though, most of these sex differences are moderate in size and in my view are unlikely to be all that relevant to the Google workplace (accounting for, perhaps, a few percentage points of the variability between men’s and women’s performances). Sex differences in occupational interests, personal values, and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), but most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway.
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex.
The problem in the employee's memo seems to be correlating scientific data (which is accurate) to groups of people (women) at Google and their qualifications (inaccurate).
The idea behind diversity is not to ignore gender differences, or racial differences, but to have the belief that skill and talent exists can come from anywhere. So these viewpoints that make generalizations about people because of their gender, race etc. serve to exclude the talent that can come from the non-white/male quarter.
Now this person is probably a good engineer, but its fair to say his impact to computing will never be as great as Ada Lovelace, Anita Borg, Fei Fei Li etc. So if a viewpoint like his hinders the next Grace Hopper then firing him is a worthy price.
The thing that the anti diversity warriors fail to understand is that their viewpoints are exclusionary to a whole swath of people, so please dont expect sympathy for your opinion when your viewpoint tells some people to go away just because of their gender/race.
But it does claim that Google created environment, where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber talking points, cant safely express their opinions anymore.
And Googles decision to pander to left leaning echo chamber and fire the guy proved his point.
If you actually read the memo, and not only misinterpretation of it on pro feminist blogs, you would see that he was very careful with words and there isnt single sentence showing his misogyny. All his controversial claims are sourced and he pointed out that this are not his personal opinions.
He even used graphs to show that he doesnt approve generalizations based on average. https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1502146696203-S...
What you are looking at is a clever guy (former chess champion), who pushed left PC SJW Google to shoot themselves in the foot. He knew what result will be. Google echo chamber activists bullied HR so they needed to fire him. Accusing him of things like misogyny, that cant be proved on court, is enough for character assassination in SJW echo chambers. But in court room where biased interpretation of his memo and words like "anti-women manifesto" or "anti-diversity screed" wont be allowed, he has the upper hand. He has all he needs to prove he was fired unfairly.
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
A non-sexist comparison between men on women would be "women on average are not as tall as men". Do you see the difference? There are so many baked-in sexist assumptions to this statement I barely know where to begin, but to name one, I'll point out that women weren't allowed (by law and by culture) to even hold high-status jobs until very recently.
Women traditionally raise children and take care of nest, while men provide resources for family. On average. It can be different, but this is how most families function.
This is the same as women on average are not as tall as man. Its true in most cases, but not always.
Feminist alike always assume that statements like this somehow assume that women are inferior, and to counter this many feminists try to convince women to start acting more masculine. Which is quite ironic actually.
This statement doesnt mean women are inferior. Men actually like women for this traits like patience, compassion, attention to details; because they lack this traits.
There is no need to be upset. Men like femininity at women. On average.
It is better to see what the opposing argument really is which is a liberalist position but in a future ideal United States free of discrimination that most everyone wants to live in. That is evaluating individuals individually based on their merit.
The question is really whether or not affirmative action is morally good, socially necessary, or practically effective.
Two thirds of that argument is possible to evaluate empirically. The other third is not which is why the topic generates so many arguments that are more heat than light like so many political views in the United States.
If you accept that is what is happening and you want to make society better and more positive, having some charity for the opposition I think would help a long way to having productive conversations.
I have become more open to the idea that the US is a wildly different place.
However it doesn't matter. For the individual person arguing a different point of view you can only succeed in persuading them if you respond to what they are saying fairly and charitably rather than argue with straw men and shadows from your own mind and fears.
That is what I am saying. Your ontology of the argument is too austere. People have other beliefs than women should be able to work or not.
Well, the pregnancy avenue is a significant area of unfairness between the sexes. Women of childbearing age DO have that hanging over their head precisely due to federal law.
There's 2 ways to fix it. Get rid of the federal law (and deny that pregnancy carries complications!) or offer the same benefit to the male.
I'm for offering the same benefit to the male. And now, that both have that law, the differentiation becomes moot.
It's really tough to have these discussions when any contrary opinion is equated with "[telling] some people to go away just because of their gender/race."
If one thing is true, there's plenty of data to demonstrate non-merit based discrimination. For example, studies that send out the same resume with different names is a common source of data: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...
If you think discrimination only affects women and POCs, you'll be delighted to learn that from second tier law schools that signaled middle class were overwhelmingly the least likely to get called. Being a middle class women yielded 7x better chances and being a wealthy male yielded 13x better chances.
Ironically, being wealthy as a woman put you as a disadvantage.
https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...
This type of discrimination is real because our brains don't like doing rigorous evaluation. To save energy, we'll substitute in some heuristic and tell ourselves we rigorously evaluated a person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution
Here's the point. Discrimination is real and it costs businesses money. It's like Moneyball. You can be like the Yankees and overpay for players that fit superficial molds, or you could actually be methodical like the 2002 Athletics and hire undervalued players their competitors discounted.
There are real economic incentives to focusing on diversity, especially if you can demonstrate your employees are passing on qualified people for superficial reasons (right school, hobbies, similar to me, culture fit, etc.)
The company that can successfully exploit an industry's hiring bias by targeting discounted groups and evaluating candidates rigorously will have the pick of the litter.
At work you should be professional and not only work to make yourself and the company/product better, but the people around you better.
It is mostly not healthy to get political or ideological at work unless you want to divide people. A company and employees really shouldn't get political if at all possible, to prevent a divided customer base. You should treat everyone at work like a client and not go all tribal or into cliques that end up in groups that are constantly complaining.
If you don't like something you can work to change it but in a company the size of Google that is not always possible. If you don't like the ideology of a company then leave. Do a good job yourself, setup your own thing if you want to control everything, but don't bring down other individuals, encourage them and make them better, create respect internally. Don't rock the boat, try to guide it, if you can't, hop on a new ship. In the end we live in a free country but work for companies that are more dictatorial/authoritarian where we are just sharecroppers on their feudal land. Companies are not democracies unless they are really small and even then they are not.
Sometimes manifestos are needed [1] but for the most part it is like calling out an employer. Not only will it probably not change the company, it will follow you around for better or worse.
Oh, there’s one final lesson: you never know when something you write is going to unexpectedly be published in the Wall Street Journal. So watch those split infinitives.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/what-i-got-wrong-in-the-peanu...
The company and its employees have very publicly political. This is the trend for most of the big tech companies. I wish they were much less political and the companies chose more moderate viewpoints.
The companies, should stay as much as to the political center, and it is wise to do so. Google, unfortunately, built its early image as a company with moral, where it nows turns into a burden rather than a legacy.
I agree a manifesto likely isn't the best idea, but you also can't just say informally, "maybe there are biological differences that affect representation at a high level." When you just say that, people assume it's a dog whistle. You have to support it, and you have to make a case for what you're proposing. You also have to state in black and white that sexism still exists, and that you're suggesting there could be other causes, too. By that point, it becomes a manifesto.
To me it ultimately comes down to the context of where it was shared internally and how, but it's tough to find details there.
This is not about purging the company of people with different ideologies. This is about a person who thought it was appropriate to publicly question not just the ability of their co-workers, but whether they are fundamentally capable of performing.
Regardless of the accuracy of his statements, this was not the way to push for any change he might have been hoping to achieve
> Equal Opportunity Employment
> Employment here is based solely upon individual merit and qualifications directly related to professional competence.
How are you going to achieve 50/50 diversity in the company if the pool of candidates is far from that distribution? (unless you go and don't hire the best ones to balance the distribution)
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
EDIT: As kevingadd said, I might be wrong assuming the goal for diversity target for Google. It can be something more realistic and be close to the ratio of the pool of candidates. In that case I am wrong in my assumption. This is also a good link he provided: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v...
Even if their hiring pool of candidates didn't have a fully diverse distribution, that doesn't automatically make it okay to have a company that ranks poorly on diversity. It suggests that you should examine how your pool is filled with candidates and whether you're committing serious errors that cause you to miss out on top-class talent - like only recruiting from ivy league schools, or excluding people without 4-year degrees. Both of those things could unfairly exclude people of all races and genders and it would further reduce the diversity of your candidate pool.
I don't think it is bad you have a company with a ratio 75/25 but I would think why are less women than men interested in tech. Is it based on biology? is it a cultural issue? We can discuss that, but for me it is clear that a positive discrimination to have a 50/50 ratio it only harms the company in the long term and it an impossible goal to achieve now a days.
> Even if their hiring pool of candidates didn't have a fully diverse distribution, that doesn't automatically make it okay to have a company that ranks poorly on diversity
So, how do you achieve this diversity?
I already mentioned some of the ways you can expand your candidate pool. There are tech firms in other states/cities with more reasonable race balances than Google, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... With the vast financial resources at its disposal and the (generally) positive brand recognition it has, Google absolutely is in a position where they could recruit more people of color and more women. They have to identify the right steps to take, and then take them - both significant challenges, especially if your employees actively resist every step involved.
Honestly though at this point, this is a well understood issue. It's not a completely solved problem but many companies have no difficulty recruiting a diverse workforce.
Do you have any reference for the goal Google had for any of his programs?
But rather than discussing the ideas in the memo, people who have never met him and who presumably don't know the context with which the memo was released have twisted his arguments, made assumptions that he racist and sexist beyond hope of recovery, and needed to be fired.
I understand that his memo was extremely inflammatory and therefore probably not appropriate for the workplace (although, again, I don't know the exact context in which it was distributed initially). But now that it's gone viral - wouldn't it be better to have the discussion rather than trying to silence him and pretend it never happened? Because I am sure there are more people out there with the same views. People who are in charge of hiring decisions, are terrified to discuss their views in public, and are now that much less likely to ever change.
Personally, it's not immediately obvious to me when reading the memo or the cited references that he was wrong. There are a lot of crackpots out there who cling to indefensible ideas and refuse to change their minds in the face of overwhelming evidence - but this guy didn't feel like one of them to me. To me this felt purely like identity politics winning out over intelligent debate and the pursuit of truth.
Maybe read the article and other informed commentary such as this ex-Googler: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
https://medium.com/@silverstrike/i-like-how-you-portray-the-...
The summary at the end of
"Get over yourself. You are not as special as you believe yourself to be.
At that point, I gave up on your pathetic and emotional diatribe. Your piece is devoid of any logic, reason, or sense and serves as a way for you to virtue-signal to the rest of the world how much of a “stand-up guy” you are."
Is spot on how I read that Medium post.
I found nothing of value in the Ex Googler's commentary.
Freedom of Speech is not the same thing as Freedom from Consequences. Unless we decide that being "aggressively antisocial" should be a protected class, private companies should have every right to fire employees who they deem toxic for their culture.
If you don't like it don't sign and go work somewhere else.
Are you saying that supporting a presidential candidate is tantamount to "death to white men"? Yes, the candidate in question is abhorrent, but come on. Those statements absolutely don't carry equal weight.
If you read the post I was replying to, it would be obvious why I chose those two examples.
Anyway, I think self censorship is an expected behavior in a peaceful society. For example: you don't bring up recently deceased significant others, comment on awkward physical characteristics of strangers, or mock the suffering of others, without expecting repercussions. People learn at a very young age that certain topics should be avoided for the sake of "keeping the peace".
50 years ago you could use the n-word in business meetings. Now, not so much, but for a long time many people were "self-censoring" themselves to keep the peace in their workplaces. Some still are, but I imagine that most people these days are happy to be in a workplace where n-words are not tolerated. Not just for their own "sensibilities", but also the knowledge that their black coworkers/friends can be in an environment that is actively less hostile.
What we're seeing is the continuing shift in standards for peaceful society. So far I think the track record on these shifts is pretty good, so I'm inclined to let this ride for a while, even if some people have to keep "self-censoring" some of the time.
I guess mob mentality does rule after all.
I just don't think this should be a firing offense.
Plenty of Google employees are christians and none of them have been fired for it (it's legally protected, for one thing)
I certainly would not write a multi-page screed criticizing the policies and practices of my employer, distribute it at work, and then expect to keep my job or have no repercussions.
He put them in a difficult position. The brand and employee-esteem damage caused by tacitly condoning his manifesto by not firing him, vs just getting rid of one engineer. Easy maths. He's gone.
Edit: backwards words not now.
Employees write strategy memos all the time.
He is hired to be a programmer, not a social activist and Google surely could stand up and say they don't want be part of that.
"Well actually, the first amendment only protects against government intruding on free speech, it doesn't apply to the rest of us!"
Free speech used to be the thing everyone agreed on. It's like a fundamental tenant of Western, liberal democracy has gone out of vogue.
So the "free speech only applies to the government" or the "free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want without consequences" argument is really just a reflex to "free speech" being often misused.
But in this case - I agree with you. The knee jerk calls for the guy to be fired without really hearing him out or engaging substantively on the issues like censorship and an affront the free exchange of ideas upon which democracy depends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
The fact many supporters of this guy's firing are treating these principles as technicalities is troubling. The first amendment is a starting point, not a loophole.
Of course, because a policy of positive discrimination for minorities is not perpetuating any stereotype...
Equality doesn't mean equity. Equality is not fair.
P.S. downvote whatever you want, it is called discrimination for a reason (even if it says positive before)
For example, your pool of candidates is 75 (mayority) / 25 (minority). If you want in your company 50/50 ratio, you must leave out better candidates from the mayority in order to increase your number of people of the minority.
EDIT: as other person replied to me in a comment, my argument fails if the target ratio is close to the pool of candidates. But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption. I assume the goal was not feasible and that lead to the famous memorandum.
In California, when companies are audited by the government to check for discriminatory employment practices, they're checking that the employment ratios are relatively close to the ratio of the pool of applicants, not some prescribed ratio like 50/50.
Do you know how they calculate the ratios for the pool of candidates? It seems it is not a easy thing to do.
After companies grow to a certain size (I think >50 employees), they are also obligated to record demographics information about applicants in the form of voluntary surveys in their application process.
Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I am more confuse now after the information you gave me.
funny, when I started applying outside of the US, I added that information into my resume.
in the US, there's often an attached (optional) form that allows the applicant to add this information. I'd never really put it together before tonight, but I've always shunned filling out that form. I also shunned saying the pledge of allegiance in grade school.
wondering, for myself, if those behaviors are related.
You're not being misinformed, this is probably good advice.
Your demographic information doesn't have to be on your CV for your name to be cross referenced with a government database (audits I mentioned are done by government offices or government contractors), which you would probably be listed in if you are working in the US.
>Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I haven't read anything about any audits that have said they have a significant bias one way or another, I don't think I've said anything to suggest otherwise.
Google and other large corporations are known to do self audits of their hiring practices (demographic and otherwise) both to improve their hiring processes as well as to identify and correct discriminatory practices (mitigate legal risk), they are allowed to collect demographic information for the latter purpose.[0]
[0]https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
My personal opinion is that Google's demographics changes are a simple result of changes in the actual applicant pool, and that Google 'promoting diversity' doesn't change their internal hiring process in any meaningful way. But the press about it probably does encourage lesser represented people to join CS majors in university. So google does promote diversity in engineering, just not in the way the author of that article suggests, and instead with marketing and a 4 year time lag.
Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environment. Anyone saying otherwise should look hard at why they value this person's desire to speak without consequence over their colleague's right to a workplace where they're not judged by their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance.
Did you read the essay? He certainly did not make that claim. Population averages are not statements about individuals. This is pure censorship.
Come on now, which one do you think he believes? He made it pretty clear, clear enough that pretty much no one would want to work with the dude.
That’s in his own words, and I would have fired him a hell of a lot faster than Google did, because I will not have my team disrupted by a prima donna.
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
The author deliberately narrows the scope of this sentence stating that the hiring practices decrease the false negative rate, not increasing the false positive rate. Stating that the false negative rate is lowered for diverse candidates is to say that qualified, non-diverse, candidates are rejected at a greater rate than qualified and diverse candidates. It is not stating that unqualified, diverse, candidates are accepted at a greater rate.
Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
This is not necessarily the case. This is a vast oversimplification of a tech company's hiring process, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that phone interviews have a 50% rate of generating a false negative and on-sites have a 0% error rate.
Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.
* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.
* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.
* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.
At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.
The "bar" so to speak isn't always something that people have a higher chance of passing the better their skills are. A working knowledge of data structures and concurrency is all that's necessary to pass all of my company's coding interviews. Practice and luck is probably a greater asset than skill in many interviews. But getting into the efficacy of technical interviews is opening a whole 'nother bag of worms.
If I've understood that correctly I really appreciate your effort in explaining it. Your comment should be higher so more people could see it :)
Also, if I understand you correctly, the phrase "lower the bar" might have gotten him fired for something he wasn't intending to say.
I also agree with your point around phrasing. I agree that lot of people took away the wrong meaning due to the phrase "lower the bar" (which is a very loaded phrase). This piece probably could have been better received if the author sought out proof-reading with trusted co-workers and friends beforehand. In particular the author should have:
* Dropped the awkward and monolithic generalizations of "Left" and "Right" at the beginning.
* Stayed way the hell away from talking about biological differences, just say that men and women have different preferences for working hours, fields, etc. and don't touch on possible causes.
* Don't emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, but rather the possible negative effects for the group as a whole. The point about OKRs contingent on hitting a certain percentage of diverse team members turning hiring and transfers into a zero sum game was actually a really good point that potentially hurts diverse groups themselves by limiting cross-team mobility.
* At the end, don't try to turn this into a Conservative vs. Liberal issue. Just point out that affirmative action is not nearly as uniformly supported as people make it out to be. For reference 42% of the population opposes affirmative action for race in the workplace, and 33% for gender [1].
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/184772/higher-support-gender-affi...
* Mentioning of left echo chamber was pandering to the right. And he got huge support form right leaning and centrist media and personalities.
* Biological differences he mentioned were sourced, so not his personal opinions. He knew this will trigger outrage from pro feminist camp that will start witch hunt against him, based on unproven accusations that he holds misogynistic beliefs.
* Emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, was another passive aggressive attack on one of SJW/PC/regressive-left sacred cows.
I dont really know if he planned this, but if you spend any time following anti-SJW sphere, then you should agree that reaction was totally predictable.
Basically he just said that google created environment where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber agenda (here he was pandering to anti-SJW anti-PC / centrists, conservatives...) cant safely express their opinions anymore. And he was fired for doing exactly this. Proving his point on himself. Google HR had two bad choices, not fire him and cause outrage among many of their left leaning (snowflakes); or fire him and prove his point that they re indeed left leaning echo chamber.
I base my speculation on fact that he put his full name on memo, instead of pseudonym and this quote:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
without dumping in a lot more money or w/e...
The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).
For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.
If he wants to argue that Google should lower the false negative rate for men too, I am totally on board with that! They should lower the false negative rate for everyone. They are bad at high-signal interviewing.
But the meaning of the phrase "lower the bar" is that less-qualified people are being let in, that people are being held to lower standards, etc. The entire point of the phrase "lower the bar" is to convey that the bar should have been be left where it was.
Honestly even if he wrote something like "Hiring practices which are more likely to improve outcomes for individual 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" I'd have much less of a problem with it. (I called out this specific sentence on Twitter yesterday; it was one of the things that particularly bothered me about the document.) But he used words with a specific meaning.
If he used words by mistake that his colleagues reasonably interpreted to mean that he thinks they're unqualified, that's all the more reason he shouldn't have his job. At a company at the scale of Google, a huge portion of effective engineering is effective communication.
The copy on the documentcloud link floating around this thread shows that "effectively lower the bar" is a link to an archived thread from the internal Google Group "coffee-beans-discuss".
I am curious if that post, or a summary thereof, has been leaked: I find the use of this phrase just baffling and technically incorrect (in addition to being insulting) and it seems like the author did have some specific intention here. Is he quoting someone else who's arguing that false negatives "effectively lower the bar"?
You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.
Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.
What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.
Are you saying he's wrong for pointing out that Google has affirmative action policies? Or that the policies themselves are bad? I don't understand.
He believes neither. We don't need to speculate, because the author writes quite deliberately to communicate his point. Here's the quote you're likely referring to, the one that mentions "lowering the bar":
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate. (emphasis mine)
The author is not stating that Google's hiring practices result in unqualified diverse candidates receiving offers at a higher rate than non-diverse candidates. The author is stating that a greater portion of qualified, non-diverse, are being rejected. In other words, the author is not stating that diverse employees at Google shouldn't be there. Rather he's claiming that there are a substantial number of non-diverse candidates who should have received offers, but didn't.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate. I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
> * A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
^ Isn't that exactly what the author is saying?
He says that Google 'has created' (past tense) a discriminatory hiring practice.
Presumably his coworkers were hired in the past and not the present or future.
Thus, the hiring practices that prevailed when his coworkers were hired were discriminatory, per the author.
I believe that everyone should have a fair shot at a good career. I can't even begin to talk about how that is not the case in America - if we disagree here, I'm not sure we'll ever come to agreement.
It's not clear that the workers favored in this alternate pipeline are incompetent (which is really the implication that everyone is making). What is clear is that people with their perspectives are not as prevalent in the technology field.
Perhaps companies are recognizing a) the value of multiple perspectives or b) the structural difficulties that deny some people the same 'fair shot' we all have.
I'll leave you with this. The SAT should be a test of one's aptitude, perhaps readiness for college. If some individuals receive years of tutoring, but others have to go to the library to get test preparation, is our metric for college readiness fair? Maybe you'll say yes, but if we were talking about any other thing (cars, experimental models, you name it) we would clearly recognize these two groups had different pre-test levels of preparedness.
If you must spew hate, could you at least choose a more interesting criteria than skin tone or genitals? These have been done to death.
No, it is not censorship. He can say those things. He just can't pretend to be an effective team member if this is what he believes about his coworkers and he is unwilling to learn from others.
But that's the point of being more cautious at work than you are in your personal life. You don't know how people will react. Most people are uncomfortable even identifying their choice of political party at work.
For some, it's simply a critique of ineffective hiring practices.
For others, it's veiled sexism dressed up with statistics to lend it an air of legitimacy.
Seen that way, this is a pretty interesting social science experiment, albeit at the expense of his job (if not his career)...
What about the behaviour before / during / after publishing it?
What kind of post-truth, post-logic universe is this? I want off this fucking planet.
I understand you would like to live somewhere that context does not matter and documents are self-contained.
Until you live in that world, please consider that there is an external world relevant to what an author's intentions are, whether they are lying or exaggerating, whether they are deliberately misleading or naively misinformed.
Does he have good intentions or bad intentions? Well, you would want to look at the other opportunities available to him to reason about that.
"This is what he believes about his co-workers" You: He did not write this
If he did not think that the performance of the women around him was holding back Google, then he wouldn't write the memo.
Can you give an explanation of how this was the best choice available to him if he did not think this was the case?
"He is unwilling to learn from others" You: He did not write this
Is it your position that he did not have any options for taking his opinions to others inside the company and getting feedback before circulating broadly?
He knows that this is sensitive - that definitely gets mentioned in the document - but there is no indication that he has gone to the people responsible for diversity policy to discuss the intentions, metrics or organisational concerns that shaped the policy.
If you don't know the functional and non-functional requirements for a system, you should find them out and if you disagree go to the stakeholders. Choosing not to do so is not high-performing employee behaviour in any organisation.
I also sometimes think about topics that would be inappropriate in an office environment (such as sex) and I censor myself by not saying what I am thinking. We even have an Internetism for that concept - NSFW.
None of this is new - we are expected to conduct ourselves appropriately for the current situation. It's just how society works.
I didn't even read the document in question, I just have a very hard time with people getting riled up about being "censored" at work. It's work, what exactly do you expect?
Regardless, your clever analogy doesn't apply. Companies are welcome to be political in their own environment. They own it. Employees are not. They're employed at-will.
Anyway, the financial benefits of diversity are almost certainly overstated. I don't know why we can't just say, "we're hiring diverse people because we think it's the right thing to do".
As a society we've been trained or perhaps tricked to suppress our sense of justice and fairness In Gabor of money.
Hence the studies promoting the idea that diverse companies are more profitable, as if that should make any difference. It's a sick obsession with viewing just about everything through a financial lens even when money shouldn't come into it.
However, I sympathize with younger people because it's a double-edged sword at places like Google, where your work and your life are very intentionally blurred. You eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. You go out and socialize with your friends from work. You do laundry at work (I'm not sure if Google still does this or not). It's not like the 1980s where people check in at 9am and leave at 5pm.
Then why are you assuming you know what it said?
---
I did skim it and it seemed like the pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo people who think they are being really smart but really are just being obnoxious write; since I read way to much of that sort of thing already I didn't care to read further.
This is the kind of behavior that woke me up (in my early teens) to the dangers of adopting my values from my religious background/peers. I never thought I'd have to deal with witch hunts for wrongthink in tech.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
- Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
- A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
- Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
- Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
- Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.
I've seen smart people pointing at 'evidence' on both sides of the discussion. Your claim that can 'irreparably' harm google is equally baseless IMO.
let me know what industry you work in where you can poison the well so badly and not get canned.
Or sued, seems like this would be an easy basis for a hostile work suit. Couple promotion denials, a documented complaint and this manifesto would probably be an easy lawsuit, though INAL.
Policies that are effectively affirmative action are by definition lowering the bar for diversity candidates. His statement that it can lower the bar is correct but still not something people like to be reminded of. Google (and others) not recognizing this distinction and treating his lack of discretion as hate speech is irrational mob PC rule or just plain cowardice (if he was fired for PR reasons).
In an n-dimensional space where we take into account all the factors that go into whether or not a candidate is given an offer, you're actually complaining about "lowering the bar" when the bar is already lower for people (for people that's not being targeted for affirmative action) due to systemic effects? You're actually complaining that we're lowering the bar by tweaking other variable so that the bar will be effectively the same obstacle for everyone?
Please explain your rationale for doing so.
Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?
> or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color
This is utter bullshit. As someone who used to work for Alphabet, gender and ethnic background never came up during interviews, simply because the interview process does not account for that. You are either able to solve the technical problems you are presented with during the interview or not. "Culture fit" - which is the one item that might be influenced by things related to gender or ethnic background - is actually a liability for minority groups.
> Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?
Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.
He knows them. Everyone knows them. The average Alphabet employee does multiple interviews a month, sometimes multiple interviews a week (complaining about how many interviews you have to do is of the favorite pastimes in the company.) We are trained for this, and - surprise - none of the training says (or even suggest) 'you should lower your standards for minority candidates.' In fact, none of the interviewing training even mentions gender or ethnicity.
I feel that this guy is coming from a disgruntled conservative-leaning position where he feels the company values don't represent his. That's a valid concern, but there's plenty of companies out there. He should just leave and find one that has values matching his.
> This was not the case at the company I worked for and it was a very negative thing
That's sad. Hope you had better luck with the next one!
> Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.
Sorry, didn't meant to be offensive. I just know intrigue (which this memo tries to stir up) is the shortest path to a dysfunctional workplace.
People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
This has nothing to do with the company, but rather with the individuals working for it. How many people, do you think, felt free to discuss their support for a Democratic candidate in the Alabama?
> People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
And they did! Heck, Google encouraged everyone to vote, not just Democrats. Maybe your anger should be directed to the companies and governments that did their utmost to stop their own citizens from voting. North Carolina is a good place to start, move South from there.
On to voter fraud!
But those numbers likely don't indicate
anything nefarious like widespread voter
fraud. It's actually pretty common for
voter rolls to be a mess. In fact,
Judicial Watch threatened to sue 11 other
states in April for the same reason.
A 2012 Pew Research study found around
2.75 million people were registered to
vote in multiple states and more than
1.8 million deceased people were still
registered to vote.
Oftentimes, people don't realize they
need to notify local voting officials
when they move or when a loved one dies.
But outside of a few isolated incidences,
those extra numbers don't generally lead
to voter fraud.
Q: How big a problem was voter fraud in the 2016 election?
A: There have been just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-...
Carter won in '76 and it's been within +-10% R/D till 2000. So not that lopsided as you might suppose.
I'm sure you could imagine walking in with a Hillary/Pussy Hat no problem whatsoever. But you would not walk with a Trump hat even as a joke. Ok, maybe in Moncks Corner or some boonie office.
Please stop trying to bring the "librul intolerance" right-wing talking point. It's pretty pathetic to paint yourself as a victim, even when you have everything in your favor.
"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"
Lowering the rate of false negatives does not lower the bar. If anything, it just improves the process and yields more qualified candidates. If you increase the rate of false positives, then you would in fact lower the bar.
It's muddled thinking like this that makes me doubt his ability as an engineer, not to mention his ability as a social scientist.
Well now I just doubt his ability as an engineer, social scientist, and writer of the English language... ;)
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> decreasing the false negative rate
(Again! This is from his POV): The false positive rate has not gone up. The diverse candidates are, in fact, qualified and should have their jobs. They are excellent. I am going out of my way to make sure no one interprets this deluge of text as me questioning my peers ability; something that I will fail at in spectacular fashion.
> lower the bar
(His POV don't pin this on me): However, diverse candidates may now have a lower bar than non-diverse candidates.
How is it possible that some candidates have both a "lower bar" and yet are still qualified?
> Hiring practices
(still his POV folks): Because for diverse candidates we have different hiring practices. Practices which are tailored to diverse candidates. It's not a lower bar, it's a different bar. A bar specifically designed to help us discover the best side of these diverse candidates.
(Speaking for myself now): I think the author is saying that going out of your way to create specific affordances for _some_ and not for _all_ is discriminatory. I _don't_ think he's a horrible monster for thinking this. I _do_ think that this way of thinking fails to acknowledge the fact that an organization that is already steeped to the brim with a specific group of people is likely to _already_ have built in affordance for that group.
He fucked up. Hard. Like so hard that I find it kind of funny (wtf was he thinking?). I, personally, don't think that the ideas that he espoused merit firing, I think they merit careful correction wherein the person doing the correcting attempts to read his meaning charitably, carefully, truthfully and fully. I feel that most of the public responses have failed in this regard. Most of what I've seen start with "he's basically wrote: {$straw_man}". Some are pandering to an audience, some are more interested in winning than in being right, but some people who retort in this way just have limited time and patience. I can understand why the straw man is appealing. I've just written three paragraphs about a single sentence, who has time for this shit?
Here's the thing though, careful correction, truth, charity—that's my "ideal world" case for him. The simple matter of fact is that Google is not the ideal world, they have no incentive to apply my ideal to him. He's a professional and the fuck up alone (separated form the ideas) represents enough potential harm to Google that he had no hope of keeping his job. Maybe one of his friends can give him the careful walk through of how his ideas are flawed. Hell, maybe a good friend will do that and he'll decide that he was right all along.
Edit: After further reading I realized I had made a mistake when I (speaking from his POV) said: "it's not a lower bar, it's a different bar". He did actually use the words "lower the bar", something I failed to fully account for. One could, with liberal amounts of charity, imagine that he meant that the bar was lower but still sufficient? We're getting into logical acrobatics. That said, logical acrobatics are part of the point. The goal in reading someone whose world view is different to your own is to better understand their logic. To imagine how, within their world view, their ideas are consistent. We could be reading the words of a monster who doesn't care about logic. Or we could, and I think this is much more common, be reading the words of someone with flaws and ignorances and prejudices. Someone not so unlike ourselves.
Slavery and Jim Crows laws no longer on the books? Therefore there is no systemic racism!
Are there laws discriminating against women? No? Therefore they have all the same opportunities as men!
Why are Black Entertainment Television and Gay Pride okay, but White Entertainment Television and White Pride not!
Black Lives Matter is Racist!
Not all Men are Rapists!
This essay started from precisely this set of emotions and found data to justify it after the fact.
Edit: Another way to say this is, if an applicant simply meets the bar, the person is most likely not hired. Conversely, an applicant needs to far exceed the bar in order for interviewers to vouch for the person and improve odd of hiring.
On the other hand, applicant that fits into the targeted demographics are probably afforded additional consideration, even if the person's interview did not wow the interviewers as much, hence the "lowering the bar" argument. It is not lowering the standard bar, but rather the "score", if you will, the applicant needs to clear the bar.
The best analogy I've read so far is that the candidate's score and its error bar must clear the bar. But affirmative action applicants are extended the courtesy of second look, which reduces the error bar, hence lower score is needed for the score and error bar to clear the Google bar.
You're right though, and it's actually really insulting to insinuate that certain groups need help passing the bar. You can easily identify people who think like this if you ask a question (politely) like "would you hire a candidate that was more 'diverse' but less technically skilled than another candidate?". People who would choose the more "diverse" candidate but without a principled reason are probably just virtue signalling.
Note that 'diverse' can mean anything -- like comparing a developer who used to work in construction before being turned on to programming to a developer who came out of an ivy school (assuming they have comparable skill levels).
(The automatic doors on Star Trek were being pulled open using ropes by hidden prop guys. The actors had to walk confidently forward as if they expected them to open when this was not guaranteed. They sometimes smacked right into them)
Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence.
Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else?
Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard.
Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
But, currently, women, people of color, etc, seem to be "last hired, first fired" plus generally paid less for reasons that appear to be something other than their objective ability to do the job. I would like to see people hired because they can do the job and paid what they are worth and not some discounted value based on skin color or gender. To me, that would be a meritocracy.
What if you have an employee who works in your data center and averts 3 days of downtime? Maybe that person provided $100,000 of value and no one will ever know except for her.
You don’t have to “lower the bar” at all, because it turns out that the average “bar” is the wrong standard for anything but the most independent of programming (which is not modern software engineering, thanks). My own hiring standard looks for people who love learning, don’t mind shifting contexts and languages, and can work well in a group. Some of the “smart guys” who have interviewed with us have been poor choices because they are bad culture fits—cowboys and jerks.
Those things seem discriminatory to me.
Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
…which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.)
By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work.
People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team.
And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.)
If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
> By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap.
Agreed.
> People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself.
Presumably, you mean the bias is toward white males. But then you go on to say your preferred method is a soft-skills developer test that the team who'd be working with the hire evaluates.
Great--that's how hiring should be done anyway.
> And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed.
Okay, if that's how it worked out for you, great. The whole point of any hiring process is to determine which people will be the best fit for your needs. If your method does this, then it's a good method.
> If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
This is where your argument breaks down. You started out talking about unearned privileges, but your whole argument is about how you test for desired skills, and then somehow in the end, you make it about race again (but this time as it relates to meritocratic hiring, not unearned privilege).
So...where does race fit in to your hiring process? To me, that part of it just sounds like pandering, since your actual process sounds like it's all skill-based anyway.
I think what they were trying to get across was that BECAUSE of the broken testing, tests that were supposed to be meritocratic are just checking for certain groupthink.
My response there was if that's the case, the problem is just making better (actually strictly meritocratic) tests.
I also agree that most hiring practices are crap, and that interviews don't properly reflect day-to-day work. I also agree with a point (I think) you made that a bunch of the "meritocratic" tests that are developed today are a lot of the time just checking if one was groomed in the same way (learned about algorithms the same way, learned the same practices, etc) and not necessarily pure can-you-get-shit-done tests.
Your point gets a little hazy towards the bottom, for me, I can't tell if you're against supposedly meritocratic tests altogether and suggesting that people test for team-fit more. Your last sentence seems to have that same off-putting insinuation, just crystalized, but I think I understand your point, maybe I can rephrase it:
"If you're measuring a candidate with what you think is a meritocratic skills based tests, it's easy to be blinded by inherent bias and support systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because many seemingly meritocratic skills based tests have more to do with confirming shared experiences/biases than checking actual skill."
If I did indeed read your point well, my response would be to conduct better interviews, and create an actually meritocratic interview process, the onus is on the company.
As an analogous situation, men often claim that women talk too much. There’s fairly strong evidence that the claim is merely sexist nonsense[1].
So forgive me if I’m unwilling to give a crap about whether people who look like me (white men) feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick because there are people like me working to end the special privileges that they have gotten literally for decades. Especially since so many of them really aren’t all that. The London School of Economics makes it clear that gender quotas actually improve meritocracy by squeezing out mediocre men[2].
Your rephrasing is mostly correct, but I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know how to see your own biases, you cannot design a meritocratic interview process that doesn’t inherently have bias against women and/or minorities. As this entire discussion on the firing of the author of the screed shows…there’s a lot of people who can’t see that they have biases.
(And yes, I have biases. I have to work very hard to prevent those biases from causing me to discriminate. This is largely why I involve my team in hiring and constantly discuss the problems with bias blindness with them, too.)
[1] http://thejunglenook.tumblr.com/post/75517868909/do-women-ta... … but also see [3] as an extension because it actually gets to the heart of just why the (now-ex) Googler at the top of this was just so wrong.
[2] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quot...
[3] http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/145374253955/do-women-ta...
There's another question then of why are there only white men available for hire?
Asians people are over-represented in Silicon Valley, yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people.
Some Asians are foreigners, hired by SV firms at lower-than-market salaries. They may be hired because they're less expensive (because they need sponsorship so badly). These types of people make this a much more complicated analogy.
> yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people
Affirmative action policies sometimes do impact Asian applicants, making it less likely for them to be hired.
Asian/Indian males and females who can barely speak english says otherwise. You can't just drop this controversial statement without any proof
I hope we never become colleagues.
[1]http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
The assertions of the author of the screed are not well-accepted, and they are not facts. They are conjecture, and the author attempted to make universals out of primarily American ways of thinking and ingrained ways of discrimination.
Several of the studies he cites on biological differences in genders are well accepted, so far as I know the field. But the key conclusions that he draws from those studies (and really, the entire point of the memo) don't have any direct scientific support that I know of. Perhaps I am missing some key references. Care to provide citations for some of these?
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things ... These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics."
There's a citation for the first part. What's the evidence for the conclusion drawn?
"Neuroticism ... This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Citation for why neuroticism leads to fewer women in high stress jobs?
How about the entire "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap" section? That contains stuff like this:
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things"
"Women on average are more cooperative"
"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
Each of these statements (which at least hit my radar of being scientifically supported from the literature I know) is followed by some suggestions on how to improve the workplace for women. Implicit, of course, is that these aggregate scientific differences are somehow responsible for the gender gaps in tech. Any citations for why the quoted statements explain anything at all about gender differences in tech, rather than say, other STEM fields (biology? medicine? they have very different gender gaps).
It would be great to have the references I'm missing, because without them it sure appears the author is citing well accepted studies in order to make it look like his unsupported conclusions have "evidence".
At the end of the day, he told a just-so story; in this, he's no different than the "blame discrimination" camp. At least this story is an empirical one backed by self-reported work place surveys, cross-cultural analyses, etc. The fundamentalists opposing him just have some anecdotes, some unreproducible stereotype threat studies, and a healthy dose of religious conviction.
Most arguments against the manifesto (sic) I have seen, seem to be either ad hominem or claiming some form of "discrimination" .. as in prejudice. In the light of the current discussion around gender, mostly in the US, I am just not convinced. And it seems that many people who actually are qualified agree (no, a group of self referencing "gender studies" professors does not convince).
Anyway, it's coming up 5AM here and I will not bother you further with my slave-owner-descendant misconceptions.
Scott Alexander covers some of the most salient points here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for a book-length treatment.
(all male, all white) scientists
This is both ad hominem and wrong (the fourth scientist featured, Dr. Debra W. Soh, is an East Asian woman).
> "Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level." -- Dr. Debra W Soh
The problem is the author is repeating a pattern common in these discussions, where some kernels of empirically supported science are used to justify opinions unsupported by them. That we can measure some differences in MRI in no way establishes that under-representation of women in tech is a result of biological inevitability. We know for certain this isn't the case due to history itself, as well as variation in representation by location and culture.
Look at this and explain to me how evolutionary psychology or biology explain what happened to women in CS in the US:
https://developers.hp.com/sites/default/files/Intl%20Womens%...
If the author's positions sound mild or plausible to you, I don't believe you've actually read the science on this issue. What the original author said simply isn't supported in the way they claim. That we can measure slight differences in aggregate between women and men in no way explains what's going on as a sole factor.
And again, I'm pointing out that the author advanced biological and evolutionary psychology as mechanisms for explaining away this, despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
Not as much as men. See a study [1] and Steven Pinker's slide [2], and many more studies. It's a well established scientific consensus.
> despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
The author isn't claiming that men evolved within 100 years, but simply that men have in thousands of years evolved to have skills more suitable for programming by a small margin. When considering the 99%tile, this small difference becomes quite big. According to [3], you find 4-10 times more men in the top 1% bracket than women in certain skills.
[1]: https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...
[2]: https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/images/pinker.slid...
[3]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/56143/sex-...
not to say that chart couldn't be related to what's going on now, but it's not helpful to simply point there and say "look science!".
> As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership.
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level.
This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. Please don't do that again.
you're saying he was putting it forth, or addressing it?
I've come across a few people from these companies and it's not that hard to come across people who have strong biases against whites and white men in particular. Sadly it's become a way to signal you're in the in-group.
Diffusing hostilities isn't achieved by becoming the thing you're trying to overcome.
A minority can complain about a majority, but the reverse is frowned upon. The amount of "frowned upon" is amplified by the degree to which the minority the majority impugns has been historically hurt by similar opinions.
See: dynamics of older and younger siblings.
The idea "well, no one can punch!" is rhetorically clean, but pragmatically problematic. There is a long history of people who had to punch up to break a ceiling that should never have existed.
You see massive disconnects.
So, while it looks like punching up, having a group "punch up" at someone is actually punching down at an indiv.
But it's near impossible for a collective group of people to perfectly balance their outrage in just the right way, at precisely the right people, for exactly the right amount of time.
We just accept the tradeoff that progress is messy.
But still, people "punch up", and progress gets made.
Assuming a person's privilege based on race, gender or other immutable characteristics is imprecise and counterproductive.
I'm really having trouble finding anything to be upset about in his "manifesto". He's literally being fired for trying to start a serious conversation about a delicate issue.
in fact he pointed directly to the flawed logic that supports them.
poor guy had no idea what was coming.
he'd have been better off if he said
> "we should expect to see people with certain characteristics in tech, in the same way we see people with certain characteristics in race-car driving. that's no reason to discriminate positively or negatively against race car driver candidates."
I think he did make a point similar to that. Unfortunately he stirred the hornets nest (most, I think) by pointing to the gender-wage relationship.
These are complex issues that will take decades to fix starting with programs at the elementary school level and fundamental shifts in the messaging and feedback our society gives to children, young adults and all the way up to college students. And yet people are expecting Google to make significant progress on the issue within a couple of years. It's not really a realistic expectation to have of Google, but there are real market consequences for Google if they're seen not to care enough.
Google can make it look like they truly care about it and are solving it, but only if people don't look too closely or start pointing out flaws. This manifesto is an exercise in looking too closely and pointing out flaws. Whether his points, themselves, are flawed or whether they have merit is entirely beside the point.
It could have been a forwarded email instead of a Google Doc. Who cares? Same difference.
We have numerous studies which how simple biasing factors, such as a person's name, can dramatically decrease interview rates.
Arguing against diversity policies can be coached in the language of equality, but the objective results show that the outcomes would not be.
The outrage, fairly or unfairly (it is impossible to know what's in a person's heart) comes from many readers believing that the person is not arguing for equality, but coaching an argument against it's outcome in language that assumes that goal.
For many people, they see a cheap rhetorical trick made in bad faith.
It's a fairly common tactic inside of the RedPill community, and within White Power/Pride groups. Arguing that by fighting sexism/racism you are being sexist/racist.
He very explicitly is arguing that policies designed to correct the natural state are sexist/racist on their own, and have to be discarded.
He then hints at having a strong bias towards believing sexist/racist conclusions from a limited reading of a limited amount of information.
At worst, if you can read his mind, it was cover for his conscious motive to discriminate against women but I really don't believe he knows it.
The thing is, if you don't believe those assumptions, you will view the the unconscious bias and diversity programs as discriminatory. And many people don't believe those assumptions. They see companies discriminating against them and they don't like it.
There are not "assumptions" at this point. They are a factual reality.
My partner was a female chip designer who after 25 years got out of the business (in start up, saved up for early retirement..) Being an early employee well compensated. She loved her work, but not the environment, which while not outright hostile, wasn't good. She's got thick skin. Its the environment thats keeping women out, not the work. If you don't think your getting a fair shake, you aren't going to stick around.
No, he started that Google's hiring practices are biased towards certain candidates. If that causes offense, it should be directed at those in charge of hiring practices, not the guy who reported them.
Why is it always scorched-earth and never something like retraining? You bemoan hostile environments, but then demand termination if a foot is ever put wrong.
The people who decided to implement this braindead idea are at fault for this. Not the guy who decided to voice what everyone else was thinking.
Other internal memos that caused internal upset - real names on Google+. Why Google Video failed. A post mortem on Google Wave (that directly criticised ex-Googlers who had been in senior management). Probably a lot more I'm forgetting.
Regardless of whether you agree with the author, he risked his career standing up for what he believes in.
If the papers proving that biologically there's an interest difference between the genders are not enough then we could apply some data science.
Let's assume that nothing can force the gaming interests of women and men such as higher pay or availability (this could be debatable in the past). There are studies like these made on over 250000 gamers which show clear interest differences between the two genres: http://quanticfoundry.com/2016/12/15/primary-motivations/ http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ The gaming field (and marketing in general) is full of models used very successfully when deciding on a company/business strategy.
Google with their huge data analysis powerhouse could end this debate swiftly in their favor but I fear that either their data proves the writer's points and they're acting hypocritically now or they are avoiding adding fuel to the emotional fire (from a scientific point, Google data would be pure gold for years to come) by not releasing anything (pro or con).
I feel like most "rebuttal's" are like listening to Donald Trump. "He's wrong and we're right. We're definitely right.".
If you do have a link, please share!
I agree - the discussion around this topic is very frustrating (more frustrating to me than the actual content of the manifesto by far), and everyone's trying to make it so black and white.
I think the current top comment has it right; it makes good points (there are statistical differences in traits across genders), it makes bad points (the wage gap...just doesn't work like that), and it contains some really bad non-sequitur conclusions (measure how a person leads on the outputs of their team, not how "assertive" or "technical" they are).
"1.I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1); if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else."
But... that's exactly what I keep hoping to find, and have yet to really see - and its the thing people, in all their breathless responses, seem to excuse themselves first from undertaking.
The rest of his reply are really expositions about his own value judgements on empathy and politics.
I would find it highly educational and valuable, if someone who is more learned on these matters than I, would offer a good blow-by-blow factual rebuttal to the "manifesto".
More empiricism and less moralizing would be a breath of fresh air.
Here's a link that looks at the memo in a much more objective light: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Had they just (as they should ethically have done) privately let the guy know "hey uh, independent of whether we agree with you, can you please cool it because this is USA, Bay Area 2017 and you just can't say shit like that" then just waited out the controversy, this would have all been dead and gone by next week. Now it has turned into all out rage fest on both sides.
Franky I see this as one Google's biggest screw ups. The worst anyone can say about his "scree" (give me a break) is that the guy was wrong and suffers from unconscious biases. Otherwise he was fairly civil and for this he is publicly and viciously crucified and demonized then thrown under a bus by Google. The butt-hurt right is going to have a never ending field day with this. It will be Benghazi of white male boo-hooing for the next 10 years.
Why? And where do you draw the line of what's non-violent or non-threatening? Because to you that line is, say, X=96 whilst the person sat next to you has it at X=45. Other desk over, Bill, with PTSD, has it at X=12. Where do -you- put the line?
That's what you're basically saying with "no one should feel threatened and if someone does then that is their line".
There was also clearly no winning externally no matter what they did. It would not have been dead and gone as long as their was a narrative to be used by someone!
Having said that yeah people mostly live in fantasy lands and this guy disrupted that suspension of disbelief at least in his one case which makes him a tough commodity to deal with internally. But firing him wasn't required and was grossly unethical. They should have just let him sleep in the bed he shit in and he probably would have been gone within a few weeks anyway.
Now the guy is a goddamn martyr to the butthurt-white-male party.
Gonna leave this one alone, but ...
"hey should have just let him sleep in the bed he shit in and he probably would have been gone within a few weeks anyway."
Again, this assumes a lot about what would have happened internally in that time period. If, for example, 1000 good engineers quit out of frustration with lack of response, ...
Somehow, I have a distinct feeling, based on what you've written in this thread, that your response would be "fuck'em, let them go whine elsewhere"
If 1000 good engineers quit the users wouldn't even notice. Google is grossly overstaffed and pointless rewrites that achieve nothing at all are rampant. Promotion-oriented development is the order of the day.
Google reached a fork in the road with this event. The Google I remember being a part of many years ago had strong, firm commitments to freedom of speech. It left China rather than continue to accept the PRCs bullshit, despite the business consensus being that leaving the world's largest market was commercial suicide. That sort of action defined who the company was. It led to a globally trusted brand.
Pichai is clearly nothing like the men Brin and Page were. He just set fire to the trust of the Google brand to avoid pissing off a bunch of staff who are very likely mostly recent grads churning crap from C++ to Go somewhere deep inside the bowels of an undifferentiated product, and thus the least experienced and most trivially expendable. Losing a bunch of engineers who throw a hissy fit because someone wrote a blog post with lots of references to scientific research would, if anything, do Google a world of good.
The consequences of this will be felt for a long time. Who can really trust Google's results for political queries now? There will always be a nagging suspicion that certain results ("lies") liberals would rather people not see might have quietly gone missing.
It's a team sport after all.
Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative?
It sounds very questionable,
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected.
IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ...
You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :)
Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
but that's not important because:
b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems.
Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate.
Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all.
There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts.
Sorry for venting :)
p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
eng-misc?
Just under 280 people (out of 72,000 google employees) responded to the poll at the time of the screenshot. No indication yet as to possible bias in how this poll was conducted. Not to mention, somebody could have whipped it up in MSPaint.
It's 2017, not 1417.
Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.
not 75k engineers right?
Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.
I'm mature enough to get past my views and work with people of different viewpoints as I've had to do all the way through college and my professional life. I was told this was the whole purpose of group exercises in high school and college but I suppose like many things, that applies to only privileged people such as I.
The difference is I actually have to practice what I learned from carrying other people's grades in college for every single day in my professional life for as long as somebody catches wind of my political alignment and threatens to quit if my company doesn't remove me. It's a team sport after all.
I'm Indian and a lot of Indian Hindus I know hold some messed up beliefs. Some of them work at top tech companies as well.
Yet, people don't seem to have a problem working with them. But they do with a guy who rails against diversity.
Why does a brown Hindu man who dislikes muslims, believes in matching horoscopes before getting married, and whose grandparents practiced and benefited from the caste system and who, if you get him drunk enough, might espouse for honor killings and homophobia get a pass?
Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not?
Social acceptance is largely a function of majority vote. Though some social values might be absurd, if the majority feels comfortable doing it, it does get a huge degree of acceptance.
Plus some absurd social values have acceptance for largely cultural reasons. Marriage among castes in India is one such thing. There are so many caste related things you do in everyday life, belonging to different castes can constantly lead to "My X values are better than your Y values" kind of friction. So people keep to their castes.
Horoscopes are one of those "Why take a risk?" kind of basic hygiene related rituals you do before Indian marriages.
None of this makes sense, but the majority of the people are perfectly happy doing it.
Infanticide? Sure, cool. Homophobia because of religion (not Christianity)? We're fine with that. Honor killings? Its a pass. Killing goyim/kaffirs? We're down with that. Have a weird hangup or otherwise cultural thing that's completely disgusting, abhorrent, and/or unethical? It's obviously cultural, and it's OK!
------------------------------------
Wait, you want to talk about something white people do? We can't allow that! That's against our diversity training.
You're fired.
------------------------------------
It's because multiculturalism isn't about learning other cultures, their languages, their histories. Nope. It's about how evil Western culture is. I've sat in those classes, bemoaning how horrible and evil our ancestors were. And the only way to "win" the grade is to regurgitate what's said.
And in avenues like this, "Winning" is silence, and losing is saying anything against the current groupthink with your real name.
Or is there something else? Because that's a pretty mild question to get so upset about.
It's a team sport after all.
Something tells me that you aren't also going to defend the firing of anyone with open SJW beliefs for the same reason.
100% agree. So much of the commentary on it reads like the writer either didn't read the memo or willfully misunderstood it. I don't agree with the memo either, but holy shit, people's reactions are so over the top.
Perhaps it's a failing of culture at Google that he didn't have a better way to express his concerns and have them addressed.
That is how it is and how it has to be in a big company.
He challenges unsupportable mental hangups with data and reason. Fuck yes I'd hire him (and if he lived in a different part of the world I could, because I am a hiring manager for a software engineering team at the moment).
That would be even funnier if it wasn't so true, given the history of mailing list threads about the holiday gift.
Nobody attacked the shitty arguments, rather they started attacking the person making them.
This is just the start of the witch hunt that will follow.
Winston Churchill
You make the Bay Area sound like a somewhat dystopian, closed and repressive place. Is it really like that?
It's definitely a cultural bubble (as is california in general, to generalize for a second).
Whether you believe the bubble is closed and repressive or open and progressive depends on your point of view.
IE California considers itself open and progressive, and cultural bubbles in the US as closed and repressive. Those cultural bubbles consider California closed and repressive, and themselves open and progressive.
Completely agree.
I mean, alright, so the guy had a politically incorrect opinion. He isn't a raging fanatic, just allow it.
I am absolutely stunned at how few sociologists are at Google that permit these sorts of toxic conceptual models to not simply exist, but come to fruition in such a crazy way.
It speaks volumes that someone would be so comfortable as to post such a destructive piece of poorly educated tripe.
And before you reply saying that people don't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech at work, consider that the engineer wouldn't have been fired if he had written a memo extolling Google's diversity practices.
He wasn't fired because because he was speaking his mind, he was fired because he said something that some people didn't agree with.
And if for no other reason, irrespective of the topic, that chilling effect is really disconcerting.
I'm also not going to comment on this thread. But our silence will come back to damn us.
Feminists/whatever have come with far-reaching accusations of discrimination. Often backed by very flimsy arguments that often has a frightening lack of details and specifics. What I find the most absurd is that I can't recall ever having heard of an actual woman who was discriminated, instead one is very happy to talk about various summary statistics.
The point is that these accusations have been raised, and in fact come to be accepted as the established truth. Almost everyone, at least in public, agrees with the feminist viewpoint. Somehow, despite these opinions being universally agreed upon, many are not interpreting the manifesto in the context of a defence against these accusations.
Finally, I can to some extent understand the need for affirmative action However, one question I find interesting to think about is, when are we going to stop it? When has society gotten "good enough" that we no longer need these policies?
It seems society have made very good progress towards grater equality in the last few decades. Yet when reading the news, discrimination facing women and minorities seem worse than ever. Instead of relaxing affirmative action as society is becoming increasingly equal, the situation is the other way around with a never ending stream of demands for new exceptions, extra initiatives and so on.
They won't much enjoy a world where these new rules they've created might apply to them.
That said, as a white man myself, I would argue very strongly that I am not being "persecuted".
Synonyms for this word include: oppress, abuse, victimize, ill-treat, mistreat, maltreat, tyrannize, torment, torture; martyr.
I've never felt any of the above.
As a white english-speaking immigrant I've never been accosted about my status. I've never been given shit for being an illegal immigrant. I've never been given crap for "stealing American jobs" (and for the record, I am now a US citizen, no arrests, tax-paying, picket fence).
But I see it very often to legal non-white immigrants.
So you think YOU or your race/gender has been persecuted? You (like me) have no idea what that truly means.
If you think you can't have that conversation with HR (fear of retaliation or mis-understanding etc), then I perhaps a consultation with a attorney that specializes in labor law and the workplace.
That is what I'd do if I felt it was a real problem.
It's clearly acceptable for other ethnicities and genders, many companies will even setup official programs for those groups, so clearly it's ok to discuss publicly at work. That leaves white and male as the only determining factors that make it unacceptable, which is obviously racist and/or sexist.
The tech industry is heavily male and majority Anglo (aka white), with a large Asian representation. I presume that if you are on on hacker news you work in the tech industry or work at a startup of some sort.
I would prefer to not sweep your comment under the table. Its conceivable that there might be something that as a white male you are could be 'persecuted' by someone at your place of employment. However you are going to have to provide some real evidence how you are being victimized when the numbers are so tilted in your favor. And if this is true it is most likely one person, perhaps a superior? Gather some evidence in form of emails, documentation, etc. I'm not sure what kind of persecution you are the victim of but your first steps might be to discuss things with your immediate supervisor, or if that person is the source of your persecution then talk to HR or your bosses boss.
If you feel like moving to another team or a project might help look for internal postings at the company, talk to other people in other teams to see if you would be a good fit. A lateral move within the company might make a big difference.
One thing I would NOT do is write a letter about how women are prone acting neurotic, and complain about general efforts to get more women and minority members involved at your company. I would also advocate against complaining about being a minority based on your political beliefs, that the entire company you work for makes you feel ostracized because your political beliefs don't align with what your employers. That's probably a bad idea.
61% white is quite a bit lower than the white percentage in the general US population, so it's hard to see how Google is "overwhelmingly" white.
- I have grievance X, how should I safely discuss it? - I can't possibly have grievance X!
People who are taller all have tall coworkers. They work for a boss that's a little bit taller than them. Some of them start thinking that you know this is probably just natural, men who are shorter are just biologically unsuited to be a leader. They aren't aggresive enough and they just don't have as much drive, it's probably just written in their DNA.
The short men no matter how much they perform or how brilliant they are always seem to be sidelined for promotion. Some of them make it pretty far but they're performing 50x compared to their peers, and theyre always sidelined when it comes to executive promotions. Other executives think: "this guy is brilliant but what would people think about us... We better promote the other less brilliant tall guy. We could retain investor confidence." Some of them break out and try to start a company. They can't get any funding, and no one wants to join their company. People think its a company run by a short guy, this guy is brilliant but he's not going to do well in the long term, so they end up joining start ups that have tall guys.
This network effects over a million times.
Now let's take people's perception, and assume people perceive men and women exactly the same. The catch here is that women are one standard deviation shorter than men. Just from height you'll see a discrepancy between men and women representation in leadership positions. Let's end height discrimination first. I believe this is a simpler explanation of the discrepancies in representation.
Wonder what changed today?
- Each Googler is expected to do his or her utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
+ Googlers are expected to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
- Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Security Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
+ Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Classification Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
Interesting though. Does it change the meaning subtly?
"Each Googler is expected to do their utmost" to "Googlers are expected to do their utmost"
It seems to me like it's saying "you should also be expected to be as a group" But the change is so small or subtle I could be reading into this.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
It makes the clear case that this employee went beyond opinion and created a harmful situation for himself and his colleagues.
Two caveats: I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy, though I think it's good enough to make the point. And keep in mind you'd have lots of people in that situation making the same sorts of claims that the reasoning in the memo was flawed etc etc.
BTW, before anyone jumps to conclusions, I am not a conservative.
Chilling indeed, so much for free speech and rational discussion.
I think people will respond negativity to being told that their group is more likely to be high in Neuroticism. Among other things.
It seems clear to me that his memo was heavily inspired by Jordan Peterson, and to a reader without some basic introduction to psychology the assertions he make can seem inflammatory.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
What in the world is happening right now? This is absurd beyond reason.
Fired from a tech company for publishing a company-wide memo insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do and suggesting that some subset of them haven't achieved their position based on merit.
All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.
No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.
Implying that should result in this guy getting fired is pretty ridiculous.
You just described a large portion of my Facebook feed. (Yes, I will admit my own guilt here as well).
[1]citations needed
He listed references that indicate, when viewed broadly, that men and women can exhibit different observable personality characteristics. That was not the argument of his memo. His argument was that, because of this broadly measurable difference, this leads to women being less interested in computer science (although not to the degree of similar STEM fields, oddly enough!) and therefore he shouldn't have to be subjected to bias training or be burdened with any other sort of program that suggests maybe, perhaps, potentially the social culture in tech/SV could be exacerbating this.
> All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.
Did the thought police make this guy write and publish a work memo suggesting some women are too neurotic to be software engineers?
> No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.
How about don't write a company-wide memo that insinuates some of your coworkers aren't there by merit because they don't have the biological composition to stomach the job? It's not like somebody was having a conversation with this guy in the break room, asked his opinion on diversity and ran to the press to start a witch hunt against some random Google engineer.
I mean, he titled the section of the document that talks about those effects "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech." But hey, those are sinful ideas, so he must have been a sinful man to have even entertained them in the first place.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
But was it "published" as a "company memo"? Or was it spread virally through individuals?
That's not what he actually said. In fact the memo had a chart and a paragraph or two specifically stating that taking average traits of a group of people and applying them to individuals was wrong and misleading due to large overlaps of traits between groups.
He was not implying anything about his colleagues that are already working for Google, rather he was pointing out potential biological differences in averages at the population level that possibly cause fewer women to enter tech (and hence making it difficult to get an even ratio of male/female employees).
I used to work at Google and this makes me sad. The fact that you could make fun of Larry Page in memegen was my favorite attribute of that company.
Doubtless a real lawyer will come along here and clarify, but a good shorthand is: you can be fired in virtually any state in the union for expressing political opinions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
> First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions.
> Second... California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.
> Third, the engineer complained in parts of his memo about company policies that he believes violate employment discrimination laws... It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.
I don't see it getting to litigation though. I'd be shocked if Google didn't offer him a fairly hefty severance payment in return for a release of all legal claims.
EDIT: Maybe don't listen to any of my predictions m'kay.
https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/894747912701263873
(tweet author is a NYTimes Journalist who covers Google)
Source: reviewed many regulatory actuarial filings, which are public record - mine were in Alaska but you might find the same by trawling thru https://fortress.wa.gov/oic/onlinefilingsearch/ or http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0800-rate-filings/
What I'm interested in is Google's best response, i.e. he has to go, how is that deal structured? Do you offer him a crazy good settlement and an NDA? What is the risk/reward here of a lowball offer vs legal action? Is the NDA negotiable, e.g. you can do X interviews, but not on say Fox news? What is the internal risk of people finding out he was given 6 figures to walk? I'm really fascinated with the practicalities of the action after the decision was taken.
Does anyone with any sort of HR experience know what is the best practice here?
You have a pile of resumes and you discriminate between the candidates during the selection process. This happens on a number of different criteria.
The criteria that we should not discriminate on are sex and race.
Anyone that doesn't agree with this is out of the mainstream.
The issue is that if you cannot discriminate on sex and race, and 90% (made up number) of your qualified candidates are men that are asian or white, then 90% of your workforce will be men that are asian or white.
So, then you have to make hard choices, guided by the current laws, and a desire to create a corporate culture.
If more than 50% of your users are women but only 10% (again, made up number) of your employees are women. AND you can legally choose a qualified woman over a qualified man. Then you have a good reason to hire the qualified woman over the qualified man.
TLDR; discrimination is part-and-parcel of the hiring process. discrimination on the basis of sex or race could be a legal and accepted thing for a company to do. discriminating on the basis of sex or race for bad reasons is bad.
The downside is that some qualified candidates (white man and woman of color alike) will potentially miss out on jobs once the candidate pool is grown, because you've pulled a bunch of extremely talented people into the pool who set the bar higher. That could certainly make people feel discriminated against if they don't have enough insight into the process.
If Google's pool of qualified candidates were a "proper" mix of diversity, then I don't think they would need to have the practices outlined in the manifesto.
So encouraging women to get into STEM and to facilitate pulling talent from around the globe to get them into the pool of candidates is 100% the right move to address the diversity issue.
BUT, if women don't come in the numbers you need them to and your international outreach yields mostly asians... what do you do?
Interestingly this hypothetical scenario would probably increase the false negative rate for overrepresented applicants due to random rejection, which effective lowers false negative rate for underrepresented applicants relative to the overrepresented.
Within each bucket, top 25% are qualified; hence 20 male, and 5 female.
But you only have room for 10 positions, 5 for male, 5 for female to reflect customer population
For male, you end up hiring top 5% whereas for female, it's top 25%.
What's an equitable way to address this?
Expanding the applicant pool will never reduce fairness, and it gives you more opportunities to hire the best of the best, assuming your hiring pipeline can actually select them.
Do you then raise the male salary? That will only contribute to larger male candidate pool.
To put it more bluntly: it's strange that the people saying white men are just inherently better at stuff are always white men. Oh well, I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
When there are real, strong differences, usually a diverse group of people are willing to accept it. Plenty of women will tell you that men are better on average at lifting heavy objects or reaching the top shelf.
But ask about computer programming, and it's invariably the supposed "in" group saying they're better. What a strange coincidence.
Could you provide text snippets where this was said?
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
Here's the unedited document with all the references. I'd like to see that.
All of the data he shows are what scientific research in psychology concluded. He then does some leaps to deduce why some of these differences, that are scientific facts, could create inequalities. This part asks for discussion which he didn't get at all. Of course his theorizing is not a fact, therefore he wants discussion, additional data, and openess of some of these diversity processes.
"As society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality traits becomes wider."
The above happens in Norway and Sweden where women hate STEM even more. Yet, I believe, both have schools not using any gender role bias for decades.
Unconscious bias training that Google uses is in worst case brain washing, best case does not work at all. So that critique was in place.
The weasel-word "may" rescues this from being an outright statement of fact. However, he then spends much of the rest of the document explaining how it is this way. For example:
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this)."
In other words, software engineering as it currently stands is much more suitable for men than women. We may be able to modify it to some extent to help that, but we probably can't modify it so much that women become equally good at it.
There was no where a statement saying women are of inferior abilities because scientifically, they are not. There were statements that showed women value some things differently than men. For example, lack of dress code is a big turn off for women, yet men do not care.
If you need to navigate in that kind of culture you should make work positions appealing to women. Is it possible to make CS engineering appealing? Of course it is. Stanford did it. Make it more aesthetically pleasing, less sweat-stinking geeky and women will come.
Can an engineering job be more social? Yes, in some engineering roles. In some it cannot. These roles will on average be less appealing to women. Maybe there's a lack of work processes making use of these social working activities. Maybe there aren't many that could incorporate a social component. This would mean women might not like these kinds of work environments. That is the only thing implied by the text you quoted.
No where in the document was there an implication that women are of inferior abilities. It's just an interpretation that everyone decided to use.
For another example, he says that women are more driven to have a work-life balance. He cautions about making any changes to accommodate this, because "currently those willing to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences." His suggestion here is to let women have part-time jobs.
The way I read this is: doing really good work requires extra hours and stress, which women won't do. If we try to accommodate women by no longer rewarding people who reject a work-life balance, we'll hurt the company. Women are, on average, less valuable to the company because they're less likely to work extra hours or take on extra stress.
If you're a person targeted in his manifesto, I'd suspect you'd no longer want to work alongside him. That's reason enough to fire him on the spot. He's creating a hostile work environment via coworkers and media.
For those that doubt it, I say try it at your job and see what comes of it.
Honestly, what did he think would happen?
Which I think was also his point. Thus the name of the document.
Those who develop greater abilities through study should find greater opportunities in work, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation or negative score on some diversity checklist.
However, according to this article (https://amino.com/blog/how-the-gender-gap-is-shifting-in-med...) even medicine is seeing severe gender gaps based on the specialty that is chosen.
This was their analysis:
Only 7% of all orthopedic surgeons; 15% of orthopedic surgeons beginning their practice in 2015
9% of urologists; 21% of urologists beginning their practice in 2015
13% of cardiologists; 25% of cardiologists beginning their practice in 2015
Why are there so few women working in these specialties? According to Mayo Clinic's Ian Mwangi, “There’s a stereotype that orthopedic surgeons are jocks, that the field requires brute strength.” There’s a lengthy feature article on Orthopedics Today that explores other reasons women aren’t entering orthopedics, including less exposure to the field in medical school, discouragement among advising faculty and deans, and the perception of poor work-life balance.
NPR explains that there may be gender disparity among urologists because of a "misconception of the field ... that urologists treat male problems like prostate cancer and erectile dysfunction."
Women seeking a career in cardiology face similar deterrents, including the “impairments to family planning, poor work-life balance, and perceived radiation risks,” according to this fellows' perspective published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.
In most of my research, I found that a lack of female role models was also a key reason why more women didn’t enter these specialties, echoing a trend across industries. Doximity reports that women represent only 22% of physician leaders.
Fun anecdote: My girlfriend's mom has a double PhD in both computer science and accounting. Her dad is also an electric engineer. She is also really good in math.
She passed advanced math classes in a few months of studying. Did her algebra and got into a top school for engineering. After months of me persuading switches to SWE.
Few semester after despite having top grades she drops out of CS and now does design
I've asked her many times what happened and the only reply I got was: it's not for me. Given her incredible talent I find this hard to believe.
I still catch her checking out CS course material and even her mom argues with her over this. She can get her a top position in SWE team at top company as she is a senior analyst there.
Yet she still insists she likes graphic design more. Either we are pushing women too much to get into CS or there is something inherently wrong in this field that disallows them to get in, it might be the culture, it might be the hours, i don't know..
For her, I know for a fact the issue wasn’t that she found it too difficult, she had top grades during her last semester in CS
I should also mention both the university and the company have diversity programs in place to embrace minorities.
Anyways, just my own personal experience with this issue
I am really baffled.
In part because the reply might not match what I have in mind.
I know we all want women to thrive in software and there is absolutely no reason for a skilled person like her to simply drop out, especially not after the serious effort that was put in.
Part of me is sadden by the thought that we may not have the next female equivalent of Linus Torvalds, because we somehow failed to make CS a welcoming field for minorities.
The speaker makes the case that current social conflicts at many American universities – though probably representative of the general population as well – arise because people are pursuing two, potentially incompatible goals: truth and social justice. I think it's a highly informative video.
Of course, I'd love to watch other videos contradicting or challenging this one, if anyone can provide some links.
Rule #2: if you are inclined to write dumb things, bounce it off a buddy before you press Enter/send
Rule #3; pretend you want to be on the Supreme Court. When you write an opinion, even at a young age, do not write controversial things. Keep low to the ground
It has its fair share of employees with huge blind spots about their own, well, privilege, while its HR people are just as prone to spasmodic, unreasonable reactions as those of any other company.
That old, discarded motto should rather have been "don't be stupid".
I'm personally not a fan of the memo's content but even if I were, it demonstrates incredibly poor judgement. Posting this sort of thing on internal work message boards and signing it with your name is just plain silly. If you want to have your 'rational discussion' about gender and race in tech and not get penalized for violating an agreement you signed governing your conduct, then do it on your own time and using your own equipment instead of your employer's equipment. This isn't hard. How does someone manage to get a PhD without acquiring a basic understanding of cause and effect?
I am pretty sure it is all about money, not engineering. Women are not inferior on average, but they are different. This is fact. There are jobs which are much harder for male to handle compared to female, and I am not talking about child care or something, but mostly stressful jobs requiting multitasking. Males are bad at multitasking on average (not to be confused with time management and doing many things, but sequentially).
I know a guy, a chess trainer who trains girls. He always tries to schedule matches based on trainee period cycle to let his girls do their best. That is intellectual sport, chess, fair play. This is damn biology, one cannot deny it by corporate policy.
So the fact is, like it on not, there are jobs which male handle better on average, there are jobs which women handle better on average, just because brain of both sexes is equally effective, but not equal. And this is great. I am more than happy to ask my female colleague for something she is better at (and I am not talking about delegating boring staff, I have male juniors for this), because diversity is good.
Root of the problem, as I see it, is that jobs male are better on average are also much better paid on average. It is not fair, but is another fact one cannot deny. Nobody ever discussed males being underpaid. Nobody ever discussed why we have too many women at some jobs (like cashier or janitor in my country) and how we should help men get equal and have a chance to get that jobs too. Because honestly, that jobs are too hard for male to handle and not paid well enough to fight for them. I saw a few man cashier working side-by-side with women colleagues. It was pure struggle, they were so over-stressed trying to serve 3-4 customers in parallel, I really pity them. But being software engineer with 6-digit salary is quite different story. Everybody wants it because everybody wants to be cool and rich.
this seems really crazy to me. the person playing chess is an individual. whether it's the best time for them to play or not should be up to them. Whether it's before their period or before lunch: a million things affect us, and we all have agency in deciding what we want to do, and when.
for the trainer to do this on another person's "behalf" is really distasteful and fails to be empathetic.
It is not that simple is sports. Sport is about pushing one to the limit and a bit beyond, by unquestionable trainer authority.
You can be "right" all you want, but then there is politics. It's been going on since at least the days of Socrates.
Every big org does plenty of silly stuff from perspective of rank and file. Sometimes it truly is silly, sometimes there are reasons that aren't obvious at that level.
I suppose Google made the rational decision. We'll have to see if it produces a martyr which is often the longer term outcome of these kind of situations. Doesn't seem like being a rallying point in the cultural war is a situation Google would want to be in at the moment, but who knows.
Thinking it may have been wiser to state publicly that every one is entitled to their opinion, but the official policy of the company was XYZ not open for debate. And then quietly send legal with a bag of cash and a stack of "zip your lip" forms and after the hoopla dies down a bit, an uneventful departure to "pursue other opportunities".
Seems I'm not alone at least, 4 scientists have written what I would call "agnostic" pieces on the subject which I mostly agree with[0].
The response (on twitter especially) has been nothing short of disgraceful, if ever we needed proof of an echo chamber and "sacred thoughts" it would only be a cross section of tweets on the subject.
It leaves one to wonder if these echo chambers are the cause of many of the worlds greater polarisations. (Trump vs Clinton was highly polarised -- Brexit -- Current situation in Sweden (rise of the right), Poland)
[0] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Engineering can absolutely benefit from 'people' minded individuals as much as 'thing' minded. It's just it usually takes a few tours of 'thing' focused jr. engineering before you can get into the 'people' related challenges seen when doing large scale software engineering.
If you follow contemporary conservatives like Jordan Peterson you can find a lot of the same themes of social construction vs biology or 'institutional liberalism' he finds in academia.
If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech?
My recollection from my teenage years in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s, emptying my Post Office savings account to buy one of the first batch of 10^5 BBC micros, trekking all over London searching for a Rubik's cube when they first arrived, and then later reading maths at Cambridge was that about 10% of the nerds were female.
The female nerds were just as good as the male nerds.
It's hard to say how much of that discrepancy was nature and how much was nurture.
If we want diversity of hiring across sexes for hard-core nerd jobs (as opposed to overall hiring at Google etc.) then we need to at least start early with the education of young girls.
It has cost me thousands of hours of time when I could've been reading literature, networking, cooking, going to med school, or a hundred other things.
It has been worth every fucking penny and minute and the best joy and highlights of my life have been when I learned about a new idea or created a new algorithm.
We exist. There just aren't that many of us and we don't glamour blog.
>There just aren't that many of us
That was my point really - female geeks/nerds existed back in the day before tech was cool.
It's just the natural level of interest (NOT ability) seemed to be more like 10% rather than 50%.
If my family had encouraged me and others like me earlier, the numbers of us surely would've been larger.
So like these Universities, Google must consider other factors they believe add uncommon value to the "campus" when choosing candidates, among which are ethnic and gender diversity. I believe the author is underestimating the value of this to Google's corporate culture and public image, and is probably overestimating the technical skill required to be a competent Googler.
That being said, I believe his firing will only raise the dissatisfaction of the (I'm sure many) employees that share his viewpoint or at least his right to express it.
If he's actually interested in the topic of working towards better workplace diversity, he could read a book, write some papers, put together a panel discussion, organize a conference, make an educational video...
That does not bode well for them, for a restrictive intellectual environment is anathema to the kind of intelligent people they want to hire to keep the company competitive.
2) why is it wrong to have a non-diverse company?
If you look at these two questions and just say "hah! that's not the same thing at all!", then that's why.
I've noticed a real inability (or perhaps disinclination) to speak about these issues in a straightforward way.
It's like dismissing people saying the earth is round as being sacrilegious. If you don't even entertain the question, how would you know whether the earth is flat or round?
(I'm not talking about whether he should expressed this opinion at the office or outside, and whether Google should've fired him, but about political correctness in US society. Which seems out of control to me as an Indian.)
I can see what the Google engineer wanted to point out. He's simply saying that companies get aggressive in trying to improve diversity at the expense of merit.
Does that mean there are no competent employees of non-white-male backgrounds?
If Google really thought that they disagree with this employee, just prove it. Why such a furor?
I had no help, I entered university a bit later than most as a mature student, so wasn't pushed towards it at a young age by any means, which is fairly typical for my social class, and yet affirmative action/positive discrimination affects me negatively, simply for being male.
I don't see how that's fair at all.
“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Mr. Damore said."
The guy apparently has decided to cleverly game the system and get $$$ settlement from Google.
Firing him just proved his point. He said that google created environment, where people whos opinions are not completely aligned with left echo chamber dogma, cant express their views safely. ... And he was fired for exactly this.
Right leaning and centrist media is not on googles side here. And seems that he plans on suing:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
Mind you if you read actual manifesto with pictures and sources, you will see he was very careful with words. He carefully sourced all controversial points and mentioned multiple times that this are not his personal views. But pro feminist blogs and media misrepresented this memo, like PS SJW culture usually does. This was enough for vocal minority to pressure google HR to fire him, wihtout actually reading real memo and relying solely on biased interpretations.
On court he has the upper hand.
Is that what the memo says? It seems to me to talk about statistical differences - a woman in tech is not representative of women in general, which seems to be the point of the memo.
> who is presumably judging my work more harshly
Should we assume historic discrimination means women will judge men more harshly? Black people will judge white people more harshly etc. I find the managerial bias argument to be a slippery slope.
> people who treat you like that
Aren't you making unwarranted assumptions about the memo author?
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
On the other going above and beyond for underrepresented groups will eventually grate against the majority when they ham-fistedly overcorrect.
This engineer likely got a nice severance or will get his due in court. Seriously, you don't fire someone for having a non milquetoast opinion.
I mean, I expect this heavy handedness from a Walmart but not from a Google. There are other more finessed ways to get your corp culture disseminated.
Off topic, but not having a union allows Google to fire these offensive employees, unlike School districts who must retain people who grind their own little axes.
It isn't useful to make people comfortable in a way that is easily destabilized by other information (be it opinion or scientific research). It's actually terribly fragile and it does a real disservice to people.
There are advantages to having absolute power over people. But the disadvantages (corruption and despotism, for example) are too great.
• The KKK (https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-sp...)
• Neo-Nazis (https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...), something their history page refers to as "our finest hour"
• Milo Yiannopoulos (http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-wh...)
All documentation is geared towards vimers. There are interests groups geared towards vimers. No one questions you if you are a vimer. If you are a stuck with some error as an emacser there are fewer people to turn to or discuss your favorite text editor, so some people start to suggest that emacsers are worse programmers.
The company analyzes the research and decides that vim and emacs programmers are equal. If the company decides to invest into supporting emacsers, by requiring more documentation to be written in emacs and funding emacs meetups, it is not a discrimination against vimers. The company recognized that if it won't offset some benefits vimers have they would continue to lose out on a group of talented programmers.
Free speech also covers the speech of people on the political right (& left). Free speech is a fundamental American value.
Identity Politics are not about rights but about granting privilege to the "victim" groups & in it's extreme form, to justify oppressing the rights of people who don't buy into the dogma. Not the same thing. Free speech is about freedom. The Identity Politics that we see today is about Autocracy.
That might be okay for them. They had too many applications anyways
He wrote an inflammatory memo asserting that biological differences between men and women is a major factor in their performance at tech jobs. I don't believe the crux of his argument is scientific. He didn't provide much evidence but he did raise some valid points throughout his memo.
He just made a bunch of wrong assertions. The appropriate response should've been a statement saying the company does not agree with this one guy. Google should've ended it there but perhaps it became a PR headache.
This outrage on the net and people posting on Twitter that they declined job offers from Google is overmuch.
"As a company we do not agree with X's opinion on the assessment of the work environment or our diversity practices. Any further queries on the matter should be directed at X."
As other has mentioned, it's very likely X will take legal action against Google because what they've done is very reasonably arguably illegal.
Are there any countries that could serve as an counter-example? That is, has numerical parity between men and women in tech ever been achieved without implementing targeted diversity policies?
It would be great to have an example. "Look at country X! Their society doesn't discriminate based on gender, they are not promoting gender-specific roles, and as a result representation of women in tech / stem is equal to men".
Not quite the counter-example you're looking for, though.
As far as I know in poor unequal societies women go more to STEM careers[1]. I'd think that's because you don't have the luxury to choose to study something that won't pay well after your parents made the effort to put you through university.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2...
I personally feel are humans are equal regardless of race sex origin or any other factor. If you are a human, you have every right that any other human has and there is no place for discrimination of any kind.
Nearly, this entire thread can be summed up as: "It isn't fair that ..." Does anybody else find these discussions centred fairness and social rules to be tedious?
We should strive to get beyond fair, and beyond the conventional level of moral reasoning.
A diversity programme is not fair in the moment, but is designed to right historical wrongs. By definition it is probably sub optimal in serving this purpose. But hey, most human decisions are made based on subconscious impressions anyway, regardless of which corporate programme might be in place.
For those who don't like diversity programmes, let this fact comfort you. For those that do like them, see them as a statement of intent to be inclusive of others[2] but take them with a grain of salt.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task Where a difficult puzzle becomes easier to solve when framed in the context of policing a social rule.
2. In addition to being obsessed with petty social rules and who broke them, humans are also inherently tribal, and almost unconsciously split into in-groups and out-groups. I find it impossible to believe that this kind of outgurouping might not be happening during hiring decisions.
should the guy have been fired? probably. it's political and divisive and disrupts the workplace. but he'll bounce back. it's not like he was black and selling crack on the corner.
are the ideas worth debating? yes, at least some of them. just not in a public document directed at your employer ...in a righteous, sometimes condescending tone. that's just dumb, or more charitably, a rookie mistake. you just gotta know that kind of stuff can get you fired, even if you see yourself as the hero (spoiler: ned stark, season 1).
i'm a little disappointed at the amount of panning required to find the interesting nuggets of discussion buried in this otherwise huge dung heap of political posturing (on both sides) in these comments. is it nature or nuture? my gosh, it just might be both!
what's fascinating to me is the document's lens onto a parallel rationalization and political decision calculus that leads us to a president trump. it's not the totality of it by any stretch of the imagination, but it smells of that sense of loss and frustration by the perennial political winners who (real or imagined) see their grip on the political narrative weakening. how will it turn out? stay tuned for next week's episode, when we find out who jon's parents are!
* eyebrow arched over beer mug held with an erect pinky finger
this isn't an interesting point but i thought the idea that we needed more diversity in an industry that thrives on a diversity of ideas was also not an interesting point. yet here it is being debated hotly.
people don't see what they don't see
>As a child, Damore was a chess champion, earning the FIDE Master title, putting him in the >99th percentile, according to his CV.
and
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
Should explain it well. He knew very well what result will be, thats why he put his name on memo. He knew that SJWs at google will pressure HR to fire him. Apparently he prepared the ground with NLRB complains. And if you have read full non redacted memo with sources and pictures you can see he was very careful with wording and he pointed out that controversial things are not his opinions but he provided other sources for them. There is nothing Google can use on real court (they have enough to convict him according to SJW norms in echo chamber court though) to prove that he was misogynistic.
Also he is getting a lot of support from right leaning and centrist media. I would say that way more people support him than support Google firing him.
Timing is also in his advantage. Recently google disabled youtube and gmail account of Jordan Peterson, youtube announced thy plan to isolate videos with controversial views despite not braking ToS, and accusation that google manipulates search results to favor left talking points are around for long time. There are a lot of articles, blogs and videos about those topics currently and this is quite effective smearing campaign against google that pushes users to think about alternatives to google products.
Hiring policy is something Google has always encouraged its employees to debate. Not any more, of course.
This guy didn't do things wrong, not by the standards of the old Google at least. He raised deep questions about Google's internal culture which absolutely affects their business, in a private document intended for his colleagues (who are ultimately the creators of any companies culture).
I also believe that Google has every right to fire this employee based on the memo. A company is a place you work. They pay you a salary in exchange for your time. It is not a democracy. You don't pay taxes to them for fair representation. You have no expectation of free speech when it comes to work. Clearly Google is trying to build an environment with certain values. If somebody is working there who is promoting an opposing set of values, it makes complete sense that they would remove that person. The person then has the freedom to go work for a company that they feel is promoting their values if they feel that that is something that is important for the company they work for to do.
What is the objective?
What are you aiming for? Google, governments, NGOs, eccetera have their own objectives.
What's Google purpose? Make money, lots of it, as simple as that.
Well, what do you have to do then? Really simple: optimise for profit! In regard to hiring, A/B test the mix of people that work best. Is a group of only minorities the best one? Hooray, hire only minorities and, when you can legally fire the "white males" just trash them as soon as possible. Have you found that there's a secret mixture of "white males", "black males", "white females", "esquimeses" that perform superbly? Well, keep on hiring them!
Are you the US government and need to optimise for general wealth? Perfect, then you should hire that woman, who needs to support her 4 children, and forget about that 19 year old Stanford PhD, he will make tons of money somewhere else.
Are you Google and need the general consensus of a particular group of people? Well, then just behave accordingly.
I laugh when I see "biological differences", not because it is untrue, but because it misses the real point.
What is the objective?
http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
What it comes down to is putting certain things on the agenda and removing other things.
Despite overflowing coffers, for instance, Google has been effectively silent about the problem of underinvestment in internet access. Every so often we get some "Willy Wonka" idea like Google Fiber or Loon, but it never amounts to anything -- in the case of Loon, Google destroyed a business that was already using the technology to deploy internet to people... for nothing.
When we look at what really matters to Google, note how quickly they mobilized when Trump tried his stupid "muslim ban". It is an ugly truth, but the overwhelming majority of immigrants who are coming to Google and similar companies are male. If anything were to move the needle on gender balance it would be gender balance for immigrant engineers, but you know that is off the table.
Or look at the housing and homelessness mess in the Bay Area. Google and Silicon Valley runs roughshod over 99% of the Earth, but in their local area they can't solve problems at all.
If we did not have a "winner take all society", it would not be such a big deal about who gets the opportunities at Google. Somebody else would be hiring all of the great engineers that Google overlooks. As it is, Google is hiring engineers just to keep them away from competitors such as Facebook.
It appears there is a lack of seeing both sides on this issue - which, to me, means there is something else going on.
It's a kind of philosophy. It's more than politics. I think it may be about what Truth actually is.
For example (and I'm feeling my way here, forgive me my more philosophically minded friends) that what we are people are clashing about is what is true, useful and socially agreed upon to believe in. It's like the social contract - if we somehow all accepted that behaving in society was untrue and so stopped operating in society, it would collapse. So there is an accepted truth that living in a society is a useful and helpful thing.
The same with sexual stereotypes. There may be some data here on both sides (The Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing and Surgery ones come to mind), but it's neither useful nor helpful to society, and so if someone says X is untrue then society will emphatically say it is true. You, a human living in society, will defend where and who you live with.
Politics is somewhat about the organisation of society. What most people on both sides of this debate cannot see is that they are arguing about something more fundamental.
Now - with a cheery hello to my future employers who will hopefully (I'm a data scientist) be using some advanced data software to tie up my contrarian HN posts with my actual identity, I'm not at all surprised the employee was fired. It goes against the culture that he is in. I do believe the discussion should be had, and repeated, debunked and defended like you imagine a real debate to work like.
The guys memo may have been wrong on some things, but I don't know why you should fire a guy for bringing up something.
This is mainly about virtue signaling. Google wants to let the world know that it isn't sexist, so it gets this guy to be the scapegoat.
Allow me to back up a little bit. First off some context: a lot of people don't realize it but we are a lot closer to a post-scarcity world than the world would have you think. Check out this chart which shows GDP per capita since the 1950's. The productivity gains since the 1950's have been absolutely incredible, and the quality of life back then was pretty good. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA
Have you ever noticed there's never any dialogue about encouraging men to be stay at home dads, or reducing the overall household number of hours worked per week? Never. The dialogue is always about the "wage gap" and "women have value too" and "rape culture" and "microaggressions". Men who are stay at home dads still get shamed just as much as they did during the 1950's. This is how you know there's something wrong - there is never any serious dialogue about actual equality. Income has in no way, shape, or form, kept up the with the GDP per capita shown in the chart above. There's never any explorations of policies that would actually increase equality, like restricting the number of "investment properties" a man or woman can own, behavior which is clearly parasitic. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_... It's not in corporate interests to have people have actual equality. Increasing the labor pool without discussions of actual equality makes it so that people can be kept in debt, wages go down and the nexus of power moves away from the family and towards the corporation, which is what is happening.
"Women have value and should be working full time too". The implication here is that if you are not working for money you have no value. Despite common belief, in fact it IS possible to generate value outside of a money context. Many of the world's greatest achievements have occurred outside a money context, eg. the discovery of calculus, wikipedia, linux, countless famous works of art, literature, and philosophy. By saying that you only have value if you earn money is throwing many of the world's most accomplished people under a bus. The reason why "money is the only form of value" is such a horrible mentality is that it leads to people like Mozart dying in poverty and being thrown into a ditch, which actually happened.
Check out charts of combined household numbers of hours worked, you'll see it's going way UP not down, despite the GDP per capita chart shown above. There is clearly something dark in that picture. http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/chart17.pdf I don't think these are idle complaints - feminism in its current form is an ideology that's on a direct collision course with the whole 'robots are about to take all the jobs' reality, which I think is going to come a lot sooner than we realize, and when these two phenoma collide, what's going to happen is that it's not going to be equality (sorry folks) it's going to be Brave New World, an immensely stratified society.
I work in one of Alphabet's departments where everything you do is constantly monitored. Your teammates conduct detailed psychometric analyses of you, beyond the simple perf of yesteryear. It's beyond cult-like. It's Brave New World.
poly + molly + endless disposable entertainment ... it's hard to come to grips with, and incredibly scary.
My most troubling experience regarding Brave New World concerns a short community review of Brave New World on GoodReads I read not long time ago. (The only review in Finnish.) It consistently kept calling it "utopia" and discussed only things like how the savages lived in terrible conditions and the characters and "Shakespeare quotes" were "annoying". Not a word about how book is meant to be a dystopia, or if skipping the fancy words, about a society that is a pretty bad place to live. And I was left wondering if the writer of that review just did not know about the word "dystopia", or simply could not spot anything troubling with the picture Huxley painted.
But I understand why they had to fire him for PR reasons. It would be untenable to keep him. They will probably just write off any compensation they will have to pay him as the result of upcoming lawsuit.
What did he think would happen?
Bonus: Why didn't he just post this to Reddit?
This is insane. The speed at which this ideology has taken over SV is breathtaking, and a massive disincentive for anyone not already so inclined to work there.
These are not scientifically verifiable facts. Actually, I take that back. His broad claims can be scientifically demonstrated as false.
I encourage you to pause and read this:
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
If that doesn't explain things, then I don't know what will. I hope it provides better context - whether we agree or not.
The manifesto's claims are very much in the scientific mainstream. Evidence has only piled on since the Pinker-Spelke debate. You have very little to hang your hat on in this argument.
[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...
Did you read the memo? I don't think you did. Let me help you distinguish fact from speculation. Quote from the memo:
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
This is science supported by citations. Cool.
"These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics"
This is pure speculation without any supporting evidence. The document is littered with these unsupported conclusions that he arrives at which are several steps away from the actual science. I'd be happy to point them out at length.
It's extremely deceptive of you to say that he was fired for stating facts, while the minority of the points in his doc had any supporting facts whatsoever.
In fact, reports indicate that was fired for violating the Google code of conduct: http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/08/google-fires-james-damore.... If you'd like to present the argument for a) why he didn't violate the code of conduct or b) that's not why he was fired, by all means proceed. I'd be interested to see your evidence for that.
With that being said, it is totally understandable why Google fired the employee, regardless of whether his voiced opinions were out of line or not. The manifesto was not well perceived by the media and not firing the employee would have resulted in bad PR. By firing the employee Google made a very rational decision.
I think google will reconsider their hiring preferences after this.
as a liberal i find that it is important to not shy away from controversy: women and men are biologically different. i am sorry, but they are. you dont need to reject this fact in order to treat women with respect and equality.
But I'll leave that to the side - there's no reason to think that many of the differences he describes aren't socially constructed. Maybe the way we raise women in America/the West turns them off to pursuing tech careers.
Until we can resolve this, it's ridiculous to use psychology studies to ascertain biology - and even afterwards, our goal should be ensuring access to well-paying careers, not remaining shackled to our biology.
As an example, we have trained runners to break previously 'impossible' race times through training, technology and science - we realize that what we thought was impossible was simply not compatible with the system we previously had in place.
Of course men and women are different, duh. The problem isn't that premise. The problem is the arguments people make from it.
You get the feeling that there are these legions of people that assume that liberals are in favor of diversity programs because liberals believe men and women are the same. And then these legions of people point to a study that shows men and women aren't the same, and then they feel, "A-ha! Take that, liberals!" It's completely mystifying to me.
We're not in favor of diversity programs because of a belief that men and women are the same. We're in favor of diversity programs because we know that people will use these differences as excuses to discriminate against women. This is not hard to understand!
as a liberal i find that it is important to not shy away
from controversy: women and men are biologically different.
i am sorry, but they are.
Unfortunately, your pre-emptive apology for recognizing the obvious won't save you from the mob - those whose minds are so rotted and aloof they insist everyone indulge their fantasy because they can't cope with reality. Feelings, safe spaces, groupthink, and all that.
I'm not sure you read the memo? The author never provided evidence for this claim - it's pure speculation. The only points he's able to support with science are the statements that there are biological differences between men and women. Quote:
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value.
Next, he says:
"These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics"
No citation, no nothing here - just pure guessing on his part. If you're going to make an assertion like this, you need evidence - just, "it makes sense to me!" isn't proving anything. I find it surprising and disappointing that so many fail to read this memo critically.
> men and women are not the same. The author is completely correct?
No one is saying men and women are the same. Similarly, no one is providing evidence to back up your and the author's assertions.
My personal view about diversity and gender identity is simple: you do what you are good at and what you enjoy. The moment doing X or Y becomes a compulsion for a gender rather than a choice, you have a problem.
If you're a man and you enjoy crocheting and want to be a nurse, you go do that. If you're a woman and you like coding, you do that.
If you're a man and you're stronger than your spouse, you move the couch. If not, the woman moves the couch. My wife is taller than I am. I ask her to get things that I can't reach. I don't puff up and get all masculinist about it - it's just damn common sense.
"Do what you're good at. Do what you enjoy". Simple as that.
Part of the current concern is that it has become common to speak on just one side in tech culture. It is seen in some circles as morally superior to be on the side of social justice no matter what the context is (or what other justices are at play).
You have to do diversity actions before age 10 if you want to do it right.
(Yes, this is anecdotal, yet fairly typical, I guess)
In this experiment, we monitored how we could manipulate opinions and elicit reactions by posting content on different mediums.
Unfortunately, due to the classified nature of this study, we can't really reveal more to you right now.
Also, we made a fuck tonne of money! You helped fund the whole thing, and then some!
No, you can't have the data. Really now, I'm surprised you even asked.
- The Man in the Shadows
https://www.wesearchr.com/bounties/james-damore-official-fun...
HN Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14954463#
https://www.wesearchr.com/bounties/daily-stormer-vs-splc-leg...
It would, of course, be a good idea to do some background research into biology, sociology, cross-industry comparators and the history of software development. And drum up some expert witnesses. I'm sure you'll be fine.
affect* is a verb, effect is a noun
Imagine if an employee at a catholic owned business started an internal conversation on the benefits of abortions.
I have a feeling that people jumped into conclusions before reading it or understanding author's POV. I'm frankly surprised by Google's reaction. They should have debated this internally instead of firing an employee because h/she expressed their opinion. Even if the author was wrong, they could've countered his/her points by bringing proofs/scientific studies.
Oh yeah, when does that go to verdict? Guessing it's still pending as this is all the article had.
Google is currently under investigation for pay disparity and are obliged to review everything and ensure there is no sexism at play. If you don't like this surely you should challenge the laws that demand this of Google.
Sending a memo on diversity or any political issue is an aggressive political action in the workplace that can only have one outcome. The context for debates and action about merit and diversity is in the legal democratic space not the office.
This individual is not a victim of free speech but of indiscretion.
It's a journey.
I don't think the big companies got big hiring similar people as the founders. But getting diverse roles. Although once they got big,the middle management night so what you say.
https://archive.is/z6xxP#selection-391.260-391.683
I for one take their words over Yonatan Zunger in this - as this is after all, their field of expertise. Zunger may be great in many things, but behavioural science, evolutionary psychology and psychology in general are i'm fairly certain not fields where he holds any achievements.
I heard from a indirect source that it blew up partially because others agreed with the sentiment. Just wondering if there could be confirmation on that.
There are lots of conservatives at Google (and other SV tech companies) who agree with the author, and most of them aren't going to lose their jobs because they have the common sense not to get themselves fired for no reason.
Why is this a violation? Not trying to be argumentative, actually just curious. Seems like putting personal thoughts on company Google Docs would be a questionable decision for privacy concerns, but not a violation.
For whatever reason, he decided to go in deep and lay out his entire worldview on biology and gender traits, ensuring as much disagreement and conflict as possible. Whether this means he intended to cause problems or he just didn't understand how to complain constructively is a big question...
Is it possible that humans have reached their limits of current collective intellectual capacity?
The outcome was: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/1vuho8/the_docu...
But the biggest confusion I think is how conservatives react to this situation for me. I use to be an avid fan of Buckley and use to read the National Review regularly as a teenager (yes I'm weird). So when I see conservatives lash out at Google over their right to fire anyone at will or on the basis that the employee is disrupting the environment at work (be it rightful or not from the point of view of fairness) I see hypocrisy of the most base kind. Conservatism in the United States values the freedom of companies, employees, and private citizens to associate and disassociate on their own. If Google wants to hire Mutualists like myself and not hire a GOP or Democrat then they should be on the principles of American Conservatism have their choice respected and not challenged in court or in some dishonest manner which violates the property rights of others. To attempt to walk back or moderate the position of free association on the basis that might hurt some people who share conservative values is to undermine the very basis of conservatism in my opinion. Basically, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Either all businesses and private citizens have the freedom of association (and disassociation) or they do not have that right. It stinks but consistency in political ideologies is an important metric to understanding whether or not an ideology can sustain itself. If American Conservatism cannot sustain itself under such consistency then the ideology is flawed and should be reformed such that it can give a conditional freedom of association on a consistent basis both in political theory and in terms of law (i.e. accepting that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent additions to the law are warranted and consistent with said ideological grounds). Mind you, I'm not a conservative at all but I'm speaking from my beliefs that I held many years ago and how I interpreted American Conservatism. But I recall Buckley holding a similar view as the one I described. And it would take a mighty strong argument for me to be convinced that the contrary is consistent with American Conservatism and conservatism as a whole.
Let's put it straight. There are obvious, hardwired evolutionary specialization among sexes of all species. Sexes are evolutionary innovation to achieve better survival rates (achieved by the process of evolurionary trial and error and natural selection) not some stupid religious nonsense. So, there is no equality in principle, by definition, by design. The notion of equal rights is completely different story, it is social realm - few levels up from underlying biology.
There is not a single doubt that biology dominates and partially determines psychology (the nature part of the Nature and Nurture whole). Biology also dominates sociology - most of human traditions and social norms are deeply grounded in biological differences and specialization - there is nothing to talk about. Animal behavioral patterns, which could be called "traditions of species" are, obviously, determined by biology and environmental factors.
At least few stereotypes produced by various human cultures (products of social formations, partially determined by biology) are reflections to various extend of these real, existing, "material" fundamental differences captured in traditions. Dismissal of all the stereotypes as a category is plain stupidity.
Hipsters and snowflakes who are trying to gain attention by "challenging" objective reality with their naive memes (the ridiculous attempts to redefine what sexes are and what it is for with "third sex" nonsense is an obvious example) at very least raise some brows.
Notice that I am not in the least "conservative", I am principal and scientific. There are evolutional and biological reasons why this or that aspect of sex differences emerged and what is for. Whatever is valid for all species applies to humans too, no matter what liberal arts graduates would say about man's superiority.
Nature forms and dominates, Nurture varies and adapts. There is not a single doubt that equal rights must be given to both sexes (there are only two of them) and equal rights must be protected.
This is where the notion of equality ends. Equality of sexes is a hipster's utter nonsense, not because conservatives think so, or some popular religious text says so, but for straightforward scientific reasons, anatomical and neurobiological. This is so-called objective reality, and opinions and memes of current snowflakes are simply non-applicable.
If it "dominates" it's inherent it (at least) "partially determines", reducing your assertion to "There is not a single doubt biology dominates psychology," which is basically untenable, scientifically.
> I am principal and scientific.
No. No you're not, unless you actually are a principal, but then it has no bearing the matter at hand. You approach is also not very scientific.
> There are evolutional and biological reasons why this or that aspect of sex differences emerged and what is for. Whatever is valid for all species applies to humans too, no matter what liberal arts graduates would say about man's superiority.
Let's cut your unsound and poorly constructed argument short here: I cede this proposition. That means, for the sake of argument, I will assume it as completely sound and correct.
Now,
explain to me, in detail, how this (now assumed true) inequality of the sexes leads to one of them being unable to code (or assume various complex technical tasks) as well as the other, purely from biological differences.
I'll save you the trouble. You can't, because if you could, you wouldn't be wildly speculating about it online. You'd be writing scientific papers about it.
Your larger argument boils down to:
-men and women are biologically different,
-there are difference between men and women
-therefore these difference must be biological
It's a fallacy. Scientifically rigorous arguments are not build around fallacies.
P.S. principled and scientific minds usually shy away from using laden and denigrating terms in their arguments.
Makes the very clever comparison to medicine and other fields that used to be 100% male.
"Nobody has any real policy disagreements. Everyone can just agree that men and women are equal, that they both have the same rights, that nobody should face harassment or discrimination. We can relax the Permanent State Of Emergency around too few women in tech, and admit that women have the right to go into whatever field they want, and that if they want to go off and be 80% of veterinarians and 74% of forensic scientists, those careers seem good too. We can appreciate the contributions of existing women in tech, make sure the door is open for any new ones who want to join, and start treating each other as human beings again."
I'm at #SHA2017 hacker camp and just before the event I put together a website: https://hck2fck.com
(didn't read Google story, just saying political correctness works - I talk to attractive women everywhere but workplace)
We witch hunt people who play at Gor in their spare time.
We hound CEOs who disagree with the popular stance on gay marriage.
We fire people who clumsily try to open a dialogue internally to a company.
The tech industry is indeed fucked, but perhaps not for the reasons that are currently popular.
Fuck that noise. Larry Garfield was asked to step down because his Gorean activities leaked into Drupal events and that made others feel unwelcome.
> The actions that led me to ask Larry to resign involve a woman who attended Drupal community events with Larry, and was "allowed" to contribute by him.
Also: check who is posting here. If you think I have any axe to grind relating to Drupal then you missed a few things last year. Like http://drupal.sh/karoly-negyesi-chx-ousted-from-drupal-commu... this. If there is anybody left who can take a neutral stand now, it's me. I have neither to gain nor to lose from siding with either party. And, I sided with Larry up until the latest statements clarified things.
This doesn't mean others were not doxxing Larry -- but that was not the reason behind asking him to step down.
And forgive me, I don't care who you are; I care that someone was railroaded for a consensual relationship held primarily outside the community. Gor is unpopular; it hasn't gained the acceptance homosexual relationships have, and this outrage tainted everything.
Maybe you believe in God? Like, a Christian? That certainly will make a lot of folks feel unwelcome. But maybe you're an atheist instead? Ha, did you think you'd get out that easy? Of course you'll make somebody feel unwelcome. [1]
OK, this is all political stuff. Let's get so something nobody objects to. How about cheese? Do you like cheese? Do you, you filthy sexist[2]?!
If you try hard enough, you can see "feel unwelcome" in literally anything, and simple google search proves it's not even a bit of exaggeration.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/us/richard-dawkins-speech...
[2] https://www.peta.org/living/food/why-cheese-is-the-most-sexi...
" This has been a very difficult time. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week. First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.” The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.” At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics—we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions. The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree—while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same. I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group—including how we create a more inclusive environment for all. "
Yet he fired the guy.
Ultimately he had to pick a side: freedom of speech or women who got upset by a bunch of links to scientific studies with a pile of social and cultural commentary on top. He picked the latter.
Advancing stereotypes aside, given that he knew that this was the case, he went ahead and published the article anyway rather than conduct private conversations on the topic or explore the discussion in other constructive ways.
Interestingly, he may have gotten a lot further in advancing constructive discourse by leaving it an open survey and reporting his findings on systemic bias. Rather than base his conclusions on his own naive assumptions, he could have conducted research and collect data from the internal Google employees and then reported his findings as objectively as possible.
i think there is some kind of effect where people who are really good at solving complicated puzzles that are right in front of their faces are not so good at solving logical issues that are less tangible or more long term. thats one of my theories, because a lot of people i know that arent dumb at all seem to totally buy into the gender politics thing, even though their beliefs totally fly in the face of logic. maybe its me who is wrong, and there is some subtle aspect of this whole thing that i am not grasping. either way, we are all in this together. its important to be patient with each other and to never allow ourselves to descend into savagery and hatred. and if you do find yourself behaving like that, its ok. we all make mistakes, dust yourself off and try again. i know i have.
"What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed."
You don't get to avoid discussion[4] about those subtitled points by retreating to some kind of invented safe space here. Out with it. Is he right?
[1] He is.
[2] He has.
[3] It is.
[4] Yeah, I'm just asserting without evidence too. But only to avoid the pointless flames that result.
Well... https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6sa9f6/google_f...
EDIT: Actually, it's unfair to say "the internet at large." HN, reddit, and twitter all seem to be taking the news in unique ways.
Person A thinks X.
Person B who belongs a group the blue tribe hates also thinks X.
Therefore person A is a bad person because they agree with person B about X.
We have failed to prove that the group person B belongs to is actually bad and not just an exercise in signaling and we are also trying to smear person A by saying they agree with some other completely unrelated person who may belong to a distasteful group. Additionally X can still be correct and both people can be distasteful, but it wont change the fact that X is correct.
Sorry if I am not being clear, it's been a long day.
> Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.
> Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role.
> Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
> Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap.
> males are biologically disposable
> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression.
> political correctness, which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause
Copy/paste any of those into an r/MensRights thread and you'll fit right in.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
Basically, you might think about one thing as 'moral fashion' and another as 'social good', but you are really comparing two fashions and pretending to be objective.
To make a concrete example out of the situation in front of us: if there is proof that diverse companies perform better (https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter) then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.
So to say that he is 'correct' means to turn your back on empirical argument, and to base things in identity politics.
In answer to the rest of your comment, it's anybody's guess and nobody agrees why. Maybe the stat is wrong, maybe the sexism is just that rampant, maybe the women-only candidate pool is inadequate (small), maybe there is a performance difference, etc.
Absolutely not true. There are many other possible reasons for such a correlation. A few examples:
It's possible better-performing companies could attract more non-white applicants.
Or, that better-performing companies could be have extra resources, which they then spend on diversity initiatives, where poor-performing companies are desperate to survive.
Or the independent variable: Being in the Valley makes companies perform better, and also makes them want to hire more non-whites, but these are both independent outcomes simply caused by being in the Valley. In this scenario, it's even possible that diversity harms performance, but the effect is more than compensated for by being in the Valley.
Or, it could be random chance; outcomes are dominated by a few high-performing companies, which just happen to be genetically diverse.
Or any of many other possible connections and confounders. This is really basic stuff.
I feel like the suspicious thing is that people didn't react in this way.
Why was this not a glaring problem that his supporters rushed in to answer?
If I told you I had an elegant model for some chemical reactions and could predict, say, the thermal energy released in an experiment, you might look at the model and think it's great.
If it doesn't match what is measured in the real world, then it's possible the model is correct: could be an environmental factor or a problem with the apparatus etc. But I need to answer questions around the gap between prediction and reality, rather than to rely on my perceptions of the elegance of the model.
That's where I think this veers off into identity politics.
But my point is that even if this person were qualified to make such assertions, his qualifications can be easily made invisible through editorialization.
If I've learned anything since November 2016, it's that messaging will frequently overpower facts.
a STEM degree
A STEM PhD from Harvard. FTFY. And comparing James Damore to Ben Carson is, frankly, absurd. James Damore is not a politician, he's a scientist. He's not some yahoo in a comment thread, arguing with academics and professionals in their field from his parent's basement.
I will also get a PhD from Harvard, and from a more selective program than this person. Yet I recognize the limits of my knowledge.
Studying microbes [1] does not give you the standing to discuss sociology. If your very well-qualified dentist wanted to do a code review of your last commit, you might think twice before accepting his advice - namely, you would ask what special knowledge he has, besides being a generally smart individual.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Damore%20JA%5BAuth...
It is ironic that defenders who claim to want a meritocracy are also defending the author because of where he went to school.
Nobel prize winning scientists have damaged their reputations by opining on matters they know little about (James Watson on genetics, and many others )
Some infamous examples:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18638_4-nobel-prize-winners-w...
You mean to say that James Watson, the Nobel prize winning geneticist knows little about genetics?
*The point is not to belittle his accomplishment (which would be silly) but to point out that he veered into a field that he was mostly unqualified to offer an informed opinion on, never mind a very controversial one.
And by the way, another fun fact:
As far as I can can tell, he doesn't have a PhD. He didn't publish any papers while he was at Harvard. You don't get through a modern elite PhD program without making any contribution to the literature. And his thesis is not showing up in any library search I do. He seems to have dropped out very early.
No shame in that, of course. But since you and many others are saying he has credibility on a matter unrelated to the topic of his PhD precisely because he has a PhD: he, er, may not have a PhD.
By the way, the more cited of his two papers reads like it was written by someone very new to research, who had his editor open in one window and the Wikipedia page for "List of Logical Fallacies" open in another.
Plenty of bigots have degrees. There are nazis and muslim fundamentalists with degrees. Extremist ideology tends to override unwelcome facts.
The memo speaks for itself.
Now, it's important to correct the record if he didn't complete the PhD. But he did publish papers (at Princeton and MIT).
You are correct that he wrote two papers.
You now state that he "didn't suggest he had one", when in fact he did: he said "PhD, Systems Biology" on his linkedin[2] profile.
This is shameful behavior on your part, but understandable because your defense of his joke of a memo depends on his authority to speak about the subject as a PhD in Biology, which he doesn't have.
Maybe it's time for you to go back to all the places where you stated he has a PhD and post retractions.
[1] https://twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/894939560391565317
[2] https://twitter.com/NuritBaytch/status/895010602380341248
I did write an essay but this is the TLDR.
Google has made a giant political mistake. Everybody saw this coming. Straight into the fire, Google must have known that even as they did it.
If Google's real aim was non-talent-bias, we already know the solution: blind hiring.
Let's use a little metacognition here. People on HN are highly likely to be in the Bubble (same way as average academic must be left of center). They belong to the Valley and will rationalize these kinds of events all day long, it's worthy of "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!". Rightists are penalized in SV. That's been true for a while, that is the bottom line. This forum itself used to contain more rightists.
I don't know the future for Google or SV but the upshot is that if I found a company it will explicitly not hire leftists. I will have internal cohesion in my mini one party state. Do I want "diversity of ideas/perspectives". Yes, but the atmosphere is already poisoned by events like this and the firing of Brendan Eich. Plainly nobody has the right answers so I'd opt for political uniformity to keep infighting at bay.
More broadly I suspect Affirmative Action is on the ropes which means that SV is way behind the curve.
tldr;tldr; Somebody as brilliant as Peter Thiel would be fired today, or more likely: never hired. That is where we are at.
I would have political uniformity which would prevent Red vs Blue infighting.
#Warning# This isn't an attempt at flamebait, it's something like a hypothesis.
I would also likely be able to hire from a undervalued portion of Silicon Valley, I suspect I'd be able to get talented Eastern European, Asian and white men at discount rates. They wouldn't have to deal with PC from HR and other firms may be less willing to hire them.
It is not unusual for a sector of the economy to have a political slant. Everybody knows health/care is mostly leftist, military/intelligence is mostly rightist. These are slight tilts but the net affect has an enormous sway over sector thinking/dogma. I suspect SV will split along such lines (right companies, left companies).
There is a healthy chance this goes very wrong for Google, I see that Breitbart has collected some engineers and is releasing interviews with them. Some of the allegations made by the interviewees are very serious if they are true, potentially laying the groundwork for Google to get attacked by the White House. e.g. search engine result manipulation against right wingers, which would have include/included Trump so...
If I were Page or Schmidt right now I'd have a pit in my stomach.
So this is happening and I find that very fighting.
Or never apply to work for Google in the first place. There are fashions in morality just as there are in clothing ( http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html ) , and who can predict now what ideas may become crimethink to Google's HR department in future?
If you're a talented, in-demand programmer, why work for a company that might arbirarily sack you based on your opinions? This doesn't mean Google will fail -- they have sewn up the web advertising market tight enough that they could weather a decade of bad decision-making.
I'll leave the last words to PG:
> Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.
and:
> I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
I'll just copy paste the relevant portion here, to save most people a click:
Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.
* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.
* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.
* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.
At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.
Forgive me if I'm conflating two groups, but isn't it the same people saying Google is incapable of doing such a thing whom are also defending the practice of affirmative action at universities?
I don't understand how affirmative action is deemed acceptable and even encouraged and at universities to improve diversity numbers, but somehow it's inconceivable that a company like Google could lower the bar to hire employees whom have already had the bar lowered for them since the day they were accepted into college?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the author wrote, "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." In other words, not that under qualified candidates are given an offer if they're diverse but rather than qualified non-diverse candidates are passed on. This is not a pedantic clarification. I think that for many people the phrase "lowering the bar" overrode the second part about decreasing false negatives. To be fair "lowering the bar" is a very politically loaded term that typically implies that under qualified applicants are (in some people's views) unfairly accepted. The author was sloppy for this poor choice of words, and it likely cost him his job.
Many people would agree that some hiring practices make non-diverse candidates more likely to be rejected when they're qualified, but not that they make diverse candidates more likely to be accepted when unqualified (at least not to a significant degree). In fact, I am one of them. The way my company handles phone screens[1] largely fits this categorization. I think it's an acceptable way of bringing in people of backgrounds we don't often, and that it does not have a particularly large chance of causing under qualified applicants to be accepted. I do think it's fair to criticize the system as discriminating against the non-diverse candidates who don't get extra chances at the phone screen, and that stating as such is not saying that diverse candidate's had the bar lowered for them. But on the whole I think it's justified.
Edit: Here's the link to the comment in which I describe my company's phone-screen policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953762
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14954803 and marked it off-topic.
I'm not sure that's the right move in any other respect, it certainly doesn't advance the conversation.
Being fired for writing such a memo is very disappointing. If I were an engineer at Google I would probably be looking for somewhere else to go.
The problem with diversity programs is that you only need them if you don't treat people equal to begin with. And then, thanks to the diversity program, you still don't treat them as equals, but give an advantage to the group you consider to be weaker.
In the end, it's not about treating people as equals, as it should be, but about political correctness and conformity.
Google's actions in this matter (recrimination against an employee over an internal discussion that leaked), which may be a violation of labor relations,
and
AirBNB's recent actions in doxxing and banning users, and canceling their reservations over their political affiliation, which may be a violation of housing discrimination laws,
as linked.
Companies are trying various ways to enforce their chosen behavioral norms upon users/employees.
Is this par for the course over the last 70 years and we are just noticing it now? Or is it something new?
It should start with the rise of the feminine in our societal structures to balance the masculine, so that as a society we would balance and harmonize those two archetypes, not cast them as the extremes that they're today. In other words, little girls should not be marketed pink princess dresses while boys get marketed Bob The Builder outfits and tool belts. Gender identity and association starts at an early age and the society we live in promotes the masculine archetype to boys and the feminine archetype to girls. It's wrong. We should be promoting the same balanced masculine/feminine type to both girls and boys. Only then will we see an elimination of gender bias.
The same justification they used to fire their employee for having a different opinion can be also used to censor search results.
You're a fucking coder, not the founder. Don't like your gig? Go somewhere else. Grow a pair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
If you are a federal employee you are covered by a different law than everyone else, and that does include political affiliation.
If you google for nlra and lexology, you can see a number of articles about the scope.
Personally I think americans should choose to defend freedom of speech, even if they aren't legally required to.
Based on the reasoning of Google's excutives, I don't see why they would not do 1 or 2.
2. No.
Oh, were you serious?
Yeah there is a lot you really can't say publicly around here but is that so different than anywhere else? Overall the Bay is awesome and in general I am a flaming liberal but there are times when the right wing bogeyman of authoritarian PC orthodoxy is real and this is one of those times IMO. But it isn't like anywhere else is any better. Look at what the NFL is doing to Colin Kaepernick for desecrating the great temples of right wing "Murca" culture - any football stadium. The Bay does not have a monopoly on this so I wouldn't judge the area too harshly for this one disgusting moment of mob stupidity (IMO).
Would you please not post like this? It ruins HN threads in more ways than one.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14955239 and marked it off-topic.
Edit: I had hoped the sarcasm was obvious
- stirring up the discussion harms the company whatever the outcome
- not firing him would harm the company more due to public opinion on the subject
Also, if I were the author, I'd probably have shorted GOOG before publishing the document. For entirely practical and obvious reasons...
Google responds to the article by being knee jerk intolerant to the ideology...
Guess he was kinda right?
What I did when I read it was substitute "woman" for "black", rolled back the clock to Jim Crow south, and read it again.
That might be an instructive exercise for anyone who hasn't actually experienced discrimination, or rather, primarily lives in the dominant side of any culture.
I would rather see this stuff out in the open, rather than hidden behind the glares and glances of colleagues. His firing is unfortunate, but totally understandable. This dialog could have ocured in a much better format.
In the famous words of Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other..."
The Racist Tree
By Alexander Blechman
Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree.
"Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl.
"I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a nigger.
"I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name.
It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree. The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field.
"Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly.
"Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child.
The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children.
And so, social progress was made.
Another part: this is a fairly left leaning site ( which I love! It is hard to find well argued leftist talking points as a libertarian ), and I'm not leftist. I get positive points in sum, which means that the majority of people are agreeing with me ( or maybe just see that I'm not trolling...). And this is not 4chan or not even reddit.
Sadly Donald Trump won the election. This strategy doesn't work if a very big chunk of the society are 'nazis'. You have to talk to them.
If you want people to care about what you think and have to say, you need to spend time and effort cultivating a positive reputation. Otherwise you just seem like an unhinged idiot.
edit: because people seem to be misunderstanding my point or simply downvoting me because I am describing a reality which makes them uncomfortable I will simply reference Douglas Crockford and the Nodevember debacle.
If what occurred to Crockford occurred to some no name software engineer do you believe there would have been the outpouring of support and articles defending his character? No the person would have likely been fired for no good reason and had their name splashed across a bunch of tech blogs as a sexist.
That's a problem. I read the whole thing and was annoyed that TechDirt cut the charts and the references.
I'm honestly struggling to understand your perspective. Would you prefer a world where nobody says anything "controversial", everyone just rolls with the status quo, and nothing ever changes? Why is espousing "controversial ideals" offensive to you? I treat ideas that clash with my own internal logical understanding of the world as challenges that can only improve my understanding of the world. If I run these "controversial ideas" through my logic and reasoning faculties, there's really only two possible outcomes:
- I reject the idea and now have arguments against them that I can share with others
- I end up embracing the idea because I realize that my implicit rejection of it lacked a sturdy logical foundation
Either way, I win—I get a better understanding of the world I live in.
Why would you choose to shield yourself from improving yourself mentally?
I do encourage people to read it and make their own opinion, there are so many other opinions on this now, the only way to get back to reality is to read it for yourself.
Where you've made some poor logical leaps are: there is zero evidence that he shouted out his obviously controversial beliefs to the world. As far as I can tell this memo did not go to the whole world by his doing. It did not go to the entire Google staff by his doing. In fact, for all we know he was asked for his well thought out opinion on Googles diversity training and gave it to the appropriate people who did not respect the fact that he was giving his opinion to a small group and began forwarding it on. You might say I have no proof of this, and you'd be right. But you have no proof that he blasted this to the whole world.
Additionally, he was a number of things in the memo but he was not an unhinged idiot. It reads like someone who was asked for his opinion on the training that was going on and whether there was value in making it mandatory.
I have been asked in professional settings for my opinion on controversial matters. One time I was put into a very troubling position because of my opinion and many people were quite upset. It was uncomfortable for us all. I no longer give my opinion on controversial topics. I keep quiet and do my work and if I disagree with a policy or procedure I find new employment.
I am sure the author of this memo has learned his lesson now. He will shut up. I hope that the world is a better place without his opinion.
These are all hypothetical questions of course. But something to think about.
Edit: because my phone likes four letter words that sound like shut.
Do you think this person that has been fired has gained anything? Do you think anything will change because of this memo?
I don't.
I do agree with you, if in fact that was the authors intent. The issue you bring up is a good one though. Did he believe that he would throw away his influence and ruin his life by sharing this opinion? That's very tough to prove one way or the other. It entirely depends on the circumstances surrounding why he wrote the memo. If he did so entirely on his own without being asked or provoked, then you are right. If he was asked to write the memo by a superior or someone in perceived authority, you may be partially correct. If he was led to believe his opinion would be valued and his reputation kept and protected, then you are quite wrong. Unfortunately, I don't believe we will ever know the truth. So this interesting academic exercise will never really come to a conclusion.
Now, on the other hand. A thorough reading of the source would indicate that he should know that essentially saying that Google is biased against privileged individuals (say, white, male software engineers) is a pretty hard position to defend and he was foolish for attempting the argument. But hindsight is 20/20.
2. He earned his PhD in Biology at Harvard University.
What, in your opinion, should James Damore have additionally done to ensure that his thesis would be taken seriously?
(I work for Google and have a PhD in Biology from Cambridge University)
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that he did cite sources, but that Gizmodo decided to remove them. In addition they also re-badged this internal email as a "manifesto" and presented it as a war-cry rather than a basis for discussion. Pretty dishonest changes really.
These dishonest changes certainly helped further this shitstorm. Knowing Gizmodo (and their sister-website Jezebel which has no issues with domestic violence against men), I'm just going to assume this was the intended consequence.
Wikipedia is not a primary source.
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
An evolutionary psychology professor said:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history. I know a little about sex differences research. On the topic of evolution and human sexuality, I’ve taught for 28 years, written 4 books and over 100 academic publications, given 190 talks, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and mentored 11 Ph.D. students. Whoever the memo’s author is, he has obviously read a fair amount about these topics. Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course. It is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences. (Blank slate gender feminism is advocacy rather than science: no gender feminist I’ve met has ever been able to give a coherent answer to the question ‘What empirical findings would convince you that psychological sex differences evolved?’)
The author of the Google memo did cite primary sources such as:
https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...