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?
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.
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.
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.
Your (and presumably, the google employee that got fired) response?
"Nah, I am right, so fuck your rules"
It doesn't work that way.
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.
That's the problem right there.
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.
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.)
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.