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.
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.
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.
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.
PC culture? regressive left? feminsts? LGBTQIAPK? lefties?
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-...
Sounds like this memo is exactly what that board was for.
Marked down for spreading alternative facts.
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.