Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
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> 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.
Good luck with that. You can't take a guy out back and shoot him for speaking his mind, and subsequently expect others do so.
I'm certain Google management knows this as well. They know exactly what they're doing and they're fine with it.
The difference between having the freedom to speak one's mind, and breaching a code of conduct that you sign when you agree to work for Google is clear cut in his note.
The message here seems abundantly clear and I have trouble understanding how it can miscontrued to be anything other than reacting to a clear violation. I can't even think of how to restate what is so clearly laid out in the note.
I wouldn't rule out the potential that there is uneven enforcement of such violations, and that would make this action look questionable. But I don't know enough about Google's internal operations to get to that conclusion.
I think it is certainly a very fine line to walk and people (including Google employees) will definitely see it in a lot of different ways. But, reading this as an outsider, the note appears to me to address the situation very directly and conveys a real sense of urgency (more so than I have ever seen from any of my employers, at least).
"many points raised in the memo ... are important topics."
So what? Other points were a violation of the CoC. Goodbye, good luck, see you around the campus!
At every company in the world. You aren't seriously expecting a company code of conduct to be applied fairly in some sort of scientifically measurable way? The code of conduct is there to protect against the worst types of behavior, and plenty of bad behavior will slip under the radar. So what? It's not meant to create some sort of utopian workplace. It's meant to create a better workplace for those who have historically been discriminated against. So far, it looks like it has come in handy at least once in a very public way.
Intimidating is a strong word for this, I think. I would call it intimidating if the original memo was a challenge to the code of conduct, as opposed to a violation of it.
Either way, I agree that other employees could see this as intimidation and that makes the whole situation much more complex. I suppose that ultimately I would not stand 100% in defense of the course of action, but I am also not grabbing my pitchfork over it.
It should be. If violating the CoC has no consequences then there should be no CoC in the first place.
The CoC makes it clear that some actions and some types of speech are entirely unwelcome at the company.
The memo also makes it clear that if you have a minority viewpoint that does not violate the CoC, then you should be encouraged to express those viewpoints. It even gave specific examples of the parts of the original memo that do not violate the CoC.
This is problematic since the toxic effect of uncertainty and ideological supression at the work place is not mitigated by it being produced through arbitrary executives or an executives arbitrary interpretation of some given code of conduct.
edit: If the purpose of the code of conduct is to create this uncertainty, than that alone should be reason enough for the code to be improved.
edit2: And of course, this specific code of conduct did not generate the legitimicy it should have created, which is why we are talking about this incidence.
What's confusing or unclear about that? It's crystal clear to me that Google prioritizes a workplace free of harassment over your individual ideology. If your ideology makes other employees feel harassed or intimidated, you'll have to leave your ideology at home.
And if you're not clever enough to understand that a statement in a widespread memo like "women, on average, have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)" could cause one gender to feel intimidated or harassed, then perhaps you're not clever enough to work at Google.
Science is not an ideology or opinion; in a diverse environment, reasonable positions are disputed by arguments, not power play.
Exercising an executive bias to intimidate the employees into subscribing to a specific ideology is nothing this code of conduct were able to prevent. The coc could not perform worse measured by it's own goal.
It's no service to any code of conduct intention if a code of conduct is treated as some chilling orthodoxy that is used to prevent a communities open dialogue and self awareness.
"Women, on average, have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)." isn't a reasonable position at Google, or any other big company. If for no other reason, to protect the company from being sued for gender discrimination.
Neither are any of the following statements reasonable:
"Blacks on average are... [insert some negative]".
"Jews on average are... [insert some negative]".
If an employee can't figure that out, you should fire them with zero hesitation. Open dialogue at a place of employment has many limits, and it will never be the top priority. If you say something that offends enough other employees, you're going to get fired, and that's not going to change no matter who you work for.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
When a murderer is sentenced for murder... there are 2 levels of understanding the sentencing. One is that he broke the "code of conduct"/law, the deeper is why we consider that to be unlawful (societal harm).
Saying he clearly broke the code of conduct just shifts the question to how useful the code of conduct is.. its not some fucking holy unbreakable scripture from the sky, its man made, just as the firing is.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I'll even stick with your example in asking - is murdering someone a good way to start debating the "why" of the law against murder?
There are certainly examples where breaking the law proves to be a powerful and effective way to start the conversation. But how often does this hold true when breaking the law causes real harm to others? I doubt the answer is "never", but I can't come up with any argument for how this applies to the current situation.
Anyways my main point was the breach of code of conduct is just the technical reason he was fired. If you read the line item he was fired for, its clear its vague enough to be used many many different ways. I don't think its productive to focus on whether he broke some rule somewhere when the whole situation that led to the firing is known to us.
If it's so clear, then could you specify exactly which parts of the memo were "fair to debate" (as Pichai says) and which part were "clear violation?"
He used internal messaging services. Someone leaked the document. That "someone" is sitting in his/her office today getting no punishment whatsoever.
Is it enough for some people to consider it that?
Consider gay marriage. Each side thinks the other is being bigoted towards some group. Do we just take people's words for it?
This only leads to people getting increasingly sensitive over increasingly minor things and it's a vicious circle.
So how do we break it? How do we re-establish open discourse?
For all intents and purposes the content of the memo was balanced, polite, and restricted to the Google audience. The adult reaction should have been to punish the leaker (which I believe should be an actual breach of the code of conduct) and organize internal debates to allow multiple viewpoints to confront.
Rallying with the hysterical mass and shutting down the minority voice is certainly not about supporting debates and free speech. It's about throwing red meat to the wolves so the company can quietly solve its all too real gender pay gap issues without making too much PR waves.
>being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
Go ahead and claim women are more neurotic and have a lower stress tolerance. Don’t expect everyone to pat you on the back and claim you’re just expressing a minority viewpoint... because you clearly aren’t. James Damore didn’t bother to do any research on the topic - I guess he just assumed his feelings were correct? And he assumed he wouldn’t suffer any consequences for claiming 1/3 of his coworkers were meek easily spooked neurotics?
Go and actually read the original memo at https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso.... Which, for this particular point, links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizin... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism (see in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism#Sex_differences). From which you can access about a metric fuck ton of actual research.
We can't expect to have any reasonable discussion on the topic if the standard of criticism is not reading the piece one is criticizing, and then stating obvious falsehoods (like "didn’t bother to do any research") as facts - probably hoping other readers also won't bother checking.
EDIT:
Also:
> Go ahead and claim women are more neurotic and have a lower stress tolerance. Don’t expect everyone to pat you on the back and claim you’re just expressing a minority viewpoint...
Those are actual falsifiable statements. They can be either true or false. The whole idea of considering them as "viewpoints" is ridiculous and it's precisely what's the problem with the whole environment surrounding the discussion.
Stop it - you are being extraordinarily deceptive with statements like this. Did you actually read this memo? And I mean read it critically? Are these quotes falsifiable statements?
"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."
Didn't see a citation for that. Care to cite the evidence? Can we prove that this assertion is true or false?
"This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Would love to read your citation for anxiety leading to lower number of women in high stress jobs.
"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them."
Again, I'd love to see some evidence showing that the desire for work life balance is the reason that men disproportionately in leadership positions in tech.
Stop pretending that just because the author has sources that his conclusions are supported. His argument was poor. Anyone with reasonable reading comprehension could see that, politics be damned.
Neuroticism is an actual measurable thing and the research seems to indicate that women typically measure about half a standard deviation above men on it.
I honestly didn't know this before but it seems like when he's making these claims he's using objective research that finds these things across cultures.
>> being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
> Go ahead and claim women are more neurotic and have a lower stress tolerance.
Pichai seems to think that "neurotic" is an insult. Turns out it's just part of an established model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Oh wait, maybe I don't agree with you...
Which part did he break exactly? Bias? Seems like something that can be construed to mean basically any ideology or opinion, conservative or liberal.
Saying diversity training sucks, or that Google should re-evaluate how they encourage diversity, or that men are getting a raw deal, would have been tolerable.
What about that they are inherently less interested in football?
Culture plays an effect, but we really need to realize that biology probably pays a role too, and potentially affects gender parities in many careers.
However, that does not give licence to Google to place unreasonable limits on employees constitutional rights.
To do so would give privately entered contracts the power to overturn the constitution which society has enacted.
The debate here is over whether his comments were reasonable in this context.
> All of these traits which the manifesto described as “female” are the core traits which make someone successful at engineering
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
How is it ok to push a gender stereotype that is pro-female but not ok if the stereotype is pro-male?
Doesn't sound like a claim that women naturally possess these skills to me.
And despite what any employer will tell you about their workplace being an open forum, they are full of shit. What they mean is, it's an open forum to agree with management.
Minority viewpoints in tech become silenced and their author(s) ostracized by the biases of a mob mentality. It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source, instead floating by on derivative tweets and extremely biased summaries (in whatever direction agrees with their existing views).
Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore.
We used to be the industry where anything could be discussed critically and the most objectively correct answer could win (logic! science!). Nowadays it's so political and heated, I've found it best to just stay out of the discussion and not share dissenting views anymore. I think the real problem we need to fix is being able to have rational critical discussion around topics we disagree with.
It is not safe to share your viewpoints anywhere where it is not considered germane: and the workplace is high on that list. A firm will fire someone who becomes annoyingly political or who makes a public ass out of themselves on social media. I work for a medium sized tech firm in the American South and we had one engineer that was very open and sometimes combative about her progressive viewpoints and people stopped wanting to talk to her, even those who agreed with her. She didn't last a quarter.
Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace.
This is not true if only for the fact that organizations have always engaged in politics. In one of the worst cases, the United Fruit Company lobbied the US President to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. In one of the most benign cases, Subaru sponsored gay pride events and publicly supported LGBT groups in the 1990s.
Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.
> Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.
Why be so hostile? If you want to be a dick to strangers on the internet then piss off back to reddit.
Feel free to point out which of these two statements is useless hyperbole:
> Google is known to be a very left-leaning company
> [Google] talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven
Everything else I said was conjecture.
But Google does this (Memegen and eng-misc), the problem is that you're only able to speak about certain things and entertain certain opinions...so naturally, conservatives will feel muzzled and want to not go against the dominant culture/power structures
I agree that there is a lot of mob mentality going on, it’s just difficult to get upset about this case because the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments. Twitter replies are mostly full of men who didn’t read the original memo or who are willfully pretending it didn’t claim women are less biologically suited to being engineers.
I like Pichai’s memo and I think it sets the right tone: the offending employee could have raised these same arguments without falling back to debunked stereotypes. He could have done an hour of Googling on the topic and educated himself. Instead he trusted his own feelings in an area he had no experience or knowledge in.
This seems to be a trait relatively common among really smart people: doctors who think they’re good at politics, mechanical engineers who think they’ve discovered a theory that overturns all of physics, or in this case a software engineer that thinks he knows better than thousands of scientists doing experiments and crunching the actual data.
As far as I can tell we can have rational critical discussions in tech - we just can’t get away with spouting nonsense. If that nonsense reinforces old sexist or racist stereotypes then we can expect a backlash.
C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592, where an actual scientist is quoted to say "The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right."
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... for plenty of good references on the topic.
But generally, I mean, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to see peace over this topic any time soon.
He also makes a bunch of unfounded claims that aren't really related to the science. And people argue that because he said a bunch of sciency things that scientists agree are correct, that everything he said was true.
I have to wonder if the artificial urgency that social media has created doesn't have something to do with this. Everyone these days wants to be the first to respond, which results in a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. You end up with a giant, unstoppable snowball of knee jerk reactions to other knee jerk reactions rolling down a bottomless hill.
"All hail diversity! But if don't think like we do, GTFO."
The owners of any business are free to create whatever business environment they want to create. The market is supposed to punish or reward them accordingly.
The job market, too, is a market.
The market won't give you the solution you seek; the issue does not impact profitability enough.
Plus, most other companies will refuse to supply goods and services to it lest they feel the backlash of catering to racists.
Not exactly a feasible venture.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola#Investm...
Actual experience has proven beyond doubt that boycotts don't work, and even if a company has blood on its hand, their deeds are quickly forgotten.
But you can't bring up the Apartheid and not dig through a huge history of companies, countries and people explicity or implicitly supporting it.
Doesn't justify anything of course but Coca-Cola wasn't the only company doing it
Didn't change much.
> Doesn't justify anything of course but Coca-Cola wasn't the only company doing it
That's my point, though. Plenty of companies have engaged in abhorrent acts, with little meaningful consequences to them. The market is not good at solving these types of problems.
Really cause that's a boilerplate libertarian argument.
That said, don't expect the market to give you a solution that's fair to people - the only one you'll get is the one of maximum profitability under implicit rules of the current culture. Those are very much not the same things.
People get easily outraged - which can and does end up with individuals getting hurt - but they also quickly forget and move to next issue. See also the arguments why boycotts generally don't work.
Google is being sued by the Department of Labor for violating a gender discrimination regulation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
These companies behavior has nothing to do with the free market. It is a response to government regulation.
Edit: thinking about that, he couldn't have gone far in the company though without some serious apologies or something, because I can't see a manager assigning him to work in or lead a team with women on it, and that's 1/3rd the company. Maybe it's also a practical decision to fire him and be done with it even if it didn't leak.
> 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.
He made his continued employment both a social and legal liability. This is a fireable offense even if he was "right".
Also consider this. As part of Google's mandatory diversity training, one is presented with Google's internal research claiming that unconscious bias is real and measurable, and that diversity hiring yields both better individual and group performance. In short, Google feels these programs are scientifically valid. The author claims they aren't, but casually dismisses Google's position without really addressing it. Instead we get an evo-psych Chewbacca defense, phrased in a way that's sure to offend a large number of people. Even if he did that in good faith, it's a colossal mistake at best.
I'm sure you have sources that disprove his sources. How about you post them.
It doesn't mean it doesn't exist though, just that we won't get access to it.
This is a well-known, well-researched fact of organizational psychology. Are you guys really this stupid? Think about it from a problem-solving perspective, in terms of the solutions individuals and groups will come up with.
Sexism, racism, and discrimination in general doesn't benefit anyone but the wealthiest few, and only if they're really, really stupid.
In order to promote tolerance you have to shut down and remove the people who support intolerance. Firing this guy is clearly in line with that mission and improving productivity.
We learn this in grade school, are you all foreigners or something? Or has American education really been gutted...
It may as well be an argument from authority - because that is what it is. One cannot hide behind "but the data show" and then refuse to show the data. That is not how science works and we shouldn't accept it for a second from anyone.
That would be interesting research to review publicly. But it also reframes the picture, changing it from "some groups are discriminated against and therefore we need diversity focus" to "we need to start discriminating in order to increase diversity, because this leads to better-performing teams".
> ...we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree—while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct
As if admitting that currently there are no avenues for open discussion on highly controversial topics such as this one or at least none that do not clash with the Code of Conduct.
It's pretty damn simple.
Have you actually read the memo you are criticizing?
It's also not a thing that the author of the memo stated. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14958594
I thought some of his arguments were very weak and, even where he had decent points, he did not make his case in a compelling way. However, I don't think he should have been disciplined and certainly not fired. Those who disagree should refute his arguments.
Sorry, but unless you are some leading researcher in a related field, your "thoughts" doesn't count for much and you should provide cited counter claims to be taken seriously. Without this, it's all just an emotional reaction and doesn't contribute anything of value to a meaningful discussion.
For example, the author of the memo presents some citations to back up the idea that there are biological differences between men and women that might explain why more men than women choose to work in tech. I don't find that idea controversial.
However, none of the citations provide any evidence that the degree of biological difference between the male and female population is sufficient to explain the relative gender balance we see in tech.
I don't need to be an expert to notice the lack of evidence for that part of the argument and conclude that the argument is poorly made.
It is possible that such evidence does exist and I would be interested to see it but that would not change that fact that this memo, with its cited evidence, failed to make that case.
From glancing over the memo I perceive that: women/man are different and men prefer working in engineering. No need to artificially increase percentage of women engineers with incentives. I did not notice any inferior/superior claims.
Being fired for this polite memo? And being characterized as a kind of toxic outcast? - I'm sorry, what have our society and companies become?
Googlers seem to be allowed to do his/her utmost only within a narrow cage of accepted/mainstream borders.
The first, from my perspective, is that it crossed a line that you really have to tread with care when it started talking about "biological IQ". Anyone familiar with the sordid history of eugenics knows that you tread that line really carefully, both because of the sordid history of policy on that sort of thing, the extreme difficulty of separating biological vs. environmental constructs for IQ, and the difficulty of creating a single "IQ test" that measures every single aspect of human intelligence. The quote about "IQ and sex differences" (being something the left ignored) was only supported by a link to conservative think tank Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (which said some things about bias in science grants, but didn't really have anything to say about IQ and sex differences).
This is the point where, to me, the memo went downhill. I am not sure it is the intention (possibly the emphasis was intended to be more the politic), but it is very easy to infer inferior / superior claims at this point, because the whole "IQ and sex differences" thing sort of came out of nowhere.
The other reason it went downhill fast, and unnecessarily so, was because the paper brought in "liberal" vs "conservative" American political dynamics elements. BIG mistake. Any discussion along this line needs to be as apolitical as possible, lest it descend rapidly into toxic left-wing vs. right-wing tribalism territory (as, well, happened). Instead of attempting to skirt around politics, loaded phrases were used, particularly at the end of the memo, like "PC authoritarian", and sourced links typically were op-ed, often with strong bias.
I agree that a lot of the memo is more some of the tribal / "role" paradigms and elements that have been discussed in many sources over time, and there's actually some interesting food for thought in it. I'm not terribly comfortable that what I see as poor communication skills led to the firing. I would not characterize this memo as "polite" though, for the above reasons.
When Google's AlphaGo beat some famous champions, people were wondering whether Google's program was merely a Go-specific program, or a more general program that learned to play Go.
I would also argue that if you went out and created another test for IQ, it would likely have high iter-rater reliability with IQ, but maybe have rough edges and have less empirical attention than mainstream tests like Ravens Matrices. That has been the history of people trying to make a name for themselves by making another intelligence construct, only to find it has insufficient distinction from IQ.
He mentioned this only briefly (a bracketed clause 5 words long) as an example of science that the left ignores, because there does appear to be a difference in IQ between biological sexes [0], with current research suggesting the averages are similar, however there is a higher variation among males, leading to a higher proportion of men at the very high and very low ends of the spectrum.
His comments on this were in no way used to infer one group was superior or more intelligent than the other. He was just pointing out that the left will ignore or deny science when it conflicts with ideology.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
Afraid of angry, vocal and hysterical internet lynch mobs on social media.
Whoever is most easily offended and cries loudest gets to decide.
Being actually right, or god forbid principled, is clearly a thing of the past.
Please, remind me of a time in the past in which people could actually say whatever they wanted without repercussions.
Oh right, there's no actual time in the history of humanity, with the exception of a select few people whose odious opinions everyone had to tolerate or else.
Strawman.
No, there has probably never been such a time, at least for sufficiently creative uses of 'whatever'.
But that doesn't mean everything is fine, and it doesn't mean freedom of expression and public discourse haven't visibly degraded since, for example, ten or twenty years ago.
But "polite memo" is not how anyone I know would describe this.
Conclusions, particularly conclusions on sensitive subjects, baldly stated without a bunch of qualifiers don't tend to be considered polite.
Sucks, but there it is.
It was a badly structured and badly argued document, and I disagree with most of its factual claims and its policy recommendations. But it in no way was impolite or in violation of Google's code of conduct, unless you think that having that viewpoint inherently makes you in violation and deserving of excommunication.
The reality is impolite is in the eye of the beholder (or culture). And in the Bay Area, that would be considered an impolite way of communicating considering the topic.
I'm not applying a value judgement here.
The one Pichai cited,
>> 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."
> I did not notice any inferior/superior claims.
He said women have a harder time leading. That's a pretty big claim. None of his sources back it up, so it's just his opinion. At best, that makes him a legal risk for Google if he were involved in any hiring or promotional processes.
He said, in the context of Big-5 personality traits [0], that women on average skew higher for 'agreeableness' (a scientifically sound finding that has been replicated in cross-cultural studies), and that high agreeableness leads to having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
He's not saying women have a harder time at these things, he's saying people with a high agreeableness personality trait have a hard time at these things.
His very next sentence states that while women have higher agreeableness at population-level averages, it would be wrong to just look at averages between genders because there is significant overlap in these traits across genders. However because it is seen by senior management as a problem for women, men with high agreeableness are excluded from training programs designed to help people with things such as negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
So, he's not saying that women have a harder time leading, he's saying population-level averages in certain personality traits result in women initially being less well equipped to handle certain situations (not that they lack aptitude or ability for it), and that senior management have recognised this and implemented training programs specifically to correct for it, but because these training programs are only for women, they are excluding a large portion of men with the same traits, who are then denied access to similar corrective training.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Yes he does, he says it word for word. He says women, on average, have more of those traits. Then he draws the conclusion that because of these personality differences, that women have a harder time leading. That's not supported by any research he cites.
> So, he's not saying that women have a harder time leading
Yes, he does say that here: "This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
> he's saying population-level averages in certain personality traits result in women initially being less well equipped to handle certain situations
He specifically cites "leading". And, that claim is not backed by any research.
> senior management have recognised this and implemented training programs specifically to correct for it
That is not in the memo.
Are these numbers available to public somewhere?
I'm asking because I would dearly want to find comprehensive data. When I've done some of my own research, I have run into sets of studies, which all agree on one thing: more diverse groups get better results. The snag is that these studies disagree - wildly - with the magnitude of the effect. Some claim maybe 2% improvement. Some others claim up to ~30%. Yet others somewhere inbetween.
The figures also fluctuate quite a bit over time. Study from 2008/2009 shows numbers that are almost entirely unrelated to a study from 2014/2015. Some studies claim that gender diversity alone bears very little benefit[ß], and other studies from the same time come out with results that sort of imply you will need cultural diversity for notable results.
But by far the worst piece of news is that the measured and/or recorded numbers appear to be geographically distinct. Results from US studies are different from those in UK, which in turn differ from mainland Europe studies. That only raises more questions. Such as...
- are the numbers consistently different across regions?
- ... across continents?
- ... across cultures?
- what is the measured effect between "just" gender diverse and culturally diverse groups?
- do age groups matter?
... and so on. I genuinely would like to know. (For the record, and you can check this from my earlier posts as well: I am firmly in the camp who believe that diversity is beneficial.)
N.B. The most recent study I know of is the McKinsey report from 2015.[0]
---
ß: I can dig out the research articles if there's interest. I have some of them sort of easily accessible.
0: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...
But as a developer, my requirements are set by project managers (50% women in my experience), the design and marketing is done by a diverse team, testing is done by other people (or end-users, sigh); so developers are "only" concerned with the actual implementation. Consequently, I don't find it intuitive that more diversity (of gender/ethnicity) would help my team.
Do developers in other companies or countries (Germany here) have wider responsibilities, and thus, diversity is more important? Can engineers at Facebook or Google write user-facing features on a whim? (The terrible mic drop Gmail gimmick comes to mind...) Could that explain the difference in how much teams benefit from diversity?
Sadly no :( - I'm fully aware that the studies in this field mostly focus on financial outcomes, and because they are commissioned by consulting/recruiting agencies, they are of course targeting the management group. That's one of the reasons I would love to see the numbers from Google's internal research.
As for this:
> Most anecdotes I've read about the benefits of diversity boil down to "if only we'd had a <minority> on the team [...]
I am not sure whether I should be offended or merely aghast. From the tone you used, it feels like you have witnessed something more akin box-ticking than strategy, cargo-culting over rationality. I know my reasons are different but I suspect they could be equally selfish.
1. In my experience, women who stay in tech tend to be pretty damn good. Even if we ignored all other factors, it would be rational from purely talent-acquisition point of view to target female engineers in hiring. In addition, women often have greater capacity for empathy and thus can become a force multiplier in practically any team.
2. Constructive arguments from different viewpoints can only make us stronger. Things I am blind to can be spotted by someone else. Things my usual peer group is blind to can be spotted by persons from different peer group(s). But most importantly - things that are obvious to people who share my background can be pointed out and questioned by people whose backgrounds are different.
The thing I, as an engineer, worry about is myopia.
> as a developer, my requirements are set by project managers (50% women in my experience)
That is an interesting observation. Do you think that is due to self-selection or external factors? Also: if PM roles can have a 50/50 gender split, does that mean that women are more likely to seek promotions that lead to PM type positions?
> Do developers in other companies or countries (Germany here) have wider responsibilities, and thus, diversity is more important?
I think it depends less on the country and more on the company [or national?] culture. In engineering driven organisations, definitely. In a rigid hierarchy with nothing-but-top-down approach, probably less so. But then again, in the light of what I know, the latter category should benefit from diversity in their upper management. Where else would the alternate viewpoints come from?
And finally, I'm going to pick this one up separately:
> Consequently, I don't find it intuitive that more diversity (of gender/ethnicity) would help my team.
I'm sorry for you. But also, I am glad that you brought this up. You have just highlighted that MY experience and view of diversity can be irrational or plain odd to someone from a different cultural environment. For that - thank you.
I guess my summary sounded a little harsh. Here's a typical example[1]:
>> When the employees of an organization better represent their users and desired users, they will build more effectively for those groups. When YouTube’s almost entirely right-handed developer team built the iOS app without considering how left-handed people would use it, for example, 5% to 10% of videos were uploaded upside down as a result. This factor may be especially relevant for leaders of consumer tech companies.
I have heard of/read similar anecdotes about various groups of people that certainly have different perspectives, but it always seems extremely anecdotal to me.
This study sounds more promising in my opinion[2]:
>> When a black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of whites, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective. The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.
> That is an interesting observation.
I've tried to verify that my experience wasn't a complete outlier; it seems that PMs really have a more balanced gender ratio than engineers: https://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk/resources/careers/women-in-...
> Also: if PM roles can have a 50/50 gender split, does that mean that women are more likely to seek promotions that lead to PM type positions?
...but now I realise that we must work for very different companies/clients. I don't see project management as a promotion from engineering - in my experience, it's a completely separate career path, just like design. Also, since I am a freelancer, my clients' offices are often full of other freelancers, and promotions aren't really a thing.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/07/21/why... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...
* harassment and intimidation
* calling for harasser to be fired
* firing harasser
All three behaviors fall under the broad umbrella of harassment and intimidation. Clearly the first is a fireable behavior, and the last is not a fireable behavior.
The middle one certainly stands somewhere between. I suppose it's possible that if the author was exonerated, the middle group may be deemed as having participated in a firing offense?
Consider this, if diversity hiring yields better individual and group performance then this implies that different races and genders perform better at certain skills, and that taken in aggregate, this leads to measurable performance increases overall at the individual and group level.
After all, if there was no difference across gender or race, then it would make no difference whether you had 100% white male or 100% asian female, or any other combination of different demographics.
They compared a Trump hat at Google is the equivalent of walking in to (a presumably hardcore) biker bar in Iowa. That's a pretty damning response, even if they meant the opposite.
On another note, I watched the 100m men's final this Saturday and noticed white men are worse at running than black men. Would that be racist towards whites if the stats were confirming my opinion?
The Google code of conduct is pretty clear. It is a primary duty of every employee to actively create an environment where others don't feel harassed or intimidated. If your science fact harasses or intimidates others, then science loses in that case and the code of conduct, and a harmonious workplace, wins. Google has a set of values, and priorities, and those might not be your priorities but you have the choice of working elsewhere if you feel those values don't line up with your own.
Science and facts aren't the end all. I know plenty of folks who are super smart, know a tons of facts, and are miserable people to work with. I would never hire them, or join a company where they work.
But at least own up to what you are.
It's all fake altruistic bullshit marketing/PR/corporate speak. It's just modern advertising and branding.
And they try to one-up each other so you just get bombarded with this happy-language about all of these beautiful non-monetary things that they somehow seem to care so much about.
These poses are just "corporate white lies". They are not meant to be tested.
It's similar to companies saying things "we are like a family".
And that is the adult version of "your dog has gone to the farm for a while".
It's crap fed to you to distract you from the brutal reality so your resources can be extracted more smoothly for longer.
Hear it, but don't believe it.
Let's say someone at my company holds the opinion that black people are generally too stupid to do tech jobs and they write a memo to the company explaining that opinion. They cite sources that show how blacks underperform academically compared to other ethnic groups and go about it in a really professional way. Should the company just say "well this guy made some good points maybe we should reconsider our diversity programs." Should they tell all the black employees at the company that they should be more open minded to that opinion? As a black guy at that company I would be really unhappy about that and I'd probably quit. I genuinely don't understand how that's supposed to work and would love to hear some suggestions.
[1] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
For example, a tolerant devout Christian and a tolerant devout Muslim may find themselves defining tolerance differently enough to find themselves in different tolerance "sects".
Peace treaty is an interesting metaphor but falls short on many levels. Primarily because peace treaties are more focused on geographic separation (whether country-level or block-level) and agreeing on borders (keeping people apart), not about rules of behavior within a single community. Tolerance is the latter more than the former and is the preferred alternative to separation where possible. Using examples from the article the white "separatists" want a peace treaty -- well defined border for them to live free of the "threat" of racial diversity. Tolerant people want to find a way to build a community together, but understand the other side's goals are incompatible with this.
Actually, the Peace of Westphalia, described in the linked article, included a provision allowing freedom to practice their faith outside of the established state denomination [1],
> "shall have the free Exercise of their Religion, as well in publick Churches at the appointed Hours, as in private in their own Houses, or in others chosen for this purpose by their Ministers, or by those of their Neighbours, preaching the Word of God"
Because it is bad to lie? The memo says women have a harder time leading. That conclusion is not supported by any of his sources. He is judging their aptitude there, so I think dopamean's example is reasonable.
> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue.
Now, these are discussed in the first paragraphs of the WP article he referenced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#... At least one of the sources is reputable (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). So you can't really accuse him of lying.
Where? It doesn't say anything about one sex's aptitude for leading there.
And for what? To justify a guy getting fired?
For real?
And it is a statement, whether or not it's introduced as a single word. To claim that this is "nitpicking a single word" is like saying that an article that includes the line "Scandinavians are taller, stupider, and blonder than other Europeans" is problematic only if we "nitpick a single word."
I'll admit that this may not follow directly from the linked research. So he doesn't have 100% scientific coverage. But who does?
I see though that you really find this statement deeply problematic. Would you find it equally problematic if someone said "Men have a harder time showing empathy"? How about "white men"? Would you claim people needed "some damn solid evidence" to back those statements up?
If not, may I ask why? Because this is by far the most common double standard I see when gender inequality is discussed, and seemingly everybody thinks that's just fine.
Anyway: You seem to be nitpicking on a single aspect of a otherwise well structured, well sourced, 10 page long carefully laid out critique of existing systems in a internal memo.
Your conclusion: that because of this tiny snafu in this otherwise good piece, he surely should be fired. Really?
Honest question: Have you ever written a internal memo with this much effort put into it to back up your statements and arguments with scientific sources? I surely haven't. And I'm opinionated enough to write these kind of emails.
I for one, am happy to work somewhere where we don't require people to get a PhD in their email-subject before being allowed to start a discussion. We call low barrier to entry. It supposedly increases diversity of thought.
Showing "Men have a harder time showing empathy," or "women are less assertive" is a heck of a lot easier to study than "women have a harder time leading". The first two are personalities, and the third is a judgement of effectiveness of a job. Judging job effectiveness is highly subjective, and it is likely difficult to disentangle biological influences from societal influences for all three of these statements.
The latter statement also takes direct issue with the Civil Rights Act, which says you can't discriminate on the basis of sex, among other protected classes. It was a big deal to pass that law, and has withstood 50 years of society and litigation.
So, we know (1) the author thinks some women have a harder time leading and has put this in writing, (2) this is not supported by any data, and (3) it's against the law to discriminate by gender when hiring.
Given these three things, if he were to interview a woman in the future at Google, then she could point to the unproven claims in his memo, say he's sexist, and maybe win a lawsuit against the company. That's a liability for Google. Keeping him on would expose them to more risk.
OTOH, I found something completely unrelated that really left me speechless (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_leadership#...): "Women and men have been surveyed by Gallup each year concerning workplace topics, and when questioned about preferences of a female boss or a male boss, women chose a preference for a male boss 39% of the time, compared to 26% of men displaying preference for a male boss. Only 27% of females would prefer a boss of the same gender.[17][18] This preference, among both sexes, for male leadership in the workplace has continued unabated for sixty years, according to the survey results."
Now, how should we call these people?
And I think that's really what was missing from his piece; why do these differences exist and isn't it possible they are constructed rather than innate? He lists a few reasons he is convinced they are not, including their consistency across cultures, but I remain unconvinced all of his list of differences can be explained in this way.
Particularly leading. There are way too many studies that show the biases women have to deal with in that regard and assuming they have no impact on behavior is silly.
Women aren't the problem in this scenario.
Not in all cases, of course, but in terms of behavior.
I'm saying the way you phrased it puts the onus on women. It's fairer to say, "men are worse employees because they can't handle a women being assertive" because men have the problem, not women.
But I take issue with a number of things in that first sentence of yours I quoted, and your comment here to which I'm replying. I'll try and be as explicit as possible because I think one of the major duties of allies is to try and explain our positions in our own communities instead of just shouting down opposing positions (which, I should say, I think is valid if you're on the oppressed end of those positions -- it's not also your job to teach people how they're oppressing you).
> women DO have a harder time leading because their assertiveness is perceived significantly worse than similar assertiveness is men
This is your quote. "Women" are the subject of your sentence, meaning your sentence is about women. You then use the passive construction "is perceived", which avoids saying that, in this context, men are (largely) the ones who have trouble with assertiveness in women when it comes to leadership.
A different way of saying the same thing is what I responded with: "men are worse employees because they can't handle a women being assertive". "Men" are the subject of my sentence, and I use active verbs to clearly say their behavior is the issue.
Our sentences both address the same issue and, more or less, confront the same causes. But the difference is that my sentence emphasizes the fact that men are the problem, whereas your sentences emphasizes the fact that women are the victim of the problem. If we were to apply your emphasis to every social issue, we'd have a long list of problems with victims. But if we apply my emphasis, we'd have a long list of problems with perpetrators and, more importantly, behavior to correct.
We can't afford to not call out where the problems lie, we can't afford to dance around what the problem actually is, and we can't hem and haw when it comes time to say who should change their behavior. That's why I took issue with your sentence.
And again, you may feel like these are insufferably insignificant, but there's a long history of minimizing the experiences and feelings of women that also transcends every culture, and stuff like this is just more of it bubbling up. We minimize the transgressions of men by overlooking their behavior (not naming them as the subject) or not directly attaching them to their behavior (using the passive), but in the process we tie women to the issue (using them as the subject) and frame it like it's their inadequacy (tying them to the outcome).
Things like this are hard, complicated, and embedded in every part of our culture. It's uncomfortable but we need to look at things with this level of detail because sexism exists even here.
It's kind of a harsh phrase, but this is where "intent is irrelevant" comes in. I'm sure you didn't mean to do all the stuff I've pinned on you here, and maybe you still disagree that you have done it. But many people will feel that you have done these things when they read your sentence, and you should at least treat their feelings as valid, try to understand why they feel that way, and consider some changes to how you phrase things.
But I was making a movement from a point made in the Google document that inspired visceral reactions and then leading FROM that point TO a more nuanced point which becomes apparent when the rest of my post is included:
> And I think that's really what was missing from his piece; why do these differences exist and isn't it possible they are constructed rather than innate? He lists a few reasons he is convinced they are not, including their consistency across cultures, but I remain unconvinced all of his list of differences can be explained in this way.
> Particularly leading. There are way too many studies that show the biases women have to deal with in that regard and assuming they have no impact on behavior is silly.
The context is relevant to understanding any sentence.
> natural to think stuff like this is completely trivial and the tactic of people who are "looking for excuses to be offended" or "looking to play the victim"
Yes, particularly when the rest of a three paragraph response clarifies any confusion that might have occurred.
> in this context, men are (largely) the ones who have trouble with assertiveness in women when it comes to leadership
Inaccurate if you're trying to say men respond more poorly to assertive women than other women. Accurate if you're saying in this context the demographics mean more men are present to respond. Seems relevant since you want to say
> men are worse employees because they can't handle a women being assertive
Which is definitely NOT what I am trying to communicate and is honestly offensive and not backed by data. Feel free to reference studies if you disagree and think men are particularly prone to respond to assertive women in the office more poorly than other women.
> But the difference is that my sentence emphasizes the fact that men are the problem, whereas your sentences emphasizes the fact that women are the victim of the problem.
I don't think men are the problem. I think society is the problem, and, possibly, biology to a degree. What degree? I haven't the foggiest.
> sexism exists
Sexism exist in everyone in every culture. Every woman is sexist. Every man is sexist. Agreed. The question is degrees and how aware people are of their biases so they can compensate for them.
> "intent is irrelevant"
We'll just have to agree to disagree. Intent is never irrelevant.
> I'm sure you didn't mean to do all the stuff I've pinned on you here, and maybe you still disagree that you have done it.
I did it. I'm happy to have done it. If I had agreed with your premise that men were the problem, I would still have disagreed with your changes to my paragraph since it lacks the movement of meeting people where they are and then moving to add nuance/clarification. Regardless, I don't agree with your premise.
> But many people will feel that you have done these things when they read your sentence, and you should at least treat their feelings as valid, try to understand why they feel that way, and consider some changes to how you phrase things.
Thanks for sharing. Your feelings are definitely valid in the sense you are feeling them. I've engaged pretty thoroughly with your comment. I simply disagree and, after considering changing how I phrase things in the future, have concluded that would be contrary to my goals.
Though I do appreciate you sharing your perspective. It's good to stand up for you believe in and promote your perspective on how people should act and behave. I'll continue to do the same.
I'm happy to get into the rest of your post which I also think is a good discussion topic:
> And I think that's really what was missing from his piece; > why do these differences exist and isn't it possible they > are constructed rather than innate? He lists a few reasons > he is convinced they are not, including their consistency > across cultures, but I remain unconvinced all of his list > of differences can be explained in this way. > > Particularly leading. There are way too many studies that > show the biases women have to deal with in that regard and > assuming they have no impact on behavior is silly.
From a public policy perspective, you often have to deal with social problems. For example, White men are far and away the most frequent perpetrators of white-collar crime. You have two options. Option 1 is assume this is a race/gender problem because of genetics and say White men can't be in business. Option 2 is to assume that there is a different cause and try and find it. I don't know what the cause is, actually, though I'd assume it's because the vast majority of people who are even able to commit white-collar crime in the first place are White men.
The problem with the line of thinking from that Google doc is that we start going down a road where we just take Option 1 for everything. That sounds pretty bad right? Well welcome to being a woman, a person of color, or an LGBTQ person in America. Sexual harassment wasn't even a term until the 1970s, marital rape wasn't even a legal concept until the 80s. I'm a white cis straight software engineer and not once have I ever read a document questioning my ability to be such because my gender is "extremely murderous and likely unable to focus" despite the fact that men are responsible for nearly 80% of murders world wide. The document circulating at Google is just the latest from a long line of bigots trying to support the crooked chair of their opinions with any science they can shove under the short leg.
All of which is to say that I don't find your added consideration of "maybe it ISN'T genetics" to be balancing. I read your entire post as the statement of someone who has an open mind about these issues but has a lot to learn.
> Every woman is sexist. Every man is sexist.
This jumped out at me and I want to make a point about gender roles. Gender roles were created by male dominated societies, and while they're harmful to people of all genders it's important to understand that this is still a system created by men that primarily benefits men. I agree that everyone is sexist because like you said, sexism exists in every culture, but I don't want to tacitly agree that women and other genders share in the responsibility as much as men do. It's our system and before anyone else it's on us to fix it.
> Which is definitely NOT what I am trying to communicate and is > honestly offensive and not backed by data. Feel free to > reference studies if you disagree and think men are particularly > prone to respond to assertive women in the office more poorly > than other women.
That's a completely valid request:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3544188/ https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publicati... https://granolagradschoolandgoffman.wordpress.com/2014/12/08... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18425573 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0730888499026001...
Note that those are just about the incidence of sexual harassment of women in authority, which I think is clear indicator of "men have a hard time dealing with women in authority". For something a little less terrifying and maybe more topical: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167215593491.
I have a couple of points about this overall though. First, I really just Google for this stuff, and I think if you or anyone else is honestly willing to learn about gender issues then there are myriad resources. Gender studies is a legitimate academic field and smart people are doing great, important work in it.
Second, let's dial it back with the "honestly offensive". Making a comment based on stereotypes about men is not the same as making a comment based on stereotypes about women. Stereotypes about men haven't held men back for thousands of years. Stereotypes about men haven't chopped off 20% of their paychecks. It is a false equivalence, and it's what the phrase "you can't be sexist against men" is getting at. The real social ill of sexism punishes women, and while -- again -- gender roles hurt everyone, the group on the losing end of this system is pretty much always women. You may also have heard the term "derailing", where women (or people of color or other groups) are airing their grievances against our culture, and white cis straight men chime in with their grievances against them. Again, these things are not the same, and while they're definitely problems, let's be sure that we're not showing up to a discussion about metastasized cancer demanding that everyone look at our paper cut.
> We'll just have to agree to disagree. Intent is never irrelevant.
When we're talking about the challenges women face in the workplace, intent is irrelevant. For example, 1 in 4 women experiences sexual harassment in the workplace. Oftentimes men are unaware they are sexually harassing women. Their behavior is either harmless, friendliness, their idea of courtship, or something else, just not sexual harassment.
But it really doesn't matter, as in it's irrelevant, if we're discussing the experience of women in the workplace. The perspective essentially is, "I don't care what you were trying to do, your behavior is causing a severe social problem for millions of women; stop it".
Sometimes intent is relevant! Like in the law (mens rea) for example. But the sad truth of things is that gender roles have so permeated our culture that even basic interactions are problematic. A good example is complimenting a woman on her appearance in the workplace. It feels friendly! Maybe they changed hairstyles or whatever. In fact, it feels unfriendly to not say something.
But women have been judged solely on their appearance for... basically since forever. So what seems like an honest compliment actually entrenches harmful gender roles.
I'm pretty tired; I've been sick the last couple days and it looks like I'll still be at least a little sick tomorrow. So feel free to write back but I might not respond until tomorrow. Have a good night!
But if that doesn't incentivize to include people, what about deconstructing the inflammatory opinion? If we are talking about a person making a comment about skin color and crime, could we not start by agreeing that the average social economical status is not identical for all groups that people in a nation can be sorted into? Some groups will have more wealth in average, and others will have less. Can we also not conclude that social economic status today effects many areas, such as education and crime rate? From that we could conclude that what would be a inflammatory opinion would just be the logical extension of the current average social economical status, and we could politely respond to such opinion with facts that the underlying issue has nothing to do with race or skin color but is a simple result of historical social economical problems which society has been and is continuing working to improve. We can even empathize that this relation between social economical status and crime is universal, so anyone including those in the group that the person holding the inflammatory opinion are part of should receive support in the case of low social economical status. By this we find common ground.
2. Educate your audience ahead of time, or at least as the opening part of the message:
2a. What the intentions for the message are? (E.g., help understand the true root causes of diversity gaps, reiterate that there are invalid opinions commonly held, and also boldly indicate that someone needs to stand up even in a culture there people do not openly share such analysis and/or opinions.)
2b. What the approach is (which would be to deep dive into the correct root cause of the issues (e.g., why working women have lower average salary than working men)? And explain that without understanding of the true root causes, it will only take longer to reach the optimal balance, never reach it perfectly, and the current situation may already be the maxima under the current set of beliefs.
2c. What are common pitfalls and misconceptions (e.g., assuming all gender gaps are coming from discrimination as the memo writer noted)?
3. The core message:
3a. What are the knowns (existing research) that points to the root cause?
3b. What are the unknowns that still need researching?
3c. Summarize the proposed next steps.
4. If as a result of capturing all of the above, the message is becoming too long:
4a. Revisit if you are targeting the right audience.
4b. Split it into smaller logical blocks, and deliver them in steps, so that people can actually follow, getting convinced along the way, rather than get inflamed.
5. There will still be people unfortunately who would not understand all this but who will resist nevertheless. A second round of explanations/FAQs would be needed to address them.
6. There will still be people unfortunately ... (Your approach above should be devised to help reach consensus.)
7. If at any point you realize that something was wrong in your own thinking, correct it, and revisit if your broader message still stands and is worthy. If you come out wrong too often, it's good for you (having learned something new), but be prepared to loose trust.
It's not pretty to have those views, it's not pretty listening to people's uninformed opinions, but so long as it's not the company and those people are not directly affecting your promotion or success failure, I don't see an easy way out of that issue.
If those companies were to fire people for non conforming opinions, they'd be left with skeleton crews, if any. Blue collar and near blue collar jobs give you a different perspective on life.
In some ways I think Democrats have alienated some of their die hard constituents because of their failure to recognize that blue collar workers don't have the same mindset urban hipsters and political advocates have.
I think a more direct parallel here would be if you cited such research, and then drew the conclusion that IQ translates directly into better performance in a specific role such as leadership.
The memo author made claims that aren't supported by the research he cites. It isn't a mischaracterization to say he questioned the aptitude of women in certain roles without having the science to back it up. That's a problem -- not a legal one, but a "how to work well with others" one.
OP didn't say he would quit because one of his colleagues held a (in his example) racist opinion, but would do so if the company just turned around and said that black employees should just be "more open-minded" to those opinions.
You can separately debate whether the original memo was as bad as OP's racist example, but in the context of OP's example I think he'd be perfectly in his rights to leave if the company was supporting such an opinion.
> Besides, if you quit a huge company like Google because one of your colleagues holds an opinion, then how are you so different from a white who wouldn't go to school anymore after the first black joined?
This is an oversimplification of what I said and also doesn't make sense even on it's own. A black person's mere presence at a school does not negatively affect the other students at the school. A person more senior than me who holds the belief that for some made up biological reason I am less capable than someone else can actually negatively affect my career.
The solution is entrepreneurship, that's all. Be your own boss as soon as possible during your career so you can manage your business the way you see fit. If you want to hire more black people then hire more black people. If you want to hire more women then do so as well.
That's also true with the person that got fired. If he thinks Google's policies are detrimental to productivity, then he has to put his money where his mouth is and go start a business where he can implement his own hiring policies. The guy should have quit then publish his paper, because he can't expect some kind of political neutrality in a clearly progressive-leaning business.
That only works if you are good at entrepreneurship and management in general. Most developers aren't (me included), so I think changing jobs to a more compatible company is the better option.
At least that's what I tell myself - punishing bad management decisions by quitting jobs/projects seems to be the most effective way of changing how software development is run.
> The guy should have quit then publish his paper
I think for those who agree with him, his getting fired only proved his point. If he did it the other way around, nobody would have even read the paper.
The QB is gonna get sacked (and possibly injured) because you are using metrics that don't apply to the job to judge fitness for the job.
Only if they had been so close-minded to not consider that possibility before and are now convinced when this new evidence is presented after doing their due diligence to verify it (good luck with that). Seems more likely the truth of the guy's points are irrelevant and the programs the company provides to minorities exist for a bottom line that takes into account the company's reputation (which, in this case, he seems naively unaware of as a relevant component to decision-making).
> Should they tell all the black employees at the company that they should be more open minded to that opinion?
Open minded in what way? Open minded as in "engage with it", well, probably. There are explanations for studies that show differences between races (and women) that aren't biological. It's worth it to look at the studies and ask yourself what you think the most plausible explanation is based the available data if you haven't already.
> As a black guy at that company I would be really unhappy about that and I'd probably quit. I genuinely don't understand how that's supposed to work and would love to hear some suggestions.
As a woman in tech who has also lived extensively overseas in cultures where women are considered inferior (at worst) and "separate but equal" in terms of domain at best, I find the best way to engage with these kinds of thoughts/opinions is directly.
Sure, there is indeed a marked difference when you look at men and women. Fact. I don't want to be someone who turns my head from facts. However, who knows what amount of that difference is nature vs nurture. Nature leaves us little room for improvement, nurture leaves a lot; why would we choose, because it would indeed be a choice, to assume the gaps are intrinsic to the sexes and limit our ability to close what are unfair gaps when it comes to prestige and pay? Further, if they ARE nature, then the few women who do have that interest + talent are entering into a profession that wasn't really designed for them and it makes sense they'd benefit from more support. Why would we deny them that? What, exactly, is the problem with the diversity programs even given the assumption a group as a whole tends to on aggregate not be as well suited?
Anyway. As someone who holds a fair amount of opinions that aren't PC, if I want to not be fired for them then I need to give other people the same right to offend with opinions as long as their actions are appropriate.
You're a black man at Google.
There is a study that says that ON AVERAGE across a large population of people, black men are relatively uneducated and relatively underperform on a particular aptitude test.
It is a known fact that although the larger population has 50% black people, only 10% of Google employees are black.
Now, let's assume that the common intention is to ensure equal OPPORTUNITY for all men. Please assume good faith for the purposes of this demonstration.
One fine day, you wake up to see an article posted by a white man that makes the following claims
- on average white men perform better at the standardized test (link to study)
- the standardized test tests similar skills that are needed for programming, and is similar to the Google interview
- therefore fewer black men get through the interview
- further, it is unfair to just give black people extra marks to pass. it leads to bad performance at work and diminishes the achievement of a black man who got in on pure effort
Now, a black man who cares would
- ask, wait a minute, why are blank men underperforming on the tests? Perhaps we skills fix our schools and colleges!
- point out flaws in the article (study is bad because... / AA is good because... / Other assumption is wrong because...)
These are engaging with the article in good faith.
A person interested in equal opportunity would not do the following
- burn the white man. Arrrggghhh!
- oh no that guy shared a study that shows that the black community is behind and points out what could be the problem. Let's shoot the messenger.
- falsely assign ecological bias to the article: white man said that all black men are bad programmers (not true, he was talking about populations)
These engage with the article in a manner that damages your goal of equal opportunity for black people.
Look for the opportunity to find systemic biases and problems and correct them. Assume good faith.
Don't be blind to something that makes you feel bad (and it shouldn't!) And therefore seek to burn it down without a thought.
I have been involved in the hiring process at more than one tech company and it was apparent that there were far, far fewer women in the pipeline than men. Even if we hired every single person who applied the balance would still lean very heavily toward men. Again, this is just in my personal experience.
I don't believe it is the job tech companies to do extra work to hire more of any underrepresented group in the industry until the problem in the pipeline is addressed.
I think the argument that there is something biological about women that makes them less interested in tech comes from what amounts to pseudoscience at best and that argument shouldn't be validated because it gets in the way of solving the problem with the pipeline.
I have never (and would never) advocated for any group of people to be given "extra marks to pass" in a situation where their ability to do a job is important.
I don't think the author of that memo at Google should have been fired. Though I do understand how from a corporate standpoint they felt that they had to.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the "person interested in equal opportunity would not do..." I didn't do those things. I'm not blind to anything and I think all I did in my comment was ask a pretty simple question that you didn't even attempt to answer.
I believe I included a lot of the general discussion we've seen in my response.
To answer your question as I gleaned it from children of sibling posts: how to foster inclusion of foreign looking ideas:
- always assume good faith (this really covers it all actually)
- listen carefully and understand what was meant
- always speak to the point that was being made instead of to the person, or worse to the words themselves
- allow both yourself and the other people to change their opinions
Ideas are just memes. We need to have the humility to see that and not associate people / ego / self with them.
In the interest of answering part of your question (since I just complained about how few answered mine) I'll say that I do think there is a role for companies to play when it comes to diversity. I'd love to see companies get involved much earlier than when it comes time to hire. Because I believe the problem is with the pipeline I think that if companies want to address the problem then they should start where the pipeline starts: early education. If Google is more interested in getting more women involved in tech I would support the idea of Google hosting a summer camp for girls at their HQ. Or funding programs to do those kinds of things in other places in the country. Of course I have no idea if this kind of thing would work and it would require patience (years) to see if it would pay off. But it seems like a good place to start.
I haven't really thought a ton about how to solve the pipeline problem but it seems obvious that you'd start at the beginning rather than the end. Perhaps I'm wrong. What do you think?
My question is should people be allowed to present counter argumenents to the alleged discrimination and need for diversity. Should people be able to present data such as different levels of education attainment among races as explanation for lack of diversity? Would that be among the perspectives that are morally reprehensible?
If so, then isn't this whole diversity and equality thing not really an idea so much as some sort of new state religion that must not be questioned and is not subject to factual discussion or analysis.
I hope we go back to the days where an individuals merits had more to say in a recruitment process than their skin color.
There is no debate, only angry people seeing what they want to see. Get angry first, ask questions later (or never) - just people being people.
Googles response is simply to appease both sides as best they can, recognizing that one is the majority. The firing is enough blood to appease the stupid & intolerant, this post is to appease the rest.
The operative phrase being, "loud enough". I.e. loud enough minority looks like majority.
The former is exactly what the author of the memo did, and they got fired for it.
This is a human issue that is not confined to liberals and women, or liberals and hispanics. If you go out to rural locales and make a big show about being liberal in a conservative stronghold, people will invariably judge and mistreat you. If you're a conservative in a liberal stronghold and make a big show of it, invariably people will judge and mistreat you. Not everyone, but some. It's not right, I don't agree with it. And I feel like plenty people are moderate enough that they would agree.
But somehow we can't stop the inmates from running the asylum. And our system seems to give greater weight to people who scream the loudest. People are smart enough to know if they scream loud enough they'll get their way. And options like compromise and collaboration take actual work, and why bother with work if screaming and fussing is accessible to everyone without any effort?
Voting is always better than not voting, even when it seems as if your vote makes no difference.
Aside from that though, yes, it is bizarre when people vote for candidates who have a track record of screwing over people like them.
This isn't unique to women.
Now some people in Google are creating black-lists of colleagues.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/07/revealed-inside-goo...
The political disagreement is an orthogonal factor, but does play a role, of course.
After all, they have run stories about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring and continuously deny the scientifically evident reality of climate change, for example.
Go ahead, find a link saying they have.
Did Breitbart push the PizzaGate sex ring story? [Yes](https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews/status/789143692540055552), [absolutely](https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920).
The NYT published at least two stories about an "unverified" dossier on Trump. Admitting it is unverified, yet they claim:
1. "consequences have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day" 2. "By all accounts, Mr. Steele has an excellent reputation"
Is it just me, or do they (subtly) suggest that, while "unverified", there may be something to the dossier?
If it is unverified (and quite damning), why publish it?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/donald-trump-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/donald-trump-...
They are reporting on the effects of unsubstantiated reports, not publishing them as fact. A far cry from BB knowingly publishing falsehoods.
>Has the NYT ever claimed that Trump met prostitutes in Moscow? Go ahead, find a link saying they have.
You skipped over that part. Have they ever claimed that?
From https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/donald-trump-...:
>The chiefs of America’s intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and President-elect Donald J. Trump with a summary of UNSUBSTANTIATED reports
>The summary is based on memos generated by POLITICAL OPERATIVES SEEKING TO DERAIL MR. TRUMP’S CANDIDACY
>The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes with Mr. Trump in a 2013 visit to a Moscow hotel
(emphasis mine)
They make it very clear they were unsubstantiated and generated by people with a clear intent and bias, there is no comparison to BB's knowingly publishing falsehoods.
And it's sort of ... makes sense. You should be allowed to augment your mind with fucking spreadsheets/lists.
It's different if a government/company does it.
What should they be doing instead? (1) STFU. (2) Do their jobs.
It's called being professional.
That means when they can pick new people for their team(s), they try to pick from those who are not on their shit list.
But if their supervisor tells them to work with X, who happens to be on a no-no list, they won't start a hissy fit. (They might try to influence their higher up to reconsider.)
And in big corps like google it's not too surprising that people with very different worldviews try to stay away from each other.
That's not what their comments (in the leaked screenshots) would seem to indicate. On the contrary, they seem ready to go to great lengths, lengths harmful to their employer, to carry out their stated personal policies.
At virtually any ordinary company, they'd be fired for this.
Here is a copy of the memo
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
A copy that conveniently leaves out all the links and citations, as well as several graphs and charts.
And while they do note that "two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted", one of those charts is quite important given that it's right before he starts going on about how men and women differ on average, but that
"Populations have significant overlap. Reducing people to their group identity and assuming the average is representative ignores this overlap (this is bad and I don't endorse that)"
Anyway, here's the full thing, links and charts included:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
It was an internal memo and was leaked. The leaker is somehow not fired.
I agree with this. But given how political google is ( remember google's arab spring movement, it's lgbt stance, etc ), maybe google should also be political/religious neutral. Every July, google changes it's frontpage to state their pro-lgbt political stance.
> its another to broadcast it to co workers.
He didn't broadcast it to his coworkers. It was an internal discussion.
> Both left/right are extremists these days and will never change.
Except that leftists extremism is rather normalized in media/corporations.
At google and in the media, you can say there are too many men or too many whites in technology. What would be deemed hateful if only the "genders/races" were switched in the statement is considered "progressive" by the media/corporations.
> All you will do is alienate and anger a bunch of co workers for a few pats on back from "your" side.
Google's stance on lgbt, diversity, etc also alienates people.
The problem I have here is that only one side gets to speak while the other side is censored and attack.
I'm pro-lgbt and pro-diversity. But I also don't want censorship, intimidation and oppression.
When I hear "censorship" I am thinking of government agents sitting in newspaper editorial rooms striking out all statements in an article that does not align with the government's point of view. It means actively suppressing certain kinds of information from being distributed.
What is happening here, looks more like this: a Google employee publishes an email. Lots of people in the company find the content objectionable. Subsequently they decide that they do not want to work with somebody having these opinions. I do not see, how that is even close to censorship. It is not like he has a right to keep that particular job. He can still go out on the street and shout his opinion at the crowd.
Censorship, intimidation & oppression are very strong words to describe a situation, where somebody lost their job, because they wrote an objectionable essay on a company mailing list.
There is a difference between a right to express your opinion, which I support, and a right not to face any resistance or social consequences for voicing that same opinion. The latter of which is made up by the political right trying to relabel it as "free speech".
You can't cry censorship every time you are criticized for something you said. And let's be honest here: white men with regressive points of view are still not particularly threatened of not being heard. After all, they are well represented in pretty much every single powerful institution like parliaments, courts and executive boards. They'll manage to get their opinion heard, I'm afraid.
More alarming is how people and the media have misrepresented and reacted to the content, even if they disagree with it.
I'm not right-wing, whatever that means nowadays. I'm what you would call a liberal from NY.
> When I hear "censorship" I am thinking of government agents sitting in newspaper editorial rooms striking out all statements in an article that does not align with the government's point of view.
Really? So if google blocks all lgbt content, it wouldn't be censorship? Sure there is government censorship, but there is also academic, corporate, cultural, etc censorship. In the US, there was a time when the media refused to show movies/tv shows/etc with interracial or homosexual content. Wouldn't you call that censorship?
> What is happening here, looks more like this: a Google employee publishes an email. Lots of people in the company find the content objectionable.
The unofficial google employee polls seem to indicate he has as much support as he has detractors. But that's besides the point. My argument is that there are many google employees who aren't fans of lgbt, atheist, liberal, etc stances either. Why are only one groups' feelings considered? If many google employees feel offended by some google employee's open lgbt support, should google fire the pro-lgbt employees?
My question is where does it end? If a google employee has a LGBT flag, should that person be fired?
> There is a difference between a right to express your opinion, which I support, and a right not to face any resistance or social consequences for voicing that same opinion.
So you support lgbt and atheists being persecuted in other countries right? They have a right to express their opinions but they deserve resistence and social consequences?
How about everyone deserves the right to their opinion and EVERYONE deserves to be protected from bullying and intimidation?
All this guy did was have a open INTERNAL discussion that was created by GOOGLE ITSELF. Another google employee who was offended leaked this information and then this guy with honest intentions was persecuted.
> You can't cry censorship every time you are criticized for something you said.
Of course not. But the guy lost his job?
I'm all for criticizing the guy. But the mindless attacks against him and him losing a job is what I am against. Okay?
I believe everyone should be able to criticize and be opened to criticize. I don't think anyone should be persecuted, attacked and oppressed over their opinions.
As I said, if this guy got fired for making pro-lgbt statements and it offended a bunch of christian employees and google fired him, would you be defending google? I highly doubt it.
If I understand you correctly, by turning the argument around (against LGBT, atheist, liberal, etc. people) you want to challenge my point that it is okay to criticize and resist certain opinions and draw consequences from them.
I feel like there is a big difference between the scenario at hand and systematic persecution of certain groups of people.
You seem to assign a huge value to keeping a job. Do you think this is equal to being tracked down and killed by police? That's what e.g. LGBT people face in some countries, is that what you mean by that?
From my point of view, that employee actually tried to advance a very hostile political agenda with what he wrote, that might have harmed many people. Of course, this harm is not as visible as being fired, but it does hurt the opportunities for women, who have to try twice as hard in an environment, where you need to fight with people over whether you are even biologically capable of doing your job.
On the other hand, following your example with the guy making pro-LGBT statements: you make it sound like LGBT is some sort of political agenda by itself. But people usually just _are_ lesbian or trans without making a huge fuss out of it… I do not see how this compares to writing a 10-page essay systematically attacking half of your co-workers.
And, no, I would not defend Google for firing somebody for, say, being a lesbian. That's a completely different scenario.
What's the difference? Persecution is persecution.
> You seem to assign a huge value to keeping a job.
It's one of the most important aspects of people's lives. One way of oppressing people is through their employment. What better way is there to intimidate and silence people other than attacking their employment?
> From my point of view, that employee actually tried to advance a very hostile political agenda with what he wrote
Care to point out where the hostility is? The guy was participating in a google led private forum. Nothing he wrote can be objectively and honestly construed as hostile.
> where you need to fight with people over whether you are even biologically capable of doing your job.
Pointing out biological differences is science. Saying that perhaps there are biological advantages that kenyans enjoy in long distance running
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...
or that tibetans/himalayans are better adapted to high altitude environments
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-hi...
isn't hostile.
To say stating certain biological conditions exist is hostile is a form of anti-science rhetoric that all peoples on all side should be concerned with.
> And, no, I would not defend Google for firing somebody for, say, being a lesbian. That's a completely different scenario.
You say it is a different scenario but you don't explain why? A muslim company asks their employees to discuss on their private channel on how they could be a better company. A pro-lgbt person says we need more lgbt people in the company. Some muslim employees find it offensive and leaks this out to the media and the muslim media wages a media war against this pro-lgbt person. So they fire this pro-lgbt person. How is it any different?
All you are saying is that you just want your side to be protected. The "others" deserve no protection or empathy. That is very worrying.
"Eric Schmidt [and a sizeable team of Googlers]* played a crucial role in Team Hillary’s election tech".
https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...
*from other sources
- We can debate anything
- However, some views are too harmful to be debated
- Whoever is most vocally outraged decides the boundary between open to debate/too harmful
- you can say absolutely anything you want, as long as it's not something we say is harmful of course
So much back and forth
What is the best way?
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. [...] This essay may not get everything 100% right, but it is certainly not a rant. And it stands in sharp contrast to most of the comments, which are little more than snarky modern slurs. The arrogance of most of the comments reflects exactly the type of smug self-appointed superiority that has led to widespread resentment of the left among reasonable people. To the extent that such views correspond to those at Google, they vindicate the essayist’s claims about the authoritarian and repressive atmosphere there. Even the response by Google’s new VP in charge of diversity simply ignores all of the author’s arguments, and vacuously affirms Google’s commitment to diversity. The essay is vastly more thoughtful, linked to the science, and well-reasoned than nearly all of the comments. (Lee Jussim, professor of social psychology at Rutgers University)
> 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?’) (Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico)
If you have read the memo and found it incoherent, then please explain what part of it is incoherent. Here are some of the points made in its summary:
> [S]ilencing [people who disagree] has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
Do you find those points incoherent? I find them to be clear. ("incoherent: expressed in an incomprehensible or confusing way; unclear.")
>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.
I would argue that even if he didn't mean to, "using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality" is the message he gave to many people. I do believe his argument is more complex than that, but it's not sufficiently accounting for this impression.
I'll continue reading. In the meantime, asking if I read the memo and showing me the definition of "incoherent" ... can we please have a respectful discussion? I'm happy to explain why I find the memo, as a whole, incoherent, with examples.
(Edit: changed "first" to "second" scientist)
And the next sentence:
> 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.
- This is bad communicating. It's incredibly vague about what % of the difference he thinks is biological, and what % is social/structural/historical, the things he completely fails to address. This "I'm just saying!" vagueness leaves the door open to an extremely wide range of interpretations. There's no argument there. It's all fudgy-hedgy. It's not coherent.
> I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. 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).
- This is where he wants to be. The high bar he sets for himself. The point that evidence should not be discounted because it doesn't fit the wished-for results is important. Results are results. His writing does not live up to what he establishes in this paragraph. He says "I hope it's clear" and he does qualify a lot of his statements with "I'm not saying xyz about ALL individuals" ... he's trying.
These are two points that give me the sense of an overall incoherent argument:
> Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.
- This is manifestly ridiculous. Accepting the truth, that some differences between people are biological, does not mean that historical and cultural factors don't matter and can't be adjusted for, or that it is misguided to explicitly direct resources towards increasing diversity. That's a whole other debate, about how to do it, and who it's fair to. It IS arbitrary, and artificial, to mandate certain proportions of jobs be given to certain "diversity" groups. It's an imperfect solution to a stupid problem. I wish we didn't have the problem in the first place, but we do, and a big clumsy solution is better than no solution. But a lot of the value of diversity is not, as Geoffrey Miller posits in the article you linked, derived from those inherent (seemingly rather small?) biological differences between those people. It is in the much larger difference in how they have experienced life and the world since birth as a member of whatever group(s). He claims he things Google should "try to correct for existing biases" but not discriminate "just to increase the representation of women" ... well this is incoherent, because the second one is kind of the only mechanism to achieve the first one, isn't it? Can we correct for bias and cultural/historical/institutional effects without intentionally tipping the scale a little bit in the direction of the people affected by those issues?
That IS another, connected, thorny problem. I get that discrimination and suffering cuts both ways.
> Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX.
- It's UX all the way down. The whole company affects the UX. But in any case, the value knowledge of "outsiders" is not just about teaching Google how to SELL things to those same outsiders. Here he shows he fundamentally does not get why Google chooses to go out of its way to artificially increase diversity, and how it (at least in theory) helps the business be more successful overall. This is perhaps the most broadly "offensive" idea here.
> Prioritize intention.
- This is wishful thinking. Although, by and large, I do try to do this in my own life, and give people the benefit of the doubt, it is also incumbent on the person doing the communication to understand what they are saying and implying by their words and actions. We each have to manage that ourselves, and accept that fact that we will spend our whole lives learning to be better communicators. Not all communicative gestures can reveal their intentions, most can only be interpreted.
> Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.
- I agree with this. However, I think he weighs the biological differences too heavily compared to the vast array of non-biological factors at play in the choices people make. They are all connected. I hope that most people don't dismiss the actual biology... it's more about, in the real world with actual individuals making choices about what to do in life, what factors may influence them and might some of those not yet be perfectly calibrated? I don't think 50/50 is the ideal target in every possible industry, but I do think we have still got a lot of intentional correcting to do before we remove structures that specifically support women, minorities, and others in succeeding once they have made a choice about what they want to do. This "not all differences are socially constructed" argument is almost a straw man, I think.. do serious people think all humans have identical biology and hormones? Hopefully not.
But ideally all humans would have identical freedom to choose without feeling like the very nature of their body is already closing doors to them before they even start. Which for thousands of years was the case, and is still the case in many places. It would be good to get away from that.
I agree with many points throughout his memo - respect for science, an overall sense of perspective to question whether we may have gone too far, etc. And do think that even if 50/50 men and women is not the exact natural balance for programmers, it is healthy and good for any business to try to roughly include a good sample of the many kinds of people that live in the world, and be attentive to that without going too crazy on exact ratios all the time (which maybe Google does?).
Policies that do this don't (and can't) address the biological component because, as he accepts in the memo, the aggregate effects are not really applicable to any specific individual.
And finally, while Jussim says he "gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right" and Miller says his claims are "are stated quite carefully" ... I vehemently disagree. I can't find where in the memo he claims anything other than something like "these things MAY have SOME effect on why women do not participate at 50%". Which is, on the face of it, of course, true. But how is that careful? How is that getting "the implications exactly right"? I think this is why he is in such hot water. He is really, really, loose with how much he thinks this affects things in real life.
I basically agree with Schmitt:
>Within this sea of gender bias, should Google use various practices (affirmative action is not just one thing) to especially encourage capable women of joining (and enjoying) the Google workplace? I vote yes. At the same time, should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that might account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance? In the right context, I vote yes to that, too.
That's funny. Compared to the response I've seen against it, it seems extremely coherent, tactfully presented and scientifically sourced.
It's an internal memo for crying out loud. Compared to anything I've seen in any company I've worked with, this sets the bar for extreme professionalism.
The science is not really in doubt, surely, but the magnitude of the effects in the full context of our lives and history and cultural norms is complicated. And figuring out how to use experimental data to improve policy is hard.
The backlash is not surprising because, though he tried, he failed to be clear about what he means.
...So we've fired the person starting the debate? Am I missing something here?
*Citation needed.
If you're suggesting they were subjected to different practices, contrary to what HR at Google is stating, then you better cough up evidence. Do the women and minorities at Google perform worse than White males?
This part in particular is worth considering:
"..if minds differ across sexes and races enough to justify diversity as an instrumental business goal, then they must differ enough in some specific skills, interests, and motivations that hiring and promotion will sometimes produce unequal outcomes in some company roles. In other words, if demographic diversity yields any competitive advantages due to psychological differences between groups, then demographic equality of outcome cannot be achieved in all jobs and all levels within a company."
A professor of social psychology at Rutgers said:
> 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?’)
> 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.
That the empirical claims are accurate doesn't mean that they are relevant to the (memo) author's motive for writing it, whatever that is.
Create STEM schools and give kids computers in elementary school. Use more fun robotics in the classroom. Teach programming literacy. Let kids make games.
Of course the caveat to these approaches is that it takes ~13-17 years from kindergarten until high school graduation / college graduation to when the candidate can then use the skills by starting a tech job. That said, I think upstream educational opportunities like these are the best long-term solution to diversifying the tech population.
1. Making the workplace less hostile to that group. The code of conduct and this firing both seem to addressing this point.
2. Making sure salaries are equal for equal work. Google might have some problems in this area.
3. Investing in the hiring pipeline (education) to make sure bias isn't occurring earlier in the pipeline.
Those are just a few ideas. Someone really committed to that goal could surely find more ideas.
Then in a decade you'll have a much wider pool of talent to select from and can just take the best while appeasing diversity advocates.
The same could be done for racial minorities.
From the original memo:
> 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
No he hasn't. Rather, he's implying that 'non-diverse' hires have a higher bar to to pass, and that by enforcing diversity quotas you tend to end up hiring exceptionally qualified people from the 'non-diverse' group, which can have the opposite of your desired effect, and perpetuate stereotypes about the performances of people from different groups.
For example, let's say you have 100 people interviewing for 10 positions. Of that, due to current representation of women in tech let's say the candidates comprise 20 women and 80 men.
Let's also assume that 25% of those interviewing meet the technical standards a.k.a 'the bar' required by Google (that makes for 5 women and 20 men).
Google however is only hiring 10 positions, and in order to meet diversity requirements will hire 5 women and 5 men (50/50 split).
Each one of the people hired is qualified to work at Google and meets the bar (none of them are underperforming).
Without any diversity requirements a candidate would need to be in the top 10% of other candidates to get a position however now, for the women, they only need to be in the top 25% of other woman candidates to get the position, whereas the men need to be in the top 6.25% of male candidates.
The bar has been effectively lowered for the women candidates and raised for the male candidates, despite all of them being worthy and capable of working at Google.
If you are always hiring equal numbers of people from both groups, but from one group you are always hiring the top 6.25% of candidates, and the other group you are hiring from the top 25% of candidates, then over time you'll start to find that on average, one group has a larger percentage of high performers than the other.
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.
So what? This action might be damaging to Google's bottom line (I doubt it) but that's actually less important that running a company in the way the overwhelming majority of employees want it to be run.
To use an ad absurdum argument - if it could be demonstrated that people who are openly racist write better code I still wouldn't believe Google should hire them.
It may not be the case for smaller companies that love to copy what they do.
How much money they have, and how long it'd be possible to survive on that, is not relevant to the point I was making.
1) http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/07/revealed-inside-goo...
You could share your thoughts on this rather than making a clickbait comment.
It's garbage news for people who don't care about journalistic integrity. Nothing there can be taken seriously.
It seems like a lot of people are basing their opinions on logic (fine) but in a perfect world where everyone has equal opportunity, we live in a meritocracy, and people are judged solely on performance. Unfortunately none of those things are true and we need to manipulate things manually to ensure people are given equal opportunity.
Equal opportunity. Everyone is throwing the same ball into the same bin, and everyone gets a chance to throw their ball of paper, hit the bin, and get an A.
But some students are 5ft away and others are 30ft away. Suddenly not so fair.
This comic also explains it well: http://imgur.com/gallery/h82vC
Employers don't know who came from privileged backgrounds and who didn't. Legally, they shouldn't even be asking about it.
The concern isn't about whether employers should help people out. The concern is that the current rubric is too inexact. And that questioning the rubric is considered hateful.
How could someone express the views the author felt without getting fired, while still promoting discussion?
Is it possible, just possible, that Google's policies are counterproductive? If so, how would Google find out? By what process could someone change them?
If such processes exist, why would someone the company valued enough to hire risk his job to send this memo?
Is it possible that Google's environment does not accept some minority viewpoints despite your beliefs and attempts?
This makes it very credible that he's actually read the whole thing and thought about it. Something that I miss dearly with 99% of the other discussion contributers (e.g. [1] which is IMO just hate speech of a worse kind than the memo it responds to).
I really thought I wouldn't write this but kudos and thanks to Sundar for such a balanced and well thought-out response.
[1] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
I think people often expect 'free speech' in situations where I wouldn't. Like a collaborative working environment where you are all professionals trying to get work done. There is a subset of speech (so no longer 'free') that is appropriate for working professionally with a group, especially a group from widely diverse backgrounds. The exact boundaries change over time and between environments, but the idea of employers setting a baseline set of elections expectations inherently limits speech. Google supports speech within limits, and a person who gets that could probably have navigated the politics of talking about the legitimate issues in the memo without crossing that line. Working together in companies is weird. Codes of Conduct attempt to standardize expectations so that work can get done. Work is a special place.
It is an utopia to pretend that the workplace should be opinion-free. Especially since the workplace on purpose tries to blur the lines between personal and professional lives: dorms on campus, cafeteria, malls and dry-cleaning amenities on campus.
If that's the direction business are going towards to then it is normal to accept that the employee comes with opinions attached.
What rights? The guarantee that the government will not interfere with your free speech? This has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment.
> It's a lie to say Google's culture supports free speech when the cost of that speech is compliance with the tyranny of a Code of Conduct.
The memo made it clear that diversity of opinion is welcome right up to the point where it violates the CoC, but not beyond that point - if you violate the CoC - you can and will get fired. It even listed which parts of the memo would have been ok.
I've never heard of a company that places some sort of altruist dedication to free speech as a higher priority than their internal code of conduct. Google's position on this is industry standard, protects Google from lawsuits, and protects Google employees from harassment. How is that bad?
What did the author say that was "out of line"? Can you please cite a section of the essay and explain?
Note: Please see this response to the memo from four scientists who study the field of psychology: http://archive.is/z6xxP
The reason given by Google for the author's termination was "advancing harmful gender stereotypes". I didn't see any evidence in the memo of "advancing harmful gender stereotypes". Where are the stereotypes? Where's the evidence that they're harmful? Is the author really advancing them? The author appears to be referencing scientific research into the topics that he mentioned. Scientific research into sex differences is not "harmful stereotypes".
The way in which the Google CEO's reply is worded gives me the impression that they don't even understand that the author's claims are scientific ones. For example:
> 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.”
These terms -- agreeableness, neurotic -- are personality traits in the field of psychology. There is a significant amount of research into how men and women differ in these traits. See Wikipedia for sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism#Sex_differences
> This paper investigates gender differences in personality traits, both at the level of the Big Five and at the sublevel of two aspects within each Big Five domain. Replicating previous findings, women reported higher Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores than men.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/
The author's mention of terms like "neuroticism" and "agreeableness" are statements of personality trait trends established by scientific research, not personal views or stereotypes. The message from Google's CEO seems to interpret them as personal insults, thereby missing the point of the essay.
The original memo raises points like: women tend to have higher neuroticism on average (low stress tolerance) than men. If some tech jobs have high stress, then is it possible fewer women than men seek those jobs? That seems like a reasonable question to explore, to me, and a question that's grounded in existing scientific research, not the promulgation of a stereotype.
The author also cited other research such as "Women, careers, and work-life preferences": https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...
Jesus Christ.
He boils down the sides do absurd minimal values that understandably cause offense. He calls the people the "left" support as "weak" and says the left worldview prefers an "unstable" approach.
2.
He jumps directly into generalizations about men and women. THe subject has hardly been breached at this point and he's already stirring discomfort among any readers for whom his generalizations do not hold.
3.
He says that women have a harder time negotiating for salary et al as part of their inherent nature.
4.
He directly states that women are neurotic and indirectly states that women cannot handle high-stress work. These terms were called "scientific" by the parent comment, but so is "retarded", and calling someone a retard is pretty fucking rude.
I empathise with the idea that men are being marginalized in order to accomodate for others. Supressing the views of conservatives is equally troubling and worth addressing. Many of his other points hold as well. But he goes too far and throws a rotten egg into the whole document.
I don't really know if your #3 is true or not (this isn't the hill I die on), but I don't think it's heresy to suggest it might be. Is that really so impossible as to be an absurdism?
Obviously some of the things he's saying are generalization, but that's hardly a coherent criticism in this context - everything we're talking about on this topic is, by its very nature, generalization. We're saying fewer women than men take jobs in the computer science sector _in general_. If you're trying to look at broad trends it's okay to talk about averages. Real scientists don't need to preface every single statistic with a huge preamble reminding the reader that individual samples are not the same thing as the distribution they are drawn from.
The silly thing is I actually agree that this was a useless move to try and 'educate' the whole company. But saying he was being unscientific is garbage. He's being perfectly coherent and scientific, it was just a fairly rude thing to blast out to a company as large as Google.
A perfectly choerent and scientific paper would include references for the points it tries to make. Many people have tried to retroactively justify his "points" with links to Wikipedia articles, but it should be proactively justified in the document with links to scholarly articles. Not doing so makes it difficult to believe that he's writing about anything other than his own cognative biases. "Real" scientists also go through peer review, when their peers might say "this makes you come across like a bit of a dick" before it's published for broader review. "Real scientists" have lots more discipline than this guy, and if he had taken a "real" scientist's approach he would have probably been a lot better off.
However, I read the original document the (now ex-) Googler wrote and from what I can see he presented his claims in a reasonable and carefully worded manner. Many people seem to be misquoting him or taking it out of context.
Could you please provide example(s) of these inappropriate generalizations? I am curious if I am misreading the original text, or if you are perceiving it from a perspective that I cannot see (in which case, it would be nice to understand where you're coming from).
If they can't do that, maybe they shouldn't even have a "grown-up" job.
And to throw my 2cents in here too, I'm a biological scientist and agree with the overall theme of what the guy wrote (though there are a handful of smaller points within the manifesto that I take issue with).
>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.
1) You can't say what you want at work, period (there are no first amendment protections at work, just from the government). The person who posted the memo was naive and this memo from the CEO is corporate bullspeak to look good for outside PR. That's all this is, and if you take it for anything more you're also naive. For all intents and purposes it means nothing.
2) The company might be trying to make women feel more welcome by having the statement from the new diversity officer and the CEO, but I can tell you as a woman the LAST place I'd want to get a job right now is Google -- everyone is going to look at you like you only got your job because you're female; it's going to be extremely hard to get people to take you seriously. That's why, if you're going to hire only for diversity (not that I recommend it), do it in silence, don't tell the world, as it only backfires against those same employees you're bringing in.
3) If Google really wanted to get more females and minorities in its rank it should be looking at why it focuses so highly on only top rank schools (IF TRUE: MAY NOT BE-- SEE DISCUSSION BELOW) -- there's plenty of great, smart people constantly overlooked by Google because they can't see past their own biases in this area, which some would argue is a bigger barrier to diversity at Google than straight hiring by gender and race alone.
Being white male, I bet most of us would never have faced any significant discrimination and please stop pretending that we know how other side feels.
Some people are suggesting Google's stance on LGBT is alienating people - Really? So, people who advocate taking away LGBT people's rights and opposed to their ways of life are complaining of persecution?
You obviously can't say anything you like at work.
Google is offering diversity of opinion but there are things you can say that are just stupid and will get you fired.
If you replace women in his essay with African American there would have been about 1 second between it being posted and it being taken down, with an escort out of the building and rightly so.
I loved this talk from Sheryl Sandberg that touches on a lot of these issues, particularly the "joke" near the end, 39 minutes:
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/sheryl-sandberg-develo...
Google is being sued by the Department of Labor for violating a gender discrimination regulation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Google's response is driven by this lawsuit. They have antitrust regulations on one side, discrimination regulations on the other. Sundar is aware that the government could sue Google out of business.
Seems legit.
James Damore document: [https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...]
But with this - I'm starting to wonder if the same is true for the other side. Are people free to post counter arguments showing that lack of diversity may be due to other factors such as difference in behaviour or tendencies? It doesn't appear that way.
[...] stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for
mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable
theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain
why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties
remain so heavily male.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/02/why-fem...
Is this text actually written by him or is it by some HR/communications person? It seems very coded and indirect.
By fireing them? Really?!
I see a lot of criticism from people who didn't read the memo. Most people just fall for the sensationalist headlines of "OMG GOOGLE RELEASED ANTI-WOMEN MEMO REEE".
The memo wasn't that bad. It tries to highlight some very real problems in this age of intersectional recruitment.
- men grow more muscle faster and that used to be important
- childbirth used to be (and in many places still is) very dangerous for women
Consequently most societies defined gender roles in similar ways, leading to similar effects across them.
Or you can go even simpler and say they're more neurotic because their odds of being raped by a man are terrifyingly high. Or they get paid less than men and charged more for things like health care, car loans and mortgages so they carry a higher financial stress burden. Or their health plans are inadequate and they're worried about what will happen if that matters. Or they're being harassed in the workplace.
Or you can dispute the premise entirely and say the standard for "neuroticism" was based on a culture created and still dominated by men.
---
A lot of people are saying things like, "he didn't really write anything that was sexist or misogynistic", but women and people of color are far too familiar with fucked up policies justified by "biological differences". There are real, deep, life and death social problems right now caused by misogyny and they all stem from the fundamental idea that women have their role and men have theirs.
What does this lead to? Health care policies that cost women more and don't even meet all their needs. Health care systems that service women less effectively than men (stroke symptoms are often missed in women, childbirth mortality rates in less progressive parts of the US, etc.), jobs that pay women less than men, laws that ignore or oppress women, etc. etc. etc. etc. And every time, it's justified with "women are just biologically different than men".
Why can't you express such an opinion in the workplace? Because that opinion is responsible for the oppression of billions of women throughout the entire history of humanity. It's not at all like arguing for wind over solar, or honestly other political debates over private vs. public health care or whatever. When you're talking about social issues, you're talking about systems that have oppressed, brutalized and murdered unbelievable numbers of people, and continue to oppress people that you work with and see each and every day. They're not idle thought experiments or a curious hobbies. Treat them with the sensitivity they deserve.
But now no one will raise the topic.
Define "safely" and maybe you can express your viewpoint. The good news is that Google ain't gonna shoot you after a 15 minute trial (including appeals) but you'll get fired and blackballed. (Google could at least give this guy FU money with a wink and a nod.)
No company will hire you after rocking the boat....things have already been decided by those who scream loudest. WTF are you to question them now?
> This note was sent to Google employees this evening. -Ed.
I'm reading a note from the future. Incredible!
Maybe he missed the memo that the author has been fired? How is that encouraging for people with unpopular opinions?
See: https://www.recode.net/2016/6/2/11845456/nest-google-witchhu...
(The outcome of the above story: the employee was rehired!)
And this dumb bro thinks he has a legal case.
I'm also amused with the pro-business anti-government types are the first to go wailing to the government for intervention on behalf of their first amendment rights which do not apply to an employer.