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As someone who's participated in outreach efforts for undergrad internships, I too find his conflation of outreach and hiring worrisome. Very few of these programs, from what I've seen, do more than get minorities into the interview or selection process, which I'm ok with. My problem has always been how few big tech firms seemed to recruit outside of their usual circles (Ivies, private schools, flagship universities).

I went to an HBCU in undergrad and one of the most frustrating experiences I had was when Microsoft sent an employee to talk to our group about what they were doing with regards to increasing diversity instead of what we could do to become better candidates.

This is a reasonable rebuttal to the memo; I wish the other responses would address these issues instead of misrepresenting the memo and calling the author a Nazi. The way this should have unfolded was that Google launched an investigation into its hiring practices, which would probably turn out as you describe. Instead, they fired the author, giving the appearance that their hiring practices are shady and demonstrating the suite of other points made in the memo.

I don't think he said that Google's sourcing programs themselves lower the bar. He seems to make two separate arguments:

1. Sourcing programs with race/gender restrictions are unfair to those excluded, and bad for business because they restrict the funnel of participants. (The same criticism would apply if Google had a while-males-only program -- it would be bad business since it would restrict the funnel without a good business reason.)

2. Google's hiring process gives special treatment to certain "diversity" candidates. He doesn't give any details, and I don't know the context, but he linked to an internal discussion which seems to imply that a "more accurate" process might be applied with the intention of reducing false negatives. (Of course anyone reading a public copy won't see this.)

This should have been the response of Google, and make him apologize. Not firing him.

Why Google hasn't said publicly the same as you?

Can you quote the specific part of his memo he should apologize for?

As far as I understood he says google has a positive discrimination policy to hire minorities and want to achieve a 50/50 gender diversity (or at least something that doesn't match the diversity in the pool of candidates). That was my conclusion from sentences like this from the document:

- "Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races."

- "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."

- "I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."

If this is not the case he should apologize for it.

Note: I mostly agree with his arguments.

> If this is not the case he should apologize for it.

Even if your understanding is correct for which of the 3 points he should apologize for. My opinion is none.

Well the manifesto is a clear claim of the positive discrimination in Google during the hiring process but if this is not true (which I am not sure), he should apologize.

The top comment says the diversity programs only focus in increasing the amount of people in the hiring process but the selection is the same for all. The author of the manifesto says there is positive discrimination (artificial bias) to hire minorities, the lower the bar for them. So if Google doesn't lower the bar for anyone there is no way to say anything against them, everybody is treated equal.

Can I quote a specific sentence for this? No, I would have to quote the whole manifesto.

For me, it's this line:

"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."

Sure, there are statistical differences between genders. This is a total non-sequitur from that, with no citation in sight to try allay blame. This is just the 1950s calling with its stereotypes.

Women may be more agreeable, and more less assertive. However you had better provide fairly convincing proof that we are speaking up too little, rather than merely less than men do.

I think there are studies that probe that claim. In my experience when I told some female friends to ask for a raise because they deserved it, some of them decided not to do it because a list of non-sense excuses (afraid to talk with their supervisors, that they will look for another job in the future, that their bosses don't like them, etc)

Bear in mind the published doc don't have the references the original work had. They removed them when they made it public (not the author)

He said "women generally having..."

You said "women may be more..."

What he said is fine, what you said is sexist.

He is talking about a distribution curve, you are talking about an entire gender.

Not what I'm discussing. I'm using hyperbole to make a point, because I'm annoyed.

I'm discussing the inference that people who possess more traditionally feminine traits are any less good at leading.

So you're just as annoyed for men with traditionally feminine traits as you are for women?

Good for you. That's a consistent philosophy. Something to be discussed and debated.

But this guy just got fired for this discussion, which puts google in the evil camp for me.

Nah, as Sundar's response says, and I agree with, he didn't get fired for discussing things that shouldn't be discussed, or criticising ideology. That should be welcomed. http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/google-anti-diversity-memo-sun...

He got fired for the other bits, the casually implying 40% of the workforce were, onr average, somehow inferior and less suited to their work than men, and for not taking it down but stirring the pot, when he realised that he'd wildly misjudged the reaction people would have to it.

Gizmodo and other sites removed charts and citations from the memo. The full version with links to references is here:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

I've read it. That claim has no backing whatsoever. It's unmeasurable.

I'm surprised that so many people, especially intelligent people from Google like you, completely ignore the "false negative" part and respond to his claim as if he'd said "false positive" instead. You're putting words in his mouth and misunderstanding the point he's making.

Just to clear things up. A false negative is someone qualified who gets rejected. A false positive is someone unqualified who gets hired. He claimed that diversity candidates have a lower false negative, not a higher false positive. The "cold, hard interview process" you refer to is both technically challenging but also has a degree of arbitrariness to it. Google gets so many applicants that it makes sense to design a process that has as few false positives as possible without regard to the false negatives.

I knew someone that applied to Google because our former manager had gone to Google and wanted to hire him again. He did really well in the interviews (he was recommended by all of them) but was rejected because the hiring committee felt his GPA, for an art degree unrelated to the work he'd be doing at Google, was too low. Our former manager brought him on as a contractor instead and he eventually transitioned to full-time and he has been very successful there for almost a decade since. Most people never find out the reason they weren't hired. The only reason he ever did is because he knew the hiring manager personally and, even then, he didn't learn the reasoning until after he'd transitioned to FTE. Aside from the fact that his manager was able to circumvent the hiring process to, over the course of a year, bring someone he wanted in, this is a rare example of a known false negative.

As an outsider with no access to Google's hiring records, I can't say for sure how many false negatives there are, but I have to assume there are a lot more people like him that don't get hired. I've met good engineers during my career that were rejected by Google. And I've worked with enough former-Google engineers that weren't that impressive. The only thing I can say is that I've never met an engineer who worked or works for Google that I felt was terrible, which is more than I can say for most companies.

It sounds like the complaint being made is that Google used a situation almost no other company has, a constant surplus of people passing their interview process and took the expedient route to increasing their minority hiring...they're just ensuring that minorities aren't cut from that last, somewhat arbitrary stage of the hiring process. They know that committee is mostly deciding between candidates who would all be good hires because the process up to that point will have already eliminated the unqualified candidates. It's both a reasonable strategy to quickly increase the number of minority hires without sacrificing on quality and it's a lower bar.

Instead of choosing candidates based on diversity during the interview process the recruiting process select candidates to reach out to by diversity.

You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level.

You are forgetting the diversity itself is valuable. For lots and lots of reasons. One is that that the metrics that people who ignore diversity tend to use are easily gamed: GPA, fancy degree, etc., and may correlate more to privilege than capability. So by casting a wider net you put all the candidates in a more competitive setting, and hopefully force interviewers to figure out what they are actually looking for, not just things their gut correlates with good hire.

> You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level.

This depends on the size of your sample and the positions to fill. It is easier to find one good candidate from 100 individuals than 100 from 1000.

>After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring

That point is less persuasive after Google has demonstrated it will terminate people who complain - even if they do so in a reasoned manner.

That's a major crux, though. You're implying that what this fellow did was provide a reasoned complaint, but if I were to distribute manifestos at my workplace, unsolicited and unofficially, I'd be disciplined or terminated regardless of what was written in it.

To add to that, it wasn't a constructive argument with a new solution -- the only proposition was regressive action. I'd posit that it's akin to someone arguing that since civil rights were not smoothly implemented, we may as well roll back the clock because some members of society had it easier that way. It's pretty weak, and certainly not what I'd call a well-reasoned manner.

It's not a manifesto. It is an opinion on how to make Google better and confront its biases. They are always looking for ways to improve but PC is beyond what is acceptable to look at.

My understanding is that it was shared on a message board of some kind intended for employees to share and discuss their thoughts. If that isn't true, and he sent this document out to some mailing list or what have you - then I take back what I said and agree with you (though firing seems a tiny bit extreme).

To your second point, the document proposed multiple steps at investigating or remediating the problem, such as the author saw it. Regardless, I hope you would agree that applying the standard of "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" seems suboptimal.

> "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired"

This isn't what happened though; this guy circulated an authoritative sounding memo accusing the women in Google's workforce as being held to a lower bar as the men, and outright stating that their "biological differences" was holding back engineering productivity.

That's precisely _not_ what was said.

But I guess the brigading has commenced- I would invite you to read the thing without bias and read it's citations and sources. Even if you disagree that we could do more to remove things like, stress and status to make tech less appealing to men.. you might find out why people are agreeing with him and why this piece circulated internally.

Mostly, it seems, scientists agree[0] with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific. So dismissing it outright without having the discussion is only doing the women in tech a disservice.

[0]: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

> Mostly, it seems, scientists agree with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific

Really? Yonatan Zunger[1] seems to disagree with you.

[1] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

Four PhDs in Social and Gender Biology disagree with him.

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

He had some great thoughts and elucidated the best I've seen so far. Thanks for contributing this.

Yonatan Zunger says this:

> nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.

Except it turned out James Damore of the DM has a Masters in Biological Systems from Harvard. And is experienced engineer working in Search (he disputed the author's chops there too).

I must have missed the parts where he explained that women were held to a lower bar or that biological differences were holding back productivity. Perhaps you could quote them, or refer to the specific sections of the document, I'll reread and then be able to have an informed response.

Don't hold your breath. It's easier to regurgitate what you read somewhere else. Which seems like more than half the commenters are doing here.

At just about every opportunity he used words and phrases like "average" and "in general" to make it clear that these metrics are just that, average.

He clearly points out that any individual woman may be more suitable to leadership and tech than any individual man, but when forced to generalize, then we must be honest about the averages.

here you go.

> "Women, on average, have more:"

> - "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs"

> - "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness"

> - "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men..." (Ironically, this is a good thing for an engineer to have)

He provides no source for this.

> "Google has created several discriminatory practices: Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race, a high priority queue and special treatment for 'diversity' candidates, hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."

And blatant disregard for the social context that these groups exist in.

He does a provide a source in the form of a wikipedia article that uses actual citations [1]. The version with sources (gizmodo removed them in their first publication of the memo), is located at [2].

As for your comment on his "blatant disregard for social context", he explicitly mentions that he believes that biases should be corrected and that society probably also is to blame [3], he just doesn't believe that biological factors does not play any role at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...

[2] http://diversitymemo.com/

[3] http://diversitymemo.com/#suggestions

> he believes that biases should be corrected

So he believes in decreasing the false negative rate? I'm confused.

Guess people didn't get it. It's not believable to claim to want to correct biases when you want to remove measures that correct biases. Even more ironic is using much of the paper to argue differences between men and women just to say that men are being discriminated against because they aren't treated exactly the same as women. Therefor the program should be replaced by his own version with 4 out of 5 measure focused on women, but despite the differences between men and women doesn't discriminate against men, because he said so. The guy isn't rational, he has just come up with a lot of synonyms for "I disagree".

Thank you for clarifying.

Regarding the first point, about women being higher in neuroticism, the author does provide a source - wikipedia. I understand there are different versions of the document, some of which omit sources or links. The version I'm using as a reference [1] maintains a hyperlink to Wikipedia's page on sex differences in psychology. Wikipedia may not be the most reputable source, although I've always thought quite highly of it, but in this instance, Wikipedia, which does seem to support the author's contention, has it's source, an academic psychology paper. The paper's abstract [2] does also repeat the Google author's claim, that women are higher in neuroticism.

As far as the Google author's sourcing goes, I believe linking to a well sourced article on Wikipedia should be a sufficient citation for the document (which wasn't intended as an academic paper but something more like an argument on a forum - per my understanding).

I don't see how this claim, that women are higher in neuroticism, leads to what you alleged the author was claiming - that the biology of women hurts productivity at Google. This seems to me like a possible explanation of why there are not as many women in leadership positions, and not an argument that the women who are in leadership positions have any defect.

By analogy, suppose I was asked why there were few Chinese basketball players, and I answered that height is useful in basketball, and Chinese people are shorter on average than white and black players. This may be a suitable explanation for the observed phenomenon, or it may not be, but either way you should not interpret me as claiming that Yao Ming is a short person.

For your second point, this seems obviously true. The "false negative rate" presumably refers to when candidates who would be good hires are rejected for some undesirable reason. In other words, the test is generating an incorrect negative (your interview comes back "Do not hire" on a person who would make a good candidate).

This false negative rate effectively "raises the bar" to get hired at Google, albeit in an undesirable way. The initiatives that the author links to in this section are presumably aimed at reducing the false negative rate for women, and thereby lowering the bar that women need to clear to get hired.

Obviously it's a good thing to reduce your false negative rate. You get more qualified employees and people who are qualified get a good job. The discriminatory part of this, which the Google author is highlighting, is that Google wants to reduce the false negative rate FOR WOMEN and isn't applying these same initiatives to hiring in general.

I agree that the author did not have enough regard for the social context of his post. He seems to have believed Google's lies that they cared about letting employees express themselves and share ideas to improve the company - when, of course, Google is a soulless corporation that will fire anyone with the temerity to criticize their sacred cows. I think that says roughly that the employee was a bit naive.

[1] - https://www.scribd.com/document/355823379/Google-s-Ideologic...

[2] - http://doi.apa.org/buy/2001-01642-012

> The initiatives that the author links to in this section are presumably aimed at reducing the false negative rate for women, and thereby lowering the bar that women need to clear to get hired.

You (he) can't say that you are lowering the bar since a false negative is positive like any other positive. Widening the bar is a more apt analogy.

Reducing the false negative makes getting a job "easier" (a higher percentage of applicants succeed) and therefore is lowering the bar. I understand your point about how this metaphor may not be exactly the right language to use, but that seems like a trivial difference in semantics and not content.

I don't think it's a trivial difference. Lowering the bar suggest that people are now being accepted on lesser merits. But a false negative is a binary condition. Both positive and false negative results are over the bar. False negatives are positive results we misjudge. If he is suggesting something else he should say that and support it. I would define "a higher percentage of applicants succeed" as "more likely".

Imagine that applicants were scored between 1 and 100 and anyone with a score over 90 is offered a job. Suppose that being nervous in an interview gives you a -5. A nervous applicant has a higher bar - a 95.

Someone says maybe we aren't hiring enough women because women have been socialized not to be engineers and are therefore nervous when applying. Let's work on a program to help women be less nervous, then we'll hire more.

Now the DM author says "let's apply that program to everyone, not just women, otherwise we'll be lowering the bar for women." And Google immediately fires him. Your observation is that he shouldn't have said "lowering the bar" but it's objectively true.

In this example, the bar for women is 90 + the likelihood of being nervous * 5. If you remove the second term for women and not men, you are lowering the bar for women.

Calling it a "manifesto" is only being done by the media though, it's a memo, or at best the first post on a forum topic.

A "memo" thats primary focus was to have an open discussion based on statistical evidence and ideally foster a more welcoming environment to people who are not currently represented as well as Google would like.

"reasoned manner" != suggesting colleagues have inherent traits that make them less biologically suited to their work.

I get it. Some of the points in the memo were reasonable.

But just because the bread and cheese on your shit sandwich look delicious, doesn't mean it's not still a gross shit sandwich.

On page 3, he clearly discusses overlap between men and women even with biological differences. He did not write in absolutist terms.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. _______________________________________________________

I meant "reasoned manner" in the sense that it was a document with footnotes citing scientific research, and that he wasn't out on the plaza screaming about how he hated women, or something like that. The former, even if you object to the conclusions or the spirit they are offered in, you can just ignore by not reading it, or rebut by pointing out flaws with your own document. The latter is obviously a real problem in every way.

Suppose someone asked why it is that Jews are overrepresented in things like winning nobel prizes, being millionaires, working as a college professor, or working in politics. My answer would be that Jews tend to have higher than average intelligence, so it is only natural that they are overrepresented in fields that require higher intelligence. But wait - some of my colleagues are not Jewish! Am I suggesting that my colleagues are less biologically suited to their work? Oh dear, that can't be right. Maybe the politically correct answer is that there is a secret cabal of Jews who run society and try to elevate their own into positions of power... but, come to think of it, that doesn't sound like such a good answer either. Maybe the real PC answer would be to accuse whoever asked of being a racist.

To your point about some of the arguments in the document being gross and terrible, I'd like to discuss those points in particular. I read the document and didn't see anything obviously wrong or objectionable. If there is something wrong, it seems to me the thing to do is correct with a better argument or better evidence, not fire the author for having the wrong opinion.

On average.

He makes it clear at the beginning that individuals must be judged as individuals separate from their race or gender.

But, when talking about groups of people, the only way to do it is to use averages.

Girls like to play with dolls more than boys on average. Agree or disagree?

If you agree you're a sexist these days.

Which is a shame because real sexism is walking up to a girl playing with Legos and saying "here sweetie, play with this doll, it's more lady like."

We're now to the point where main stream thought has conflated real sexism perpetrated on an individual with the very mention of statistics of a group.

Wouldn't that explain, then, why women are underrepresented at Google? If 500 males get "thrown over the fence" and, say, 5 make it through... that means if 50 females get "thrown over the fence" it is reasonable to expect 0 will make it through.