The fired Google engineer wrote his memo after he went to a 'shaming' programme
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
Due to intense backlash said naive and privileged person joins angry privileged people on a road to genuine hatred. All the while claiming that they are the underprivileged group.
sigh
I am reading Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro. It's highly relevant to this situation. Also, for those who have read it, this particular situation becomes an extremely interesting case study on exactly what not to do when you are working at any company.
Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/wingnut-welfare...
> Damore made the comments in his first major interview since being fired, to alt-right YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux.
Frankly, as additional details and background have come out—and the more he speaks—it seems increasingly evident his motivations were less than virtuous.
> Fired Google Memo Writer Took Part in Controversial, 'Sexist' Skit While at Harvard for Which Administration Issued Formal Apology
Whatever you think of this guy it doesn't surprise me that this other stuff is coming out. It seems like you would have seen his views in his behavior in the past... which these new things seem to show.
> while they described the skits as typically a “roast,” they emphasized that “the goal is not to offend.”
Really just seems like some more character assassination by Gizmodo.
You can't kill something that's dead.
It doesn't seem like a massive deal according to what they state: he made a joke and it wasn't well received. They never say what the joke is or what about it was sexist.
> Damore said: "I went to a diversity programme at Google, it was ... not recorded, totally secretive. I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programmes. I had some discussions there, there was lots of just shaming, and 'No you can’t say that, that's sexist' and 'You can't do this.'
That is, he took a bland corporate diversity training class and tried starting fights. The tell here is "you can't say that" with no antecedent for "that". Yeah: if you tell your diversity class that women aren't cut out for work at Google, you're going to cause a fight.
When did he ever say that?
[1] Yes, it was. Don't pretend that it wasn't. If he genuinely felt that women and minorities were just as valuable candidates why did he write 10 pages about why efforts to ensure their inclusion were hurting google? The fact that he framed the argument creatively doesn't change the fact that fundamentally he feels Google is hiring too many women, thus the diatribe.
We are so prone to evaluating messages based on their form. If someone is ranting and cursing and shouting, we fundamentally assume that they're irrational. If someone speaks calmly and clearly and uses objective wording we assume that they're rational.
We read this statement, see "there was lots of just shaming," and our immediate natural reaction is to think, "Well that sucks, Google shouldn't shame people, this guy is being persecuted."
But that's not the information actually presented here. All this statement tells us is that this guy felt shamed. Was that because the people were actually shaming him? Or was it because they stated facts that this guy feels shamed by? Or something else? We have no idea.
Clearly Google messed up here and walked into a trap.
He said on average, as a group, they are less interested in tech, but that we should treat everyone as individuals.
That's not very controversial, now is it?
That's, yeah, rather controversial. How would you feel if your coworker and all his friends (c.f. all you guys posting here) felt that you were sub-par? Would you tell your female coworkers this to their face? "I don't think your gender is not good at tech per se, but you personally were hired from a too-large pool of candidates and that makes you not as good at your job as I am. You probably shouldn't have been hired".
To me it seems the man is trying to change the accepted political view rather than to spark controversy for the sake of it. Both approaches spark controversy, only the latter is trolling.
For example, here's a part that really stood out for me:
"Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths."
Superficially, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. The quoted statistic is true, and the proposed causal relationship between a drive for status and more male presence in these jobs is at least a believable reason for why there are so many more men in these jobs.
But taking a step back, it's a complete troll. The manifesto is supposedly about gender and diversity at Google, where there are very few coal mining, garbage collection, or firefighting jobs, and very few work-related deaths. So why is this even in here? It's not related to the topic at hand, it doesn't give us any useful information, and it's not going to help persuade anyone of anything.
The only answer I can come up with is: it's there to provoke. It's practically begging for ladies to thank men for doing important, dangerous jobs that women won't do, and using an emotional argument in the form of dead people to push it. It's a faux-dispassionate way to say "we're dying for your sins, ladies."
This is a big part of the art of the troll: you stick in little irrelevant asides that are built to provoke. When done well, these asides are factual and appear relevant.
In Google's ideal world where ideal means all jobs are distributed evenly matching the population of men and women, there would be an equal push for women taking those undesirable jobs. However, there isn't, and everyone is fine with that (I personally haven't heard any rallying cries to get more women into garbage collection, at least). What this translates to (in my interpretation of what I believe Damore's point was, as a disclaimer) is "men take dangerous, stressful jobs because women don't want them, even when they are high paying, due to differing pressures on the sexes."
The problem is when you remove the "dangerous" part (and software engineering one could argue is also not as stressful as these other jobs, if only for its lack of danger. The worst thing that can happen to you on the job is to be fired), women supposedly want the jobs, and so there's an artificial push for them to be employed by employers like Google. So now the market is smaller for qualified men to take these jobs, and theoretically they are more incentivized to take lower paying/more stressful/more dangerous (worse) jobs that may also be male dominated, but where there are no pushes for artificially increased diversity.
The result is a net loss for men overall, and not necessarily a net gain for women, when you consider his other point that most women may not actually want software engineering jobs (this is a more controversial statement in my opinion, but not the one you chose, and I still believe it deserves to be responded to respectfully instead of with ridicule and outrage). Additionally, this could also lead to a reduced average level of talent if less qualified women were being hired over qualified men, but I won't argue that and Google is an elite enough company that everyone they hire is likely supremely qualified.
So to me it seems like a reasonable (or at least not inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory) assertion to make. I don't think that specific passage was there to provoke (although his original intent with the entire memo was to spark dialogue, which I suppose you could call 'sparking controversy' but I wouldn't). I believe you missed the point.
I think he cited dangerous jobs like coal mining because he is trying to build a case that certain personalities lead genders, on average, to different professions.
He does not support this opinion with any research, and that's where his argument falls apart. He ignores societal factors and assumes biological factors explain gender employment gaps.
I don't think it matters. As far as I am aware, no part of the business, or any part of this industry, is trying to help people understand why they should change their behavior and thinking towards women. The only thing I see is a sort of 'behavioral training' that tells you how to think and act, without helping you gain the empathy and compassion, or even rational arguments, needed for this to be a willing act. Do what we tell you to do or you're fired, we don't care if you believe it.
This sets back the whole cause because it makes silent angry people who stew until they get shamed at a retreat and then churn out ignorant manifestos they are subsequently fired for writing. If the company gave a shit, they would do more to help change minds, not just silence them.
Maybe their retreat was supposed to do that. But it sounds more like people there were hostile rather than compassionate, and didn't do their job to help these people understand. And now the alt-right has a new poster boy to push their propaganda.
I mean, OK. I agree, that would work. But you honestly don't think that's what we're trying to do here? It's hard. People are jerks. All we simpering SJW's are saying is while people are still jerks, would it really hurt so much if they were forced not to act like it in ways that actively hurt things?
You're saying that people's opinions are the problem and that doing this thought police stuff isn't changing them, so it's not a solution.
Isn't the actual problem, though, that women (c.f. this very thread) don't feel comfortable or welcome in tech careers? How is the inner mental landscape of a bunch of dudes going to fix that? Isn't the "real" solution to, y'know, actually make things better for women in this industry?
Well, that's certainly an accurate description of a corporate diversity seminar.
I just completed a corporate training about bribery, just lots of "No you can't accept that gift", "No, you can't give the contract to someone who's family works for the government in return". If I'd been accepting bribes I'd probably feel shamed.
On the contrary, any statement that can be derived within the framework A cannot contradict A because that would prove that A is inconsistent! Of course with a real sufficiently complex logical system we cannot know whether it is consistent or not, but that doesn't mean it is possible to prove a paradox in it.