“In defending me as a woman, you’ve insulted me as someone who works in STEM” | Hacker News Reader

“In defending me as a woman, you’ve insulted me as someone who works in STEM”

medium.com

40 pointskathyqian11 comments

>Did you really think you could say that “much of what was in that memo is fair to debate” and “portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace” without me asking you to clarify which sections you found fair for debate and which portions violated which specific portions of your Code of Conduct?

I don't think google knows where to draw the line between what is fair and what is harmful in the memo. I think they are just reacting to the media outrage. If they tried to draw the line it would just get shot down by both sides of the argument, only fueling the outrage.

It wasn't necessary for Google to disprove Damore's arguments, because they didn't fire him over the quality of his science, but rather due to the controversy arising from his claims, whether true or not.

It's completely irrelevant to Google's interests whether his claims were unsupported by data, harmful [to society], or politically incorrect. None of those were the reason they fired him: they fired him because his claims attracted attention that could reflect negatively on Google.

Poor google, no matter what they do - they cannot win now, can they.

http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/mad/

Fair question. Perhaps they could just tell the truth a la

"We live in contentious times, we've surveyed our employees and thought about it ourselves, and decided that no matter what we say we can't win. There is a divide in our culture and we don't have 'THE ANSWER (TM).' Only time will tell what balance we as a culture will come to in weighing out the merits of hushing stereotypes versus questioning everything.

So to avoid hasty decisions we'll bow out, and return the Dalmore 6 months from now.

We're honored this great cultural debate could be started at our workplace, but it is not our intent to make this discussion about us. We are about search, email, etc."

I'm pretty sure that if they would say something like this they would lose the lawsuit pretty quickly. Then they'd had to pay the guy a lot of money.

I still think they are probably going to do so, but not as much?

Well I was thinking they'd best have done this before firing him, instead of firing him. And after 6 months if everybody, after cooling down, still thought what he did was fundamentally inappropriate THEN they'd fire him.

Frankly, a huge number of people would be utterly outraged by that. For many putting in doubt certain commonly held values and saying "we don't know if it's true" is like a slap in the face. At least the media in general are Left-leaning, so it's much safer for Google to pay Damore a limited sum rather than open to another wave of accusations, no matter how grounded they might be.

The piece came off to me as somebody looking for a way to be offended. She criticizes Damore and Google but doesn't point out what is lacking in Damore argument and instead of showing why google is wrong, her argument makes me realize how bad of a PR position google really is in. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

> but doesn't point out what is lacking in Damore argument

I think it's because this article is about Google, not Damore. I;m sure if she really wanted to talk about Damore's arguments, the article would have to be far longer and her main argument watered down.

Don't you think though if google had really dived into the science they'd have just opened themselves up to even more criticism than handling it the way they did?

If their only goal is to avoid criticism, not even stopping at breaking California law in order to do so, then they're well deserving of being sued. At some point they need to either be intellectually honest and ethical or pay the price, given their motto has always been an explicit claim to the paragon of virtue.

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