Why I'm suing Google
unobtainabol.com
unobtainabol.com
https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/james-damore-google-mem...
It's perfectly likely that these stories are just not true, or are at least a highly interpreted version of what happened. Only primary sources are trustworthy; show me the chat logs and emails.
Like most news cycles though, the media from all sides of the spectrum were able to find something in it to get people outraged, drive clicks, gain eyeballs, etc.
Your claim that it was secretly anti-diversity is a bit infuriating as Damore goes to great pains to state he is in favor of diversity, and part of his memo is about how Google can do a better job of attracting women. Watching you, and others, twist this into "secretly he doesn't believe anything he wrote, but actually thinks the exact opposite" and not even bother offering evidence of this, let's be generous and call it an "interpretation", like I said - it's infuriating.
Damore's mistake was believing Google's PR, that it cared about diversity or rational discussion. Google doesn't care about diversity, they care about appearing to care about diversity. Thus, when Damore's memo is internal it can be discussed, but when made public he must be terminated.
Google is demonstrably insufficiently diverse, when an employee offers some thoughts based on modern science, to improve diversity, the press howls and Google terminates him. Google wants people to think it's a good corporation, and they are quite willing to abandon good principles to pursue that. It's a shame you've been fooled by their corporatist double speak and lazy media.
These people see these reactions as only fair. After all, this memo attacked their careers, so they attacked the author of the memo. Doubly so, of course, when it turned out to be well-written, effective, and, crucially, led many people to question the reason for the policies that form the basis of many "careers" (sorry "initiatives" I hear is the current term) at Google. I've heard similar stories of this happening at many companies.
Google is just doing what every other company is doing. Managers are directly rewarded or punished for diversity, but (at the moment) also for effectiveness. So they give out the jobs that don't matter exclusively to women. And of course management is enabling this. The cleaning staff. Security. There are many kinds of women-only internships. HR. Finance. Does this result in equality ? No, of course not, it results in antagonism, resentment as careers are destroyed because the person behind the career is the "wrong" gender, and to a lesser extent color, religion, ... (and, I would like to point out, as can be clearly seen in any SV company: minorities are racist too. There are teams in every company that "just happen" to be young Japanese males. Indian females with a few males among them that are behaving VERY obediently. Pakistani males. And so on. Zero diversity in those teams, and from the stories I hear, not because people don't join those teams)
The real thing diversity wants to achieve (imho), a more reasonable, perhaps even equal proportion in the various departments like engineering, is something that may happen over, well, let's be optimistic and say between half a generation and a generation, 15 to 30 years (from what base I don't know, because it still isn't the case at all that women and men have equal proportions in university CS).
Those are the rules many higher ups live by. You attack me, I attack you. Issue is that a LOT of people in the lower echelons don't know what might attack them. Diversity efforts are at the moment idiotic : it is not possible to recruit 50% women engineers from a pool that is 95% male, so the stated result is impossible to achieve and to get better scores they must cheat. Pointing this out, in a way that becomes popular, is an attack against the careers of higher ups and will result in very high up management demanding your dismissal.
How so? I've read it; but maybe my own biases prevent me from seeing an "anti-diversity" theme.
I've have read the mischaracterizations of it online, for example:
> "circulating a memo discussing the biological inferiority of his female colleagues" [1]
Yet, reading it, I see absolutely no claim in the memo that supports that idea.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/08/google...
It was anti-pro-diversity policies (at least the existing ones). That doesn't entail it was anti-diversity. For instance, if I prove that diversity policies are completely ineffective and say we should do away with them, that doesn't make me anti-diversity except to people interested in token PR efforts rather than real change.
> It was a criticism of Google's policies to fight social biases and promote diversity in hiring, using cherry-picked and misrepresented evidence.
Not really. Did you actually read the memo?
Before you inevitably get further into semantics and burden of proof, you should read a breakdown of how Damore failed to prove his memo's claims, from the perspective of an Evolutionary Biologist:
https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
Most of the people who disagree don't even understand the terminology Damore employed, and instead project their own inflammatory interpretations of scientific terms (such as various personality traits from the literature, like "agreeableness").
Finally, I will also note that we can even throw out any arguments about the evidence and quite easily prove mathematically that Google's hiring practices aren't biased and the methods will necessarily be ineffective at attracting more women: women comprise about 19% of Google employees. Women comprise around 20-21% of computer science graduates. Is Google expected to conjure women from the aether so that their female ratio somehow supercedes the ratio of women in the entire pool of possible applicants?
Even if Google were to achieve a better than possible ratio, they'd just be making the ratio at other companies worse. We'd all be hailing Google as some pinnacle of modernity and diversity, and we'd scold the rest of the industry for not following suit. It's complete bullshit theatre.
The only real change can happen in the halls of post-secondary education, or even earlier. Most of these arguments about culture at companies driving women away is smoke and mirrors. The predictions of such theories simply can't explain the data.
Women fought long and hard to get into achieve parity in plenty of other fields that were way more of an old boys' club than programming, like medicine and law. We're to believe that scores of women are so intimidated by nerds with keyboards that they're running away from STEM back in first and second year college? This narrative of the gender gap in STEM is total bull.
> But if you didn't prove that diversity policies are ineffective and still say we should do away with them, that does make you anti-diversity, to most rational, logical people.
Except you're clearly not even open to the possibility that Damore pointed out, that there's some intrinsic factor driving interest in STEM. Not ability, as Sadedin's strawman argued against, but interest. I suggest reading [2] for an overview of the evidence for the "things vs people" theory that can explain gender differences in interest.
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
I get that you support and want to make your own personal argument in for Damore's memo, but if you would read the Sadedin's criticism of Damore's memo, rather than dismissing it with an ad hom attack, you would see that the points you and Quillette are raising are addressed.
You can't ask me, "Did you actually read the memo?" and then make excuses to not read an expert's criticism. It smacks of confirmation bias.
No she does not. I read Sadedin's response when this Damore thing blew up. Sadedin's mistakes are so blindingly obvious that I can't even... Here's Sadedin quoting Damore and responding to it:
> Damore: 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.
> Sadedin: At what point did we jump from talking about personalities to abilities? It’s a massive leap to conclude that a slight difference in average personality must undermine women’s professional abilities in software engineering.
Except Damore didn't say anything of the sort. Damore literally said nothing about ability in his entire memo except this one off-hand remark that some differences in ability might exist due to biology, and Sadedin spends half her text attempting to debunk something Damore didn't even claim.
Sadedin clearly has an axe to grind, and Damore's memo was a convenient outlet. Sadedin's reply is riddled with exactly this sort of pattern, building up a nice Damore strawman and easily knocking it down.
And now I suggest you read the other expert's opinion that I linked in my previous comment, as he provides an overview of over 4 decades of cross-cultural research on gender differences which actually explains the data we have, rather than some bizarre conspiracy theory of nationwide sexism, oh but not everywhere, just in these specific fields for no reason whatsoever.
I'm not even going to bother responding to any more uninformed comments on this topic. You believe what you like, but if you're interested in evidence-based measures to improve gender disparity in STEM, then inform yourself. If you just want to wage some gender holy war, then I'm not interested in hearing about it.
Damore did right here: (emphasis added)
> 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.
This is a key misrepresentation of the evidence, as it is claimed, right here by Damore. Whether or not it's claimed multiple times in the memo, as you say, does not mean Damore does not make the claim. It is one point of many that is addressed directly by Sadedin.
Again, your attempt to minimize Damore's fallacious statement, as well as unwillingness to continue a discussion you started in lieu of new information you find disagreeable, is confirmation bias.
Furthermore, the straw man I referred to is that she took his brief mention of possible difference in abilities as an implication that Damore was saying they would adversely affect female success in engineering. He doesn't say that anywhere. She's putting words in his mouth instead of making a charitable reading like one should in any debate. Considering Damore's argument doesn't in any way depend on differences in ability, what do you think the charitable reading is?
You're arguing exactly the same straw man as Sadedin. Damore's whole argument does not depend on this one statement, even if it were untrue. Many more of Sadedin's rebuttals make exactly the same mistake and I'm not going to rehash this whole thing again.
I also notice that you've now repeatedly ignored the other experts I've cited in preference to one that agrees with your chosen narrative. I suggest exposing yourself to a wider variety of opinions and data.
It feels like you've gotten yourself a little lost. My guess is that you are indeed suffering from systemic confirmation bias.
Also, a moment ago you were saying Damore doesn't make this claim, now you're defending it? Which is it?
The sentence immediately following your quote:
> (e: Yes, I've read it several times for those who question it)
Note, this hiring and work-related discussion is very different than what's going on in google. They have mailing lists for everything from conservatives, liberty (liberal), transgenderism, furries, polygamy, etc. I would be very interested in hearing how polygamy is work related.
Are you saying the workplace should censor and/or prohibit anything not work related? Your opinion of what work should be sounds pretty draconian, and is political, sure enough.
These are _professional_ relationships. Very different than your personal relationships. People should understand that, and restrain themselves from bringing personal matters into the workplace.
People who work that much have only workplace to discuss things.
Yes, well then.
He is on tape saying he hurts women. WTF else do you want?
We can agree he has some fascist tendencies, but it's a big step from there to equating him with one of the worst fascists of all time responsible for spearheading a genocide, or to a group that openly wants to conquer the world and subjugate more than half of humanity. If you can't acknowledge these comparisons are hyperbole, then I can't help you.
Is it so much to ask that you restrict yourself to saying things that are true? If you said that "Donald Trump has repeatedly said things which are contrary to the ideal of treating men and women as equal" then you'd be stating a simple and defensible fact. When you go to extreme and perverse lengths, like equating the former with "Trump is like a Nazi" then you're just willfully engaging in empty partisan rhetoric which is obviously untrue. Ironically, that's a claim that could be made against Trump. The hysterical Trump critics aren't so far from Trump himself.
I was not aware of this. Thanks.
Let's let them have their minutes in court, if a court considers their complaint to have merit. That's the whole point, isn't it? No point tossing out two cents’ worth around and about.
Having read the "Damore memo" and knowing it is not even a good rehash of bad arguments, and having seen this silly attempt at a gotcha-flip of actual grievances, (not to mention some apparently sincere whining about oppression from a position of dominance), I have little doubt about where it will end up, but even whiny revanchists deserve their day in court.
Damore has a much stronger case without this guy.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/20180...
> Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately $150,000 per year.
> On or around April, 2017, a few months after he started working with his new team, the Google employee’s reviewing manager stated in a written performance review, “[The Google employee] has ramped up fast on ML, a new area for him,” and his manager further told the Google employee that he was on track to receive either an Exceeds or Strongly Exceeds Expectations rating in the next performance cycle.
> On or about October 25, 2017, two weeks after that weekly meeting, the Google employee received a “Needs Improvement” rating. This occurred despite the fact that his reviewing manager had been assuring the Google employee every week since September 19, 2017, that he had been meeting expectations. The Google employee also argued that the rating was unfair because he only learned of his alleged “poor performance” on September 6, 2017.
So looks like they're arguing that his bad performance review is because of his memo. Since this is from the complaint, obviously take in what you read with a grain of salt. The complain as a whole is interesting, surprising amount of memes as exhibits.
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Da...
Reading through the actual complaint[0], as much as I despise many aspects of the Damore memo, there is a lot of substance (in the complaint itself).
One example is the quote: “If you put a group of 40-something white men in a room together and tell them to come up with something creative or innovative, they’ll come back and tell you how enjoyable the process was, and how they want to do it again, but they come up with fuck-all as a result!”
HR defended this speech, but when substituting in any other class of individuals it would have been violating... It's hard to empathize with the conservative white males that filed the complaint but the substance of the complaint does hold some weight.
[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/20180...
All that means is that Damore has a minimally competent attorney. A complaint and the supporting information in a complaint (which isn't required to include evidence at all, that's what trials are for) is constructed to sell the idea of a violation of legal right (and, often, in a case expected tomget public attention, secondarily for PR reasons). It is not, quite often, a fair reflection of what the full evidence in context will show, though to be at all ethical it should be a plausible interpretation of the most favorable evidence when all other evidence is discarded as untrustworthy.