Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying reasonably to organize a union), but are actually broader: the NLRA protects an employee right to almost arbitrary "concerted action" to improve working conditions.
Damore was terminated by Google for authoring his anti-diversity memo. During the time he was authoring and distributing internal copies of the memo, he worked with (apparently) a bunch of other engineers at Google that shared many of his viewpoints (the memo covers a lot of ground). He was terminated after the memo, an artifact of his concerted effort to change aspects of how Google was managed, was published. He and his lawyer mounted an 8(a)(1) complaint.
As a starting point --- people with real-world experience or understanding of the NLRA should correct me where I'm wrong --- NLRA complaints get filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB adjudicates claims internally. If a complaint is found valid, the NLRB will try to convince the employer to settle with the employee; if that goes nowhere, the NLRB will itself effectively sue the company. If the complaint is found invalid, the NLRB will inform the complainant that NLRB is done with the case.
Most of these cases (there are tens of thousands annually as you'd expect) are handled by grunts in DC. Novel or high-profile cases are escalated to a special department in the NLRB called the Advice Division. This particular case was not only escalated but apparently handled personally by the director of the division, an NLRB lawyer who'd been with the board since 1988.
The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint. I think he could theoretically still sue in civil court? I don't think that's commonly done? Either way, his complaint was denied.
The basis for the complaint is super simple and kind of obvious in retrospect: employers in the US are required by federal and usually state law to avoid discrimination against protected classes. To the extent that Damore's memo was about organizing against discrimination of conservative viewpoints --- a phenomenon that is almost certainly real in SFBA tech! --- it was protected. But to the extent that it attempted to organize around changes to Google management that might (might) themselves violate EEO laws (for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women), they were not. You can't use the NLRA to organize in opposition to federal employment law. Wa-waa.
As it turns out, this was apparently super-apparent to Google legal and Google HR, who fired Damore precisely by the book, exclusively for promoting stereotypes about women and advocating for the inclusion of those stereotypes into Google's management processes.
I think an important thing to consider --- I'm no lawyer and am probably wrong about lots of this stuff --- is that if the memo had been exclusively about how SFBA tech discriminates against conservatives and could in a number of ways be made more accommodating to them, Damore would had been protected from retaliation. The Advice Memo says as much!
So for someone like me, who believes very strongly in both the importance of employee organizing rights (I think tech should organize into professional associations; "unions lite") and who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women, this is the best possible outcome. There's a lot to take heart in here; we do in fact have the right to organize that we've been saying we have.
Was he trying to do that, though? As I understand it, he was protesting policies that sought to actively promote diversity. EEO laws require no such active promotion, afaik. He fell all over himself to be clear that he was not saying that Google should prefer hiring men, or that they should restrict women to specific roles within the company. He was questioning Google's active efforts to specifically recruit women above the background level that would otherwise apply. Whether or not this is a good idea is certainly up for debate, but it does not, to my knowledge, violate EEO laws to merely not actively and specifically target women for recruitment.
> who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women
Curious, why do you believe in that? Have you evaluated the evidence and come to that conclusion, or is it a priori for you?
It might help to pivot away from EEO law and to some other regulatory regime we work under. For instance, you could attempt to organize around reworking the way your company complies with the HITECH laws. What you'd be doing would certainly not be unlawful! Nevertheless, despite that fact and the fact that the NLRA generally protects employee organization, the fact that your employer has a legal obligation to comply with HITECH would mean that the NLRB gives them substantial extra deference in whether or not they can fire you for doing that.
On the other hand, if you were to organize around, I don't know, closed-door offices instead of open-offices, no such extra deference would apply.
(Re: my beliefs: I provided them as a cards-on-the-table disclaimer, not an invitation to litigate them; they're the least interesting part of this story).
> Damore's statements about immutable traits linked to sex — such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution — were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding his effort to cloak his comments with “scientific” references and analysis and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
I find this disturbing.
I don't know whether Damore's assertions are scientifically accurate, but the NLRB appears to be saying that it doesn't matter. Stating an unpleasant truth would constitute discrimination "notwithstanding scientific references and analysis".
Exactly. Google had the right to fire him. Which is why he should have published his memo anonymously. Unless, like Snowden, he felt that authentication was important, and was willing to face the consequences.
Ya, I understand that. I was objecting to the notion that his protests would have violated EEO law were they realized. That seems to me to be an uncareful reading of his opinions on the part of the NLRA board.
Curious why you question his belief?
All of the half-way reputable studies I've ever heard of have either concluded that there is no difference in male/female intelligence or that there are small differences in certain silos, with men scoring slightly higher on average in visuospatial while women score slightly higher on average in verbal.
Even if you accept the latter as fact (which there is no clear cut evidence-based reason for doing so, if you look at the studies in aggregate) it says basically nothing about suitability to "our profession" as both of those skills are important.
Given the choice between someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding visuospatial skills and someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding verbal skills, I'd generally prefer the latter as a colleague.
My views are in part informed by this essay. It mostly deals with issues of interest, rather than ability, but the cumulative effect of interest divergence culminates in aptitude divergence.
That being said, i'm open to hearing contrary evidence. To the extent that i've read about it, there are non-trivial difference and they are large enough to at least partially explain some of the discrepancy in jobs like software engineering.
As was already stated in this thread, this is the null hypothesis. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397321
Damore certainly cited many studies, and while there's valid criticism of their validity, "they disagree with the null hypothesis, ergo they are false" is not right.
Nor is "I have not read them, therefore the null hypothesis is right".
> [...] that men are better suited to software development at Google than women
When you use generic "men" and "women", you imply he talked about a categorical difference. Damore explicitly talked about population distributions, even illustrated with a Bell curve. He said for example "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."
More importantly, he never said men are "better suited" to software development. You mention aptitude, when Damore focussed on preference and interest, based on a well-established literature of personality differences between men and women.
Technically the NLRB didn't act on Damore's charge because he withdrew it. The Advice Memo was requested by and directed to a Regional Director at the NLRB. If the charge had not been withdrawn the Regional Director likely would have refused to issue a complaint, i.e. dismissed the charge. That decision could have been appealed to the General Counsel, a Presidential appointee. The person that wrote the memo, the associate General Counsel for the Division of Advice, reports directly to the General Counsel. If the General Counsel upheld the decision to dismiss the charge, that decision would not be appealable to any court. Nor can the relevant provisions of the NLRA be enforced directly by private lawsuit.
Almost immediately my attorneys launched a two-pronged approach. They filed additional complaints to the lawsuit and they had me file a complaint with the NLRB. Prior to this, I had never even heard of the NLRB and when I read their website I still thought it was a protection for unionized employees. This is far from the truth. My NLRB complaint consisted of two complaints, one for wrongful termination and the second was centered around the employer trying to stop my organizing the class action by terminating my employment (I was the only member of the class that was terminated at this point). At this point, I was also separated as a plaintiff from the "class" and had my own lawsuit against the employer that encompassed the wrongful termination complaint.
The NLRB almost immediately assigned an investigator (a staff attorney) to explore my complaint. This lasted a couple months with several meetings between myself, my attorneys, and the NLRB interviewing the employer and other current employees.
One thing I learned is that there is nothing an employer hates more than a federal agency digging around their business. In the end, the NLRB found both my complaints valid. They offered a settlement to the employer that involved monitoring and random complaince checks for a period of time.
At the same time, my lawsuit continued through the courts. What did help my case was the NLRB findings. It was hard for the employer to deny complaints when they had already settled complaints with the NLRB. In the end, we ended up settling the entire case.
After the case was settled the employer ended up terminating most, if not all, of the employees that were involved for various reasons (mostly false allegations).
Overall, the NLRB does provide a level of protection for the common employee and working conditions not just for unionized employees that I, and I am sure many others, are completely unaware of.
> The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint
Can you explain where you got this idea from? Not this article, because it states several contradictory or non-commital things such as:
> Damore withdrew his complaint in January
And
> "a federal agency lawyer concluded."
And
> an associate general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board wrote in a six-page memo disclosed Thursday
Is this just an opinion, or an actual ruling? In other words, is this a PR exercise by the NRLB, or is it an official ruling in some way?
https://nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-203891 appears to be the case - AFAICT as the dates lineup with the withdrawl statement, and https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Anlrb.gov+james+dam... shows this as the only link. As a non-American, I'm not going to file a FOI request, so I have no idea what any of this is, or how to find the memo that Bloomberg quotes.
Can you (or anyone else) shed any actual, source not third party light on this?
Apparently, there's no private right to action under the NLRA. Enforcement is public, and goes through the NLRB. If the NLRB decides against pursuing a case, that's probably the end for you (maybe short of suing the NLRB itself).
1. You believe that Damore's lawyers withdrew the claim because the NLRB said they wouldn't pursue it. Is that a correct assessment? That's the timeline AFAICT anyway. Does that make the memo a public statement of what they informed Damore of? Is that common, for the NLRB - or similar institutions - to release a memo about a withdrawn action? I'm not American so this all seems very odd to me. I just can't imagine a government body commenting on a withdrawn complaint here.
2. You have not read the memo itself. Is that true? Do you know where it is or where I can read it? How would I even start?
I'm not being critical, I just have no idea how the US's state and federal laws combine, and it all seems very complicated, procedurally odd and very overlapp-y.
This is what an Advice Memo is: "The NLRB analyses referred to are NLRB Advice Memos, which are prepared by the Office of the General Counsel (GC), a division within the NLRB, to respond to requests for advice from various NLRB Regions across the country about the proper response to some specific fact pattern under the Act. In answering these requests, the General Counsel considers the facts of the specific question posed and analyzes Board precedent relating to the situation.
The GC then reaches a conclusion whether the particular fact pattern violates the Act or not. If the fact pattern does not violate the Act, the Office of General Counsel indicates the unfair labor practice charge should be dismissed. If it finds a violation, it will direct the Region to issue a complaint if the matter is not settled in accordance with its analysis of the law.
All this analysis, and the conclusions, are incorporated into a document known as an Advice Memorandum. These Advice Memos are distributed for the information of all NLRB Regions so that they will all have the same guidance and can address similar questions in a coordinated and consistent manner throughout the United States. The Advice Memorandum does not have the same authoritative force as a published decision of the Board, but it does set out the agency's enforcement position on the questions covered and provides guidelines that will be followed by all Regions when faced with a similar situation.”
So what happened was Damore filed a complaint under the National Labor Relations Act with the National Labor Relations Board. The regional office turned it over to the central office for advice, given the novel issues. The central office decided to decline the case, viewing it as not a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. I don't know whether Damore could still privately sue Google for violating the National Labor Relations Act in court or appeal this decision somehow; perhaps he had some rights, since from the link it looks like he withdrew his case on January 23, a week after the date of the advice memo. He does, however, still have a pending lawsuit against Google, which at the very least, could allege violations of numerous other laws other than (and perhaps also including) the National Labor Relations Act (e.g., California state law).
This was where Damore's got his words twisted in his mouth: He never claimed that!
The problematic claims he did make are that women - on average - "have a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" and are more prone to "neuroticism". Nowhere in the memo does he touch upon women's fitness for SWE jobs -- even though everybody seems to think so.
Whether he promoted stereotypes about women is another story (although most of his claims seem to have some backup by actual science) but the whole thing would have never blown so badly out of proportion if it wasn't for people who circulated a malicious and wrong summary of this memo, either intentionally or by being hanger-ons.
It's not the same thing as being crazy or a neurotic in the Freudian sense (which is not a personality trait but a condition or syndrome, more or less vaguely defined).
It is not problematic to use the terminology of the field that you are citing. The problematic part is misrepresenting those words as judgements. That would be like firing our programmer for lazy-loading images because we can't tolerate laziness at our firm.
Probably, but the entire conversation would have been different then, likely not even leading to his termination and the lawsuit in the first place
Do you also believe in the absolute innate equivalence in motivation for our profession between men and women, so that in a perfectly fair society, we would end up with a 50/50 ratio?
Would this also be the case with other professions, such as nursing, psychologists, or social workers?
I believe in it also, but shouldn't this idea be quantifiable in order to be a legit basis of a firing? I.E. where is the line between "promoting stereotypes" and "promoting science?"
So where this might become a material question is if you were an employer who was receptive to the "scientific" arguments for superior male aptitude, and you had employees that shared that view, and your employees organized to promote that view organically. Like, maybe you couldn't discipline them at the insistence of some other employee?
But in general it sounds like if the workplace issue you're organizing around is "does our employer go too far in trying to comply with EEO laws", the NLRB is not going to have your back.
But in general it sounds like if the workplace issue you're organizing around is "does our employer go too far in trying to comply with EEO laws", the NLRB is not going to have your back.
Well, for one thing, I think the issue James Damore was organizing around is, "does our employer effectively make it thoughtcrime to question how they comply with EEO laws on the basis of differing average preferences." The NLRB's answer is that, yes the employer can make it a thoughtcrime, the NLRB has your back on that, and furthermore, that a lower level NLRB functionary can adjudicate on matters of truth in science.
Basically, what the NLRB has done here is to "instantiate into law" through the back-door of regulations and regulatory bodies, ideologically driven junk science.
Do you think if he had kept his original memo to those acceptable points(the hostile attitude toward conservative views), that they might have gone forward with it? Or would it have still been too difficult to prove with the case?
It's a little fuzzy because the Advice Memo asserts up front that it's assuming arguendo that the memo, in both its protected and unprotected components, constituted protected concerted action. So it's possible that NLRB never really reached the question of whether this kind of organizing truly constitutes organizing for "mutual aid and protection" under the definitions of the NLRA; it didn't have to, because whether or not you're organizing under the NLRA, the memo says there's pretty extensive case history saying you can't do it to work against federal anti-discrimination law.
The NLRA does not eliminate employment at-will! You can get fired for all sorts of dumb superficial reasons. You just can't be fired for exercising your specific rights to concerted action for improved workplace conditions under the NLRA.
But before you go flex this particular right --- and really people should start doing this, like, a lot --- go talk to a labor lawyer and dot your 't's.
This turns out to be pretty easy to do: you can just contact @michelleimiller at Coworker.org, who facilitates this kind of stuff.
I'm having trouble finding it on nlrb.gov's site or Google w/ `site:www.nrlb.gov`.
It looks like it may be this [0][1]. But, that case doesn't mention Damore as a participant, though it does list his lawyer: Dhillon Law Group, Inc.
[0] NRLB Case: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-205351
[1] Advice Memo (PDF): http://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391
I fully respect Google's right for at-will termination, just trying to figure out whether Damore sinned by going against "world-as-is" or "world-as-ought-to-be".
I took the effort and found both the full text of this new National Labor Relations Board judgement [0, PDF], which includes:
"… statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism … were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment…"
and Damore's original memo, which cites a peer-reviewed published source [1]:
"research in large samples has shown that levels of N (neuroticism) are higher in women than men. This is a robust finding that is consistent across cultures. This is especially the case during the reproductive years, but is also visible in children and elderly."
Does such research really constitute harassment in the US? If so, what are the broader implications for science?
Other rebuttals I could find were similarly vague in distinguishing between facts ("is") and desires ("ought to be"). Has Damore's memo been rebutted at the "is-level"? Is he wrong in facts, or merely controversial in his proposed policies?
[0] https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391 (PDF)
There's still a civil lawsuit going ahead as the article notes.
This sounds almost sarcastic. I get that hyperbole is a rhetoric device. I agree to a certain extent, too, while I understand that positive discrimination is discriminating never the less. But: The absolute "innate" equivalence between any two persons is not comparable.
Prejudice is not allowed, sure, but it goes both ways. You can't just take any 50% of the population and claim they must be as good as the other half, just as you can't take any half and claim they must be inferior. Because that is subjective -- concerning subjects -- whereas you want to be objective -- judging actions by their objectives.
Improve the working conditions for whom though? IANAL, but I would think that it'd have to be an improvement in the working conditions for everyone, or at least not have a negative impact on other, non-managerial groups.
For example say engineering gets tired of the sales department's constant phone conversations and boisterous behavior. They organize a group that seeks to eliminate the sales department altogether, after all, the engineers are building a self-service SaaS product that sells itself.
Would the engineers have legal recourse if they were fired for seeking a change that would harm some other group?
I know I should really not be focusing on that one silly little detail out of your comment (which I agree with in general) but can you please explain that "Wa-Waa"? Do you mean it as in the "wa-waa-waa-waaaa" sound from old movies, like in the video below?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xt1kUK71lc
And sorry for derailing the conversation.
Silicon Valley's achievement in the last 10 years is to make sure ambiguity is profitable. Resolution of anything or even a path to resolution just produces less clicks, talking heads and outrage.
The proof is in the pudding. Who wants to bet 2-5 years from now the status quo wouldn't have changed? Replace the issue with gun control, climate change or universal health it hardly matters.
If you guys want to see change the noise levels have to reduce.
Is hacker aptitude some kind of conserved quantity that is conserved over sexes based on some natural symmetry ?
Why not just say, absolutely pretended equivalence.
If there are very few women in computer science, you wouldn't assume it was due to some conspiracy or "systematic discrimination" without any proof. You wouldn't enact policies of reverse discrimination (affirmative action) to correct some supposed imbalance of the system.
You'd simply admit you don't know why, and search for proof of the reason.
Both "P" and "not P" can be null hypotheses, depending on the design of experiment.
The fact that we are all equal does not mean we are all equivalent. I suspect you may not be making this distinction.
Wrong. Damore was pro diversity.
What he said was Google didn't achieve the wanted diversity, because the methodology is wrong.
In California, it is illegal for an employer to discriminate against an employee on the basis of their political beliefs [1], so to that extent particular political ideologies (including conservatism) can be viewed as protected classes.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... and https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
The first is preventing rules and regulations that guide the political beliefs of employees.
The second is a law against threatening to fire an employees for their political beliefs.
Discrimination is something totally different.
Damore was fired for espousing gender discrimination; again, because gender discrimination is very illegal.
Not saying this is necessarily the same as "conservative viewpoints," but it could be interpreted that way.
If I say that women are on average shorter than men, is that a harmful stereotype when it comes to mixed gender basketball leagues?
If I say that women are more caring on average than men, is that a harmful stereotype only if it is untrue, or is it harmful to state it even if it is true?
It’s fine to disagree with what he said, but it’s not fine to mischaracterize what he said.
But then this whole thing would be nothing, maybe a minor labor dispute. So this boils down to his bigoted views.
1) Damore never argued men were better suited to software engineering than women.
2) Damore never argued for google to violate EEO laws, and in fact it’s the opposite.
It’s very sad to me that there is such widespread misinterpretation of Damore’s nuance in his memo. In every possible factual way it’s a pro-diversity memo, but because it cites research on the average personality differences amongst men and women (which are 100% true), he gets crucified as a bigot and an anti-diversity zealot.
Furthermore, when it comes to matters such as these, “belief” should not play a substantial role. We’ve already proven that men and women don’t differ much on intelligence. No need to believe one way or another.
While this may not have been his intent, this ruling appears to imply that the EEOC thinks that the content of his words do amount to that.
You can disagree, but my expectation is, being that they are EEOC lawyers and you are not, their understanding of what does or does not violate EEO law is better than yours.
Then he started retweeting Breitbart articles and selling "Goolag" t-shirts and threw his credibility out the window, and solving the problem of "how do we bring people on-board with the diversity thing without scaring them off" is again put off to another day.
It wasn't merely that he spoke out. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. Saying "women, on average, have more neuroticism" is not how you start a dialog. It's how you start an argument.
Let's not debate whether it was a factual statement, but suffice it to say that "what I said was factual so there's nothing wrong with it!" isn't a defense. There are a million statements that are factual that you don't write down and distribute throughout the whole company.
Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is to build internet services and make money. If I were Google's management, I'd feel justified in firing him for having the poor judgment to approach things in a way that embroiled the whole company in a fight. The lost productivity alone from the distraction must have been costly to the company.
It's possible he was just trying to help, but you don't hire/employ people for good intentions; you do it so they'll be a functioning gear in a bigger machine. If they can't do that, they aren't fulfilling their purpose at the company.
What does that have to do with anything? It does not support (let alone prove) the idea that they are less capable engineers because of this. Where is the science linking this to ability? I might as well state "men, on average, are more violent", or have narrower hips - this is provably true, but it would equally uncorrelated to suitability to the life of a software engineer.
Here; I took a real statistic, made it a generality and pretended that it applied to engineering.
Just because you cherry pick facts to support an argument does not mean that you are 'speaking the truth' as you wrote.
Moreover suggesting that a portion of your coworkers do not have its place here is crossing a very big line.
And men, on average, have a lower emotional quotient (EQ) than women and in the case of software engineers it is significantly lower.
So given that software engineering is a social activity i.e. it involves team work with a wide variety of other people. Perhaps then we should look to hire more women since men are biologically unqualified to do the job.
Or you know this line of reasoning is asinine.
Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is getting the data right - and if you can't even speak of the data, then how are you going to get it right?
To use a technical analogy: it’s like a C++ programmer writing a rant about how JS dynamic typing must be for people too dumb to learn C++, and the ending it with “but I’d love to ‘learn’ more about JS!” Nobody is going to assume good faith.
1. If there are indeed biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits, should it be firable to say so?
2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?
I won't challenge anyone who answers. Thank you.
You need to unpack this into a few different things:
1) Are there cognitive differences between the sexes? Probably true--but we don't have a great idea of what they are.
2) Do those cognitive differences explain different aptitudes for different intellectual pursuits? No evidence for this in the context of computer programming. Which is why Damore's memo was so intellectually weak. The reasoning was basically "studies show women are people oriented" --> ??? --> "men are biologically predisposed to prefer programming."
3) Is it okay to fire people for saying things that are true? Businesses aren't free speech zones. Actions that jeopardize team cohesion, recruiting goals, company image, etc., are and should be fireable offenses. If someone at Google prepared and circulate a memo on how advertising is evil and destroying America, they should be fired, truth of the matter aside.
4) Everyone is entitled to an opinion, to speak on their own behalf, on their own time. People don't have to associate with you if they don't like your opinion. If you make a lot of money and send your kids to private school, you don't tell a room full of democrats "who cares about public education, let's cut the top tax rate." And if you do and people get salty, you don't say "but don't I have a right to speak on behalf of my own interests?"
First, I'll note that "should it be firable" in the question is a little bit ambiguous. I'm interpreting it as "should a company be allowed to fire an employee for this", and not as "should a company fire an employee over this".
If you believe in at-will employment, then yes. Truth does not protect you from being fired.
I'm not a huge fan of at-will employment in general, but I think even in this context the 1A freedom of association makes it problematic to prevent companies from firing people for their speech. Even truthful speech.
As an individual has the right to speak, without interference from government actors, the employer has the broad right to choose who they associate with. Restricting that right is problematic.
> 2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?
Of course they should be allowed to voice opposition. The government should not interfere with their speech in any way. Further, the government should not discriminate against those individuals based on that speech.
However, as they are allowed to voice their opposition their may be social consequences for doing so. Speech often carries social consequences—some I agree with and some I don't. For me, how appropriate or proportional those social consequences are depend very significantly on the content and tone of the particular voiced opposition and the social response. That makes it somewhat harder to respond to a general question.
You are free to challenge my responses. I'm happy to discuss these ideas.
Some similarly constructed questions I would return:
1. If there are not biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits—but a coworker asserts that such differences exist, that your sex is the one with less aptitude—could you see how upset employees and applicants of that sex?
2. If women have traditionally been discriminated against in this industry, and a co-worker voices support for this ongoing discrimination in a way that makes them uncomfortable, should they be allowed to complain about that co-worker? Should their complaints be taken seriously?
I similarly won't challenge you if you answer.
No, but you can start conversations and learn by asking questions. What silences conversations and prevents learning is a menacing attitude towards to having conversations and asking questions.
He was attacking core assumptions about what a fair society should look like.
Aren't the assumptions the very things which should be questioned? If your axioms are flawed, then the systems built upon them are invalidated. Why should there be equality of outcomes? Should Asians have representation in the NBA proportional to their population percentage? Why is it that Jewish people have been radically more successful than the general population at tailoring across literally thousands of years of history, in so many different cultures and contexts? Why is there a Scandinavian Gender Equality paradox?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
(Watch that video and try and tell me that the "equalists" don't come across as unreasonable, closed minded, and ideologically driven?)
A broad reading of history tells us that cultural human capital is tremendously powerful. It also gives one hope, as the historical record also indicates that cultural human capital is also transferable. The transformation of the Irish diaspora from their utter destitution to their descendant's current place in 21st century society should tell you that. (Some historians would place the average displaced Irish peasant's wealth at something like 1/2 to 1/4th that of the contemporaneous average US slave's.) Such a reading of history also demolishes the ideology of the worst segments of the Alt-Right. (As well as demolishing that of the identity politics US far-left.)
Let's call such a world view, "Cultural Primacy." Given that cultural human capital has such deep-rooted and powerful effects, what conclusions could we draw about Google's policies? It could well be that cultural human capital would have strong and persistent effects on the preferences of groups, so it would be unreasonable to expect immediate 50/50 outcomes. In fact, it would be expected for such changes to be generational, perhaps taking 2 or 3 generations. Such a world view would also emphasize the educational pipeline, and the way the subcultures of professions and fields are perceived by under-represented groups. This also happens to be in line with James Damore's suggestions from the memo. It's also entirely in line with what Google and YouTube execs have said in public:
This wasn't some intellectual debate.
But either way, those who are fully in the alt-left camp at Google seem to consider themselves completely free to make anyone who disagrees with them uncomfortable and to go far beyond that: to force them to undergo indoctrination "training", or to be fired outright to make examples of them to others who might be tempted to openly question leftist dogma that may or may not actually be correct.
At Google, those on the far left don't seem to feel the need for "careful deception" when it comes to expressing their opinions of/to coworkers they disagree with. They don't act as though they are required to make those with different opinions "feel safe". They have every reason for confidence, because "safety" just means "privilege": We get to blame and criticize you, but you aren't allowed to respond, because we (not you) are entitled to "safety".
I'm frankly ashamed at the behavior of my classmates, who were so enthusiastically throwing him under the bus, without really knowing anything about him. I found it very odd that people who had no basis of judging his software engineering skills had very strong opinions about them.
I'm reminded of a documentary film about North Korea, where during one segment of a meeting, people went up to the front of the room and took turns condemning the United States, and were cheered the more fanatical they sounded. There is indeed "thought-crime" in the United States, and this category is at times conveniently expanded to to encompass any questioning of the new orthodoxy at all, with no basis but irrational, emotional ones.
Team coherence and psychological safety are important, just as important as engineering skill. This is especially true at a large company.
Why are you writing this in the passive, as if this is an unfortunate thing that happened to him? He did all of that to himself. That memo created a hostile workplace and Google had no choice but to fire him. The outcome here isn't terrible, it's exactly what should have happened.
But if we're talking about consequences of his actions, what about all the women whose careers he was advocating for destroying? Who, had he continued to work at Google, would have felt entirely unwelcome, untrusted, and unrespected? What is the impact on their careers when they face constant questioning of their very legitimacy merely because of their sex?
Would you kindly provide a source for this? Preferably from the memo itself?
Its a federal workplace law. A company will correctly fire you if you cause women to feel harassed or discriminated. Peoples understanding of whats allowable needs to catch up with the implications of the laws.
You have a right to free speech, not to alienate your coworkers.
I think tech workers are easy targets. For instance, we've all heard about the need for diversity in tech, but never hear about accredited investors being < 6 % female and < 1 % black.
It's an impressive feat of mental gymnastics to put people like Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, and Steven Pinker into the category of "Alt-Right." (The first two being an openly gay man in a gay marriage, and a Lebanese jew.) There is no logic there. Basically, if you're not a true believer who has drunk the Kool-Aid, you must be one of the lurking enemy harboring evil thoughts. Sorry, but there are a lot of people who are happy to live and let live, but who have different ways of interpreting the world.
Here [1], by the way, is an interesting overview of diversity programs. It mentions that voluntary diversity training (contrasted with mandatory training) is among the more effective tools for this. IIRC, it was Damore's attendance of such that got him all riled up.
Edit: here's the link:
What in that memo makes you feel that you can claim he didn't start with a shred of humulity? Can you point to any specifics?
I take it you either didn't read the memo, or read the version of the memo with all the references removed (Gizmodo, Buzzfeed, and surely others)
He went much further, though, basically asserting that women engineers didn't belong at Google, and that in fact the job of software engineer is (and should be) designed to exclude women's typical strengths and preferences (as if general traits of the biological sexes have anything to do with individuals' aptitude and preferences). By so doing, he created a hostile workplace for women at Google. If that type of talk is tolerated within the company, what woman would feel comfortable working in a technical role?
Women on average show a higher interest in people
and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented
with pair programming and more collaboration.
Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-
oriented certain roles at Google can be and we
shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into
thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
female students into coding might be doing this).
Women on average are more cooperative
[...but] Competitiveness and self reliance can be
valuable traits and we shouldn't necessarily
disadvantage those that have themWhat does that have to do with his credibility or his arguments? His arguments stand on its own merits. Externalities has no bearing on argument. If he said 1+1=2 and then retweeted a breitbart article, does that mean 1+1 no longer equal 2?
Examples:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/14/haidt-google-memo-c...
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why...
So? Are you saying you disagree? Then state your case.
> his active association with them makes the claim that the memo was a good-faith attempt to improve diversity rather hard to swallow.
Why does it make it hard to swallow? What does damore stating a fact that women being more predisposed to more social careers rather than engineering have anything to do with his stance on diversity? Are you saying that men should be forced out of engineering and women should be forced into it?
So should we take over norway, get rid of women's rights and force the norwegian women to go into engineering?
> http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/14/haidt-google-memo-c....
That link is about an NYU professor who says data and analysis backs up damore's claim.
> http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why....
A lot of good points there.
This sounds like a really lazy way fo reasoning.
Damore cherry-picked Wikipedia articles to claim women are biologically inferior with the intent of causing an uproar, that's not at all "well-meaning".
Buried deep, deep down, he had somewhat of a point, but it wasn't at all the point he was trying to argue for.
How would you imagine those folks educate themselves? Easily, by relying on the abundant resources available to them. The internet, books, youtube, etc. There's a ton of material out there, if you actually care, if you think it's important to educate yourself the resources are available. He did not do that, because he wasn't seeking to inform himself, he was seeking to advance an agenda, to encourage others to adopt a prejudice that he held.
Also, I'm getting really sick and tired of these comments that bemoan the fates that have befallen these individuals who have substantially brought it upon themselves and give short shrift to the impact they've had on others. Damore was "merely asking questions" but the questions he was asking were things like "do women deserve to be the equals of men in this field?" and so forth. As both google management and the judge here have correctly pointed out, communicating in that way is incredibly damaging. It's unprofessional, it's discriminatory on its face, and it has no place in a modern work environment. The man is a grown-up, he should be smart enough to know how to broach a difficult subject of conversation if he is seeking to learn more about it or to explore controversial topics. Similarly, you can't just blunder into a discussion about race relations in the 21st century by leading off with questions like "are people of color equal to whites?" or "was slavery really wrong?" Because, again, those are on their face discriminatory, exclusionary, and harmful.
And to claim that Damore was in any way trying to advance the cause of diversity is just plain counter-factual. It is clear, especially after the end of his google employment, that he has a much different agenda.
Doubly so for Google.
Not because “how can you find the time” is an excuse, but because it’s a symptom of the problem. We have an industry that enables people with no sense of perspective. It’s not just the outliers that need to ‘wake uo’. It’s on all of us.
He didn't ask whether women deserved to be equals and just the fact that you think that shows just how ignorant many commentators are in this case.
If you actually are interested in hearing his version of the story, not just your own wrongly informed and biased one here is a good interview to provide you with some of the proper contexts. Then tell me what exactly it is that he has done wrong.
I also take umbrage with his civil suit against Google because it amounts to no more than a document meant to doxx google employees by revealing their names and political positions ranging from benign to the more 'punch nazis' level of discourse. There was selective censorship applied such that people he agreed with were protected, while people he disagreed with were brought out in front of the crowd. I have seen pictures floating around designed to make it easy to effectively target said employees facebook, twitter etc accounts.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Damore is more of the same. Take, for example, his invocation of studies showing that women are more prone to be "neurotic." Aside from the fact that "neurotic" covers an immense range of personality traits--Damore leaves it as an exercise for the reader why that would be a bad thing. Among other things, "neurotic" encompasses "obsessive compulsive" or "anxious." Why isn't that a good trait in a programmer--someone who needs to be constantly on the lookout for the errant buffer overflow? He also invokes the idea that women are less able to handle "stressful" situations. Which explains why nurses--who are literally dealing with life and death every day--are mostly women? It's not that there isn't evidence of differences in personality traits between men and women, it's that all the inferences after "infant boys prefer trucks" is complete handwaving.
Back in the day, people would, with the pretense of science, invoke differences in cranial measurements to explain the economic plight of African Americans. Damore's is just the latest in a long line of pseudo-scientific gibberish. And it blows my mind that so many in the tech community are falling for it. You actually have to be bad at logical reasoning to find Damore's points compelling.
Note that he isn't saying that women do have these traits; they are saying that on average, they are more likely to. In this example, O'Connor would just be one of the ones to not have them.
Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or are males simply genetically more predisposed to rape relative to females?
If males are genetically more likely to rape, should we lock them all up at birth? I guess not?
With the biological explanation, we have evidence of certain gender differences, and we have evidence of disparities in representation, but we have no theory of how the two are causally linked. That’s the hallmark of pseudo-science. Say we know that women are more cooperative than men. What does that mean for programming? Is programming inherently less cooperative than fields like accounting where there are more women than men? What is the sensitivity of programming choice to differences in “cooperativeness?” The biggest confounder is that while we have scientfic studies associating genders with traits, we have nothing linking traits with professions. That’s where Damore’s memo goes off the rails into handwaving and begging the question: he repeatedly assumes that because men are over represented in programming, that programming is necessarily characterized by male traits. (E.g. thing oriented versus people oriented: why does Goldman Sachs have more women creating abstract financial instruments than many tech companies have creating social apps?)
That wasn't the reality of it, of course. Those women were doing massive amounts of the work around the logic of the systems.
But there was a hierarchy, and everyone knew it. Wasn't until the 70s and 80s that things turned into a man's world. Once people figured out that there were hard problems to solve and plenty of opportunities to yell, "Yeah! We Really Fucked that problem in the ass!" Yeah, right about that time, the women started leaving.
My mom's roommate didn't quit NASA until she retired quite nicely in 1995. And by that time it was a very different place.
You can laugh and mock someone who started with punch cards all you want, and maybe even think she's a dinosaur who didn't keep up. But this woman taught me assembly, C, Lisp, C++, SQL, and Python. Not too shabby for a punchcard programmer from the 50s. I'd say she kept up just fine.
But boy, did she want out of that environment. She was not a happy camper by the time the 90s rolled around.
The thing you aren't getting is that it's the people on the ground who did a lot of the work to make programming languages not suck.
In fact, it was almost embarrassing for a man if he knew how to type since that was women's work.
So I'm sure that played a role once keyboard came into the picture.
Before that, when it was mostly punchcards, women were manual "computers" that did the calculations. So it seems reasonable that computers were considered women's work and thus that drive the trend.
Whether women were more or less suited to the job wouldn't seem to be relevant at the time.
I would say "more or less preferred" is a more relevant and less acerbic metric to consider.
I think James Damore's main thesis (or one of his main theses) was that men had more of a natural and biologically driven preference to work with things/machines. So if women were placed in these positions, it detracts from the narrative that "something mysterious happened in the 80s that caused women to flee the computer industry".
When ceos started realizing the potential social and economic power of the magic typing box it was no longer socially taboo for men to operate them. Of course, no self respecting business elite man would use one, only dirty hippie social rejects.
That's what makes the whole thing extra sad. For the longest time silicon valley types had to deal with being social outcasts in the business world. Rather than learn from that to be more inclusive they just took up the mantle of the business elite they replaced and perpetuated the same system of prejudice. In fact now that I think about it part of excluding women from the profession might have been an attempt at self preservation. Early tech people knew they were already looked down upon, if they didn't amp up the sexism to make it clear they were real men they would look even weaker to their east coast elite superiors.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. It doesn't matter how well they "performed". What matters is: would they have chosen that profession if they weren't placed there? Could it be that men preferred computer-related careers more than women did? If so, then the fact that many women were placed in those careers initially is completely irrelevant to the question of why there aren't a lot of women in those careers now.
>that these differences may [emphasis added] explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership
And he says one of the differences is a higher drive for status. That is one way it could change without the 80's thing being counter-evidence, if the status of practitioners and/or leadership in the field changed for some reason (maybe Bill Gates becoming the richest man in the world).
I'm not saying that I agree with him, or that the status drive difference is true, or that it would actually be an explanation for the difference from the 80s to now (Bill Gates might have lowered the status of the field for being socially awkward). I'm only saying that your counter argument may not work because he couched his statement in "may" and he talks about meta-level factors around the field.
But isn’t the opposite true as well? I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the IT department was at the bottom of the organisational pecking order, sometimes literally at the bottom in a dingy, windowless basement, and jokes about nerds and geeks and personal hygiene and poor fashion choices and so on were totally mainstream and acceptable. In those days, no-one said it was problematic that these losers and social lepers tended to skew male.
Obviously, everyone should be free to do any work that they want to and show an aptitude for. But you posit a one-way traffic that just isn't true.
Effect: wages rise
Effects of that effect: men choose the job, and respect increases
Alternatively, that the nature of software work changed.
It seems to me like the nature of the work hasn't even dramatically changed in the first place.
There was only a short exception around the PC boom and the dotcom boom, when the proportion of women choosing to study it actually increased, and then fell down again once the boom was gone. This is similar to what the Scandinavian countries found in trying to encourage women to go into engineering: when they stop the campaigns, women's participation drops back to baseline.
But rather than look at the complete picture, only the gender ratio graph is ever shown, because that's the one that confirms the preconception that women are being victimized. This "drop", by the way, only exists at the bachelor level, and vanishes at the masters and PhD level, which suggests there is nothing driving committed and talented women out of the field at all.
But even if you didn't think all of the above is valid, it is preposterous to posit that the biological differences argument implies women must've somehow changed in the mid 80s. There is a much simpler explanation: computer science itself changed, and how it relates to industry. With the birth of PCs and especially SaaS, the amount of hard CS skills required to make computers do useful things dropped pretty much to zero. Only people with a particular theorical and abstract interest need to go into it. At the same time, software development pioneered many of the async and remote working styles that are common place in open source, and which allow for individualistic collaboration rather than the always-on social setting that women prefer. You see this in engineering too. Women gravitate towards engineering subjects that feature more team work, field work and lab work, and which involve working with people. The increased appeal of the field for men could be due to the fact that a segment of people previously tortured by social styles could now excel in a more solitary setting.
None of this is a taboo when it is used to imply that women's communication and empathy skills are innately superior, a common refrain in diversity circles. But try to make the same argument about men and their abstraction skills, at a population level, and suddenly you're blaspheming against the church of intersectionality.
The double standards and shoddy science are obvious, and the NLRB should be ashamed for rendering a judgment that declares reality to be sexist because some people's feelings were hurt. The only person who got actually victimized was Damore himself, for the crime of taking diversity advocates at their word, and actually offering them the feedback they claim to want, but clearly are incapable of processing.
Women weren't becoming less represented in CS over time, because they were never welcomed in graduate programs in the first place
http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/05/08/gender-gap-in-...
The point of discussion is whether there has been a drastic reduction in female participation in CS since the early 80s. This is a point that is commonly brought up, based on the graph of the gender _ratio_ of degrees conferred (which is dominated by bachelor's degrees).
As this ratio has dropped only because the absolute male numbers have increased, it is unfair to attribute that to a reduction in female participation.
I never said anything about equal gender balance, in fact, I strongly believe anyone who aims for a 50/50 gender ratio in STEM has embarked on a quest for a holy grail that can never be found, for the same reason social workers and nursing will never be 50/50 gender balanced. The only way to get close is to actively discriminate against the people most interested in it, and this is both stupid and immoral.
By the way, during those crucial 80s and 90s, computer tech was strongly associated with geeks and nerds, and the popular image was that of socially inept rejects. But now all that has been retconned as women being discriminated against, because the hard work of those nerds has turned it into a lucrative and prestiguous discipline. The idea that women weren't welcomed is preposterous, those men and the communities they built have always been infatuated with any woman who considered them worthy of respect, and a minority of women have always been part of it too.
Or that computer science, and programming, started to change around 1984, which is not at all implausible.
Also, in the article you linked there is a good observation:
> The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.
Which coincides with the time in which programming became a hobby you take up in childhood because you enjoy doing it, rather than a profession like any other. In other words, this could hint to a self-selection into a computer science career based on pure enjoyment of the activity as a child.
(The article instead suggests computers were marketed mainly as toys for boys- which is also not implausible, but doesn't explain why tech companies would have willingly cut themselves off half of the possible revenues of their product- I bet a 100% increase in sales would beat any prejudice).
This article has an alternative explanation as for why:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Without implying there was any biological change at all - rather that other fields that were shut off to women (medicine, law etc) become more open.
It's a long read, but provides some interesting food for thought.
For example the following claim made by the author:
>Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming!
Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him seriously.
[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
How about some references for your second paragraph. I've seen statistics floating around proving you wrong...
There are many comments that classify his memo as anti-diversity (it is pro diversity), and there are many that seem to suggest that the memo claimed women are less suited for these jobs, which again is patently false to anyone who gives it a reasonable and full read.
The injustice here is that this employee was taken to a workshop/seminar, was asked for feedback, which he submitted, and was ignored. His firing only came when his memo was leaked to the public and it became the subject of a media witch hunt.
Had the memo not been public, he would still be working there. This was not a planned firing and there was nothing normal about it. The CEO cancelled his vacation to return to HQ and address the situation caused by the media outcry.
This is a cancerous cultural problem that manifests the worst forms of censorious and authoritarian practices of dictatorial regimes of the past. Diversity at this cost is not worth it. Nothing is worth this kind of environment that is openly hostile and punitive to "wrongthink".
People of various backgrounds are not tokens to be planted into various positions to fulfill some fetish or misguided sense of justice. Under-representation by a specific group or sub group is not sufficient evidence of discrimination or a conspiracy. Deeming programs and opportunities unavailable to people because they don't have the correct biological trait is disgusting, and the ends do not justify the means. To argue that favoring someone because they belong to a special genetic group is rooted in the very "essentialist" thinking that is claimed to be chastised.
There is a better solution to these issues, and at this rate it will never be found. Ironic that some of the world's most innovative people who have no problem bouncing from one design pattern to another, are perfectly content with an approach to a point that criticism of it will get you fired.
Of course, this is expected since the first ones to complain about growing equality are the ones who prospered disproportionately under inequality.
To constantly read about cases where biology determines whether or not people are eligible for a particular opportunity, i.e. imposing inequality of opportunity in order to arrive at equality of outcome, is violating the very principles one claims to be opposed to. The excuse for this kind of implementation is that it is justified, in order to fix historical inequality. The people who are being discriminated against had no say in historical inequality. They were born into this kind of a society by accident of birth. If a young boy in Saudi Arabia goes to get a driving license and is told that he is no longer eligible because they have decided to randomly reject 4/5 male applicants to correct for historical injustice, he is being penalized for something he had nothing to do with. When a young boy is rejected for a job he is qualified for, citing the fact that he is the wrong sex, he is being penalized for something he had nothing to do with. Nobody should be at a disadvantage imposed on them by others using biology as a reason to do so. This is immoral, and no outcome is worth this kind of violation of principle.
I am from India, and I know bias when I see it. Classism and racism is systemic in India and whether you want to believe me or not, a person from a religion or upper caste will prefer a person from the same group. I am not going to claim that this exact same thing happens in the US, but I will not believe that it doesn't happen at all.
The thing is that the memo even mentions the problems with inherent bias, and then mentions that we need to have "open" dialogue.
The open dialogue is hard to happen when one group has been suppressed for generations.
What are you going to tell them? - Ok, we are sorry for what we have done, now we are going to be equal and you can compete for the same things? One group is dirt poor and disadvantaged, and the other has always enjoyed enough wealth to get proper education. How is that level playing field?
Minorities need to be given a hand up, at least for a generation to really make a level playing field.
As for your examples, yes, it's unfair, but that's what the under privileged group got told for generations. I guess life really is unfair.
In isolation, yes, you are very right. But history is anything but that, and there is always a context and reason for why things are the way they are.
I am from India, and I know bias when I see it. Classism and racism is systemic in India and whether you want to believe me or not, a person from a religion or upper caste will prefer a person from the same group. I am not going to claim that this exact same thing happens in the US, but I will not believe that it doesn't happen at all.
The thing is that the memo even mentions the problems with inherent bias, and then mentions that we need to have "open" dialogue.
The open dialogue is hard to happen when one group has been supressed for generations.
What are you going to tell them? - Ok, we are sorry for what we have done, now we are going to be equal and you can compete for the same things? One group is dirt poor and disatvantaged, and the other has always enjoyed enough wealth to get proper education. How is that level playing field?
Minorities need to be given a hand up, at least for a generation to really make a level playing field.
Perhaps you men "snark-hunt".
Men were not the target of witch hunts because they were the "incorrect" sex.
Today, in cases where merit seemingly takes a backseat to diversity, men are the "incorrect" sex for some opportunities, like say if you want to speak at a node.js conference, or attend some special mentoring workshop. The opposite is not true, if you are not a man, there are no instances that I am aware of where you are openly denied or discouraged from pursuing an opportunity for that reason alone.
Damore's California lawsuit, which per the first page of the complaint, lists the below causes of action under various California laws, is unaffected.
CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT:
1. Violation of Cal. Labor Code § 1101
2. Violation of Cal. Labor Code § 1102
3. Workplace Discrimination on the basis of Gender and/or Race in Violation of FEHA
4.Workplace Harassment in Violation of FEHA
5.Retaliation in Violation of FEHA
6.Retaliation in Violation of Public Policy
7.Retaliation in Violation of Cal. Lab. Code § 1102.5
8.Failure To Prevent Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation
9.Unfair Business Practices, Bus. & Prof. Code Section 17200 et seq
10.Declaratory Relief
All the other observed comments about liberal/conservative/libertarian views are frankly not very interesting. The bottom line to me is that he didn't have a strong enough claim to unfair dismissal.
Court did its job. Move on.
He's stupid. Something like liberal/conservative is totally unrelated, indeed.
Only in the way that union organizers and whistle blowers are stupid.
They say that "discriminatory statements are not protected". Is "discriminatory statement" a matter of law or a matter of fact? Naively I'd expect a jury to decide if a statement is discriminatory.
So I really don't expect such discussions to be high quality. I think it has merit that it can happen at all, but my feeling is that much of the discussion swirling around the Damore memo is training wheels level discussion.
And yes, I've read it. Just because he wrote some sentences that claimed he's in favor of diversity doesn't magically change the content of the rest of the memo.
If he was truly arguing in good faith, he should've stuck to actual, demonstrable examples of issues or problems caused by the existing diversity practices. There was no need to go on long rambling tangents about population statistics that even he acknowledges aren't really relevant to the topic:
> "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."
You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc
There was no need to go on long rambling tangents about population statistics that even he acknowledges aren't really relevant to the topic
It's certainly relevant. The "jury is still out" in terms of biology and gender preferences and how those are modulated by culture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
(Seriously, watch that, and tell me which side is intellectually open and honest, and which side comes across as ideologues.)
> "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."
You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.
"Seems to be implying." You are essentially admitting to an ideologically skewed, imputational reading.
"Men’s higher drive for status
"We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
"Status is the primary metric that men are judged on4, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. 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."
I pity those poor men, forced into high-paying, high-status, but unsatisfying jobs like programming, management, coal mining, and garbage collection.
That's the point.
It's a proxy for the nature / nurture debate.
I put my vote token in the nature side. Women can do what ever men can and persisting the ideas that they can't sucks.
That is my opinion and I am unwilling to change it.
Just talking about some things is enough to imply unintended conclusions. That's how it works in the real world no matter how hard you want to play Mr. Logic. To believe otherwise is extremely naive and puts you in serious danger, as Damore found out.
Opinions based around differences in human biology have a really bad historical track record. Groups and institutions have built up a natural vomit reflex for when they show up. Many might argue that this is a suppression of the truth but they also have to appreciate that that suppression might be in service of a greater good.
It took us a lot of years to get to the point where we could go furniture shopping and communicate constructively in order to agree on a purchase instead of fighting about who would win this one. We often were focused on entirely different attributes in our decision making process. For example, attractiveness of a bookshelf might be my focus. Sturdiness might be his.
Once we got past knee jerk rejection of each other's first pick, it was entirely possible to find a bookshelf that satisfied both his criteria and mine. But that required us to be able to communicate effectively, something we didn't have mastered when we got married at age 19.
When you do surveys, you find that the majority of people are both antiabortion and pro choice at the same time. Most people feel that abortion should be a last resort, not standard birth control. But they also feel a woman should have control over her body and her life and should not need to prove she was raped to choose to terminate a pregnancy.
Pollsters with a political agenda know this. They can survey the same people about the same issue and come up with data to support either antiabortion laws or pro choice laws depending on how they ask the questions.
Most people are not monoliths and not rabidly polarized along X social fault lines. The inability to safely talk to "the other side" means people can't learn to speak in a more nuanced way and can't build bridges.
I'm not 19 anymore. I see no reason to pick bookshelf A while hubby picks bookshelf B and we fight about who gets what they want. I am much more interested these days in finding out why he likes B, talking about why I like A and then looking for a third option that is satisfactory to both of us.
Society benefits when people can find a safe sandbox to begin that communication process. It does not have to be a case of which side wins and which side loses.
Members seems to be expressing views that are intrinsic to their identities. To that end, no one has an open mind on the subject.
Even I genuinely don't have an open mind on the subject!
These discussions and disagreements will only serve to cement the existing views of members.
She is a brilliant software engineer who switched out of CS into another major, despite having top grades.
I finally caved and asked her to read the original memo.
Whilst she found the memo interesting, she mentioned this is the view of a single person and found it ridiculous that it caused such an outcry.
She is all for diversity in tech (and for all industries for that matter) and pointed out that the hypersensitivity nature of CS causes much harm than good.
While we are busy doing roundabout discussions regarding a memo, personal data of millions of people are being leaked, privacy and security of people are in jeopardy because we fail to make high quality software.
It truly sadden both of us that the brilliant minds in our Industry are focused on what should/should not be written in a personal memo, than actually pushing the boundaries of software.
When a thought provoking community such as HN calls for arms every time this topic comes up and turns into a battlefield, I do wonder whether we have already lost the fight for TRUE diversity.
> Women are more prone to “neuroticism,” resulting in women experiencing higher anxiety and exhibiting lower tolerance for stress, which “may contribute to . . . the lower number of women in high stress jobs”;
> Men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women, such that there are more men at both the top and bottom of the distribution. Thus, posited, the Employer’s preference to hire from the “top of the curve” may result in a candidate pool with fewer females than those of “less-selective” tech companies.
you can also find the full damore memo online.
I checked Damore's Twitter account, and he has not yet made a statement on this, perhaps wisely following his lawyer's advice.
from the NLRB Memo: "[Damore's] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers."
Interesting. The Board completely dismissed the scientific arguments, even going so far as to put quotes around "scientific". They didn't accept that he was making scientific statements at all! It's not clear whether they understood that Damore used "neuroticism" as a specific and uncontroversial psychological term, and not in the folk meaning of "crazy". I'm going to suppose no, since their qualifiers "heightened neuroticism" and "more prone to neuroticism" don't come from Damore's memo, and imply the "crazy" connotation.
These are completely qualified folks, for the job of junior engineer. We purposely, from the category of all qualified junior applicants, hired those that also were from less represented groups.
Is this perceived (by “you”, I suppose) as “acceptable”?
I can't believe you were downvoted for expressing that merit rather than race and gender should be use for hiring decisions.
This is the new world we unfortunately live in. Words and their meanings are transformed to fit within the ideology ("it isn't discrimination if it favors women over men, or minorities over whites...")...
I have first hand experience with this. As a normal working-class white guy with poor parents and no connections (I worked my way through school), I had a hard time even landing an interview at first. As a social experiment, I changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, kept everything else on my resume the same, and reapplied to all the jobs that didn't want me previously. Every single company that rejected Joe was overjoyed when Joanna applied. In every case I got a email within the week wanting to meet and interview me. It was kind of eye-opening. I didn't follow through as "Joanna" because the sexist hiring policies were enough to put me off working at these companies entirely. I eventually found an employer that wasn't sexist and have been happy with them so far...
IANAL, but from my understanding making hiring decisions based on race, gender or religion is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But I really don't know what I am talking about and would be interested in hearing a lawyer's opinion.
There were other legitimate points in his claim that should be addressed too. You simply can't discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. And if people are outright saying that, that's a problem.
Is he a jackass? Yes. Did he do something obnoxious with that memo? Yes. Fire him for that. Which they did. Totally fine with that.
But if the real culture at google is as described, that's something that needs to come to light in discovery. I would have preferred for this to move forward so we can see some light on things.
The problem here isn't with Damore's "theory." It's whether or not there is a pervasive, race-based bias.
My suspicion is that there isn't really anything in practice. Yeah, maybe some dude does some virtue signalling every once in a while. But in reality, I can't actually believe a competent HR team would let that happen on a systematic level.
The chances are he would've been shown to be wrong. So it's too bad this didn't go past this stage.
The difference between being cast out and being celebrated is that the latter keeps their opinions to themselves. This guy self-immolated for foolishness.
> The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these cases. statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
The "these cases" reference is talking about a KKK member and someone who "made debasing and sexually abusive remarks to a female employee who had crossed a picket line months earlier". I don't see how Damore's memo is at all relatable to these.
And more importantly, the content they found to be discriminatory were the studies on differences in IQ and psycological traits by gender? How can presenting science be discriminatory?
If you disagree with some study, you explain why the methodology it used is bad or find other studies that try to explain it. You don't just claim that it's findings are discriminatory. That makes it impossible to discover why it's wrong (if it is).
[0] (PDF) http://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391
The important thing to remember is that in most of the US, there's a presumption that employers can fire you for any reason. Employment is at-will. Damore was appealing to a specific exception to that rule.
The question should have been "What is Damore advocating?".
And if they read the entire document then it would be clear that Damore was suggesting methods to bring Google's gender balance to 50/50 by making Google (and tech in general) more attractive to women by altering the software engineering culture to leverage inherent strengths that women (on average) possess.
>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.
People should get fired for not doing their jobs -- not for writing what they think. And I also want to say that before you blame "the Left" for Google's behavior... Had he been fired in "Socialist Europe," the firing would have been declared against the law and Google would have had to pay a hefty fine.
I can add why I'm so sure he wouldn't have been fired. In most (many?) European countries, you can be fired for only(!) two reasons; misconduct and labor shortage. Misconduct must be specifically related to your job performance. Like, a train conductor that always oversleeps or a cock who can't boil eggs. Something quite a bit more obvious than claiming gender differences between men and women. Labor shortage is if there is not enough work to do and then the company can let go of the surplus personnel.
The walkthrough of the US laws, that tptacek provides, shows that they are completely different and much less employee friendly.
People don't just get fired for not doing their jobs. If I bully a co-worker or start stating at work that I think someone is less capable for any reason linked to their biology, religion, sexuality or age I will be putting my job at risk. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's worked in a professional environment for any amount of time (or heck, even a fresh graduate who bothered to read the company handbook!).
That's an extremely strong claim that does not match my experience and will highly depend on the company, which country in Europe, etc. For instance I've seen explicitly sexist things happening in French companies, and have had many more related to me by friends and family. My mother works for a large European oil company, and has witnessed execs telling women in meetings to shut up and go back to being secretaries. None of these examples resulted in firing.
And honestly, while Europe is indeed socialist in many ways policy wise, in many places it is far from as progressive as the coastal US. I'd much rather be LGBTQ in San Francisco or New York than Paris or Barcelona. Hell, I have several European female coworkers who have explicitly told me that they do not intend on ever working there ever again because the culture is significantly more sexist than SF/LA/Seattle/NYC.
But again, Europe is big. Paris or Madrid are much more hostile than Berlin or Stockholm in these ways.
He didn't really say women were less capable, though (biologically or otherwise).
He said that there are differences not related to capability, and that the current environment in tech is such that the work environment is more acceptable to people on the "male" side of those differences, which makes capable women less likely to go into or stay in tech. To increase diversity he suggested that we need to make the tech environment more friendly to women.
For example, he said that men on average are more competitive, and women more cooperative, and that women tend to value work-life balance more then men, and men tend to value status more. There's a fair bit of scientific literature supporting those claims. (To what extent these differences are biological rather than learned is less clear--but does it actually matter?)
Currently tech tends to favor competitive status seekers who will make their career the focus of their life (especially for management and leadership positions). Cooperative people who want a good work-life balance get left behind. He suggested Google move toward more pair programming and other cooperative ways of doing things, and make it so that it is easier for employees to balance their outside life with work. That should get more women coming into tech and increase the retention rate.
It is worth reading the actual memo if you have not. A very large amount of the discussion of it has been based on what people imagined it said, not what it actually said.
Do you think it's possible for his stating of his opinion to have side effects like creating a toxic work environment, which would be the antithesis of doing his job well?
The fact that Google has not addressed this is a more damning condemnation of their culture than anything else.
I also believe all the google employees that physically threatened damore should receive jail time, and those that verbally did so to get the can.
Moreover, what Damore got fired for would be very likely qualified as a gross misconduct here. He was advocating stuff that would go straight against the anti-discrimination laws which are standard Europa-wide. It could be perhaps qualified even as incitement to hate or discrimination against certain groups of population which is actually a crime - typically used to prosecute racism, antisemitism, hate speech against LGBT groups, etc. but not only.
Hate speech laws are MUCH stricter in Europe than in the US, lots of the stuff that is fair game in the US is routinely prosecuted here. And committing a crime (you don't even need to be convicted yet, being indicted is often sufficient) is a valid reason for termination pretty much anywhere in Europe.
"Employment at will does not exist in France. So, you may only dismiss an employee for specific reasons. The specific reasons must be recognized by French Law or French case law.
Employment at will does not exist in France. So, you may only dismiss an employee for specific reasons. The specific reasons must be recognized by French Law or French case law.
If the dismissal is challenged by an employee, the company will have to prove that dismissal was based on "genuine and substantive grounds".
Also, employers need to be careful about applicable dismissal procedures."
See also the sections POSSIBLE GROUNDS FOR DISMISSAL and DISMISSAL BASED ON PERSONAL REASONS. Of course, it is still possible for companies to get rid of unwanted employees, they just have to be smart about it. Common methods include assigning only menial tasks to employees or setting up inconvenient work schedules so that they leave voluntarily. Or reorganizing departments so that they become redundant. But outright firing people for no justification is not possible.
Committing, or being indicted of, committing crime is generally not enough for terminating an employee either. For example, speeding is a crime but not grounds for dismissal.
Someone ELSE then disseminated it more widely (Internally and externally).
[1] I cannot find any citations on this right now though, google-fu appears to be failing me.
Even if the employer could show that the manifesto caused a toxic work environment (hard), and that that was also Demore's intent (even harder), the employer would also need to show that they had tried to resolve the situation with other means. For example, by asking Demore not to publish similar manifestos in the future. Had he then refused to comply, their case would have been stronger.
Not even the examples I gave -- a cock not able to boil eggs, a train conductor always oversleeping or an active member of a Nazi party -- are completely clear cut in all countries. And Damore's manifesto is very, very far from it.
“People should get fired for not doing their jobs”
When you’re hired to write code all day and instead are writing a long sexist rambling memo at work during work hours and posting it to a work forum, you’re not doing your job.
Given how significantly many people have misunderstood Damore's claims, this seems to open up a hole for companies to mischaracterize someone as a racist/sexist/etc and then fire them over it.
People really did exaggerate how bad the memo really was. That said, it definitely has portions that brought up stereotypes without citing direct evidence, like how men have a higher drive to achieve status. Google considered these statements "discriminatory," which sounded reasonable enough to the NLRB. It doesn't matter whether these statements were actually discriminatory because they clearly fall outside the bounds of protected speech.
No, it doesn't.
Because the interpretation of the firing company doesn't determine the legality. Whether, on the evidence, a firing is solely due to actually legally unprotected statements (not statements that the employer chooses to misconstrue as unprotected) is.
Like, sure, a manager could wake up and just fire you because they were grumpy. But if it is discovered that there was internal communications about their political opinions leading up to it, then there would be a case.
If the NRLA believes only parts of Damore's memo were working towards improving working conditions and other parts were working to discriminate against women, which part is which.
To someone that agrees with Damore, it looks like everyone mischaracterized his effort to improve working conditions as sexism. Then Google was able to use that as cover to fire him for protected organizing.
But, I haven't read exactly what the NRLA found to be discriminatory. This would help anyone that is legitimately trying to improve working conditions and trying not to promote discrimination.
Every time the memo is brought up I see this same shit, and feel someone needs to call it out. I don’t care what side you are on; how we are going about this conversation is clearly not working. I wish I had a solution for this. I don’t. But understanding that there is a problem may be a good first step.
We must be better than this
You are ready to assign equal blame, when there are unequal incentives.
This Advice Memo establishes the precedent that discussing biological differences between men and women constitutes sexual harassment, even if those differences are supported by scientific research.