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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

48 employees over a 2 year span is nothing. How many employees has Google had in that time? It is probably at least 100,000. We are talking about less than 0.05% of the workforce. I don't know what percentage of the general workforce has committed sexual harassment (I have seem the victim rate as high as 20%), but 0.05% is insanely low. Either Google employees commit sexual harassment at an incredibly low rate or they are punished for it at an incredibly low rate. My money is on the latter.

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> It is probably at least 100,000.

no need to guess. the second quarter results for alphabet inc says 89,058 employees.

https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2018Q2_alphabet_earnings_releas...

We are talking about a time frame that starts in 2016. Therefore anyone who worked for Google during that span should count and not just current employees.

It’s specifically 48 employees that were at the senior manager level or higher. It’s got to be much higher than that if all levels were included.

No. 48 "including 13 senior managers".

0.05% is not insanely low for something as specific as sexual harassment.

If 1 in 2000 is insanely low, how much would 'low' be, and how much would 'average' be? No environment should deal with whatever you think the average amount of sexual harassment is.

This is in comparison to the real world. It's not intended as some ideal to strive for.

And what are the stats in the _real world_?

You are comparing perp w/ victim stats. You are also comparing female victimization rates w/ Google's population (only 30% female, even less in higher levels where most of these 48 get dismissed from). I also think there are ~90K employees.

One dude can harass lots of women (as is usually the case). These 48 could have very easily been responsible for 20+ incidents each. And there are probably many more perps who have gone unpunished.

That said, male Google employees are probably less likely to sexually harass. They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).

Edit: I shouldn't have used a word like masculine, whose definition is largely debated. I meant masculine in the hormonal sense.

> They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).

Not a fan of you making this up based on perceived stereotypes and then using it to justify an argument. I do agree that these numbers are complicated and require analysis on data that we probably don't have access to.

I'm curious why you think I am making this up. Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression. Anyone who is employed to write code and work with computers works a sedentary job.

I don't think it is a ridiculous notion that your average Googler will be nerdier or smarter than the average man. And I hope that just because "low-testosterone" is used as an insult by alt-right losers, you don't associate me with that group or characterize my comment as troll-y.

Google has quite a few ripped masculine employees doing dev work in Mountain View... They have to stay in good shape if only for their brains to continue working at the highest level...

Yeah, I know some. I said "tendency" for a reason. People in this thread seem to think I said "every and without exception".

Get used to it ;-) You can still have some good discussions with people that captured all the shades of your statements properly.

Yeah sry if I came off aggressive man. Everyone in this thread misinterpreting what I said probably reflects more on ME than them. I need to get better at writing...

I take it that you didn't mean to, but you effectively trolled this thread by tossing flamebait into an inflammatory topic. Please don't do that in the future.

If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

I think it's a hasty jump to make assumptions about the biology of people based on their job description. Plenty of engineers I work with exercise regularly. I'm curious, do you have any links to research correlating sedentary jobs and testosterone levels?

You are just digging your grave deeper here. Don't assume high testosterone = must be a blue collar worker or sumpin. That's basically classist BS.

Pushing code because it is one of the highest paid professions in the world right now and exercises real power could be construed as aggressive as hell on the face of it. There's a reason people bitch about "brogrammer" culture. Even if you ignore that, desk jockeys aren't all sedentary losers. Plenty are buff and pursue Manly Man (TM) activities in their off hours, like sports, martial arts, etc.

You are the only one who has associated a sedentary job with being a loser or a blue class job with high testosterone. I'd appreciate if you didn't put words in my mouth.

You seem to be misconstruing a "tendency" for an "absolute blanket on all"

I didn't use the word loser.

> Even if you ignore that, desk jockeys aren't all sedentary losers

You're right. You used the word "loserS"

My bad. I guess I did.

OP said

> They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).

and

> Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression. Anyone who is employed to write code and work with computers works a sedentary job.

> I don't think it is a ridiculous notion that your average Googler will be nerdier or smarter than the average man. And I hope that just because "low-testosterone" is used as an insult by alt-right losers, you don't associate me with that group or characterize my comment as troll-y.

At no point did OP say:

> Don't assume high testosterone = must be a blue collar worker or sumpin.

Your statement isn't even the inverse of OP's statement. The only one that said that is you.

> Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression. Anyone who is employed to write code and work with computers works a sedentary job

How is it unreasonable to infer from this that "Obviously, high testosterone guys must work physical jobs" (often called blue collar jobs)? What jobs should I infer are the opposite of sedentary?

How is it reasonable TO infer that? If the claim is that sedentary jobs lower testosterone, it does not follow that non-sedentary jobs raise testosterone. If A => B, the statement NOT A => NOT B is not necessarily true. That's just rudimentary logic.

My question is "What's the opposite of a sedentary job? Is it or is it not a physical job, AKA a blue collar job?"

I do not see where OP said sedentary jobs lower testosterone. I do not see any statement clarifying the exact nature of the presumed relationship between testosterone levels and job type.

Perhaps I missed that?

Google has a lot of right wingers. They just are closeted about it. Doesn’t make them “losers”.

Dude, how did you get "right-wingers are losers and there are none at Google" from "low-test is an insult used by ALT-right losers"? I wasn't talking about political leaning of Google employees at all.

I seriously gotta get better with my words lol. Everyone in this thread seems to be getting a different meaning out of what I said.

I see that several of your comments were taken backwards and sideways, and I extend my sympathy.

Your mistake is not your wording, which is perfectly clear, it's the erroneous choice of the topic article to engage, as that defines both the audience and the discourse manner.

I misunderstood you, but I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just some online discussion.

> Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression.

Testosterone is correlated to higher levels of aggression similar to how estrogen is correlated to emotional instability. It leads to false and rather crappy conclusions which misrepresent what hormones actually does to the human mind.

Modern research on testosterone show that higher levels increase the response that a man or woman has when their social status is challenged. If social status is maintained in a group through violence and aggression then those correlate to testosterone, but you can as easily have a company where productivity is the primary trait for social status and then testosterone levels will correlate to productivity when someone have their social status challenged.

From a biological perspective, this has a very basic reason. Testosterone goes up when the chance for procreation is high and it can be seen as a modulating effect that encourage the individual to hold on to the current beneficial social status. Aggression in itself is not an effective strategy for that goal and is only relevant if the local culture reward aggression.

Enough (of both genders) were creepy and assuming/entitled while I was there in 2010. Being more beta, they tended to have difficulty getting laid unless rich and were more open to using/abusing any pull they were perceived to have.

> That said, male Google employees are probably less likely to sexually harass. They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).

Citation for either point that Google employees are "less masculine" (whatever that means) or that being "less masculine" has something to do with being less likely to sexually harass?

Is your argument here that Google punishes a high percentage of sexual harassers but only after they have accrued 20+ victims? Is that meant as a defense of Google?

I would also object to that last paragraph for similar reasons that others in this thread have brought up.

Wow I really hope I did not come off as defending sexual harassers in any way. I think many might have thought this because of my last paragraph which seems troll-like. I can assure you I don't defend that behavior and am not trolling.

I am simply saying that your statistical analysis was flawed, because perpetrators can have multiple victims, and you had suggested, statistically, that one man fired means one woman harassed in one instance.

Also given low rates of sexual assault reporting, it is likely that by the time a report is made, and even more-so investigated, that the perp has been involved in multiple instances of sexual harassment.

I didn’t say you were defending harassers, but it seemed like you were downplaying this as a sign of a problem for Google. Either way, the stats are so low that you either need a large number or unpunished harassers or harassers need to victimize a large number of people before they are caught.

Your statement is similarly nuanced and accurate to those made by James Damore, although obviously not as thoroughly documented. Not meant as a slight or a compliment, just making an observation.

Tbh I’ve met a _lot_ of nerds who are complete creeps because they don’t understand shit and read some pickup artist’a blog

Add any sort of power dynamic to that mix and...

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