James Damore was fired for misogyny, which is not a valued viewpoint anywhere on the mainstream political spectrum.
* Claimed that female engineers are less capable than male engineers because of biology.
* Claimed that women and URM engineers at Google were hired despite not being qualified for the work.
* That the memo is "anti-diversity".
None of these were correct. The memo's arguments on biology were about male vs. female preferences. That is, men and women's rates of making career choices, not the effectiveness of men and women in the same career. Similarly, the memo did write that google's affirmative hiring processes "lower the bar by reducing the false negative rate" which is an accurate description of the company's diversity hiring initiatives (but most news outlets stripped out the words, "by reducing the false negative rate" leading readers to a false conclusion). And lastly, Damore laid of 5 bullet points outlining discriminatory policies that he argued should be abolished but also laid out 9 bullet points for non-discriminatory ways to promote diversity.
I have seen very few publications that agree with his firing that actually base their arguments on what was written in the memo. The fact that the memo circulated within Google for a month, but Damore was fired one business day after it was leaked to the media strongly suggests that it was the media coverage that resulted in Damore's firing and not the content of the memo itself.
I'm actually sympathetic to both Google and Damore in this situation. Damore's firing sucked for him, but the slanted (and at times, outright false) coverage put Google in a situation where not firing him would be a PR nightmare.
I guess some of them thought it wouldn't be good for the stock price and others just believed the outrage without reading for themselves?
1) Google does "diversity programs" to increase their number of female employees
2) These programs involve "lowering the bar" to help female applicants get into the company
True, he does not explicitly state that:
3) Therefore, current female applicants are likely to be less competent at their job than current male ones
But I fail to see how this isn't an obvious implication from 1) and 2). This is akin to people "merely asking" about the origin of the IQ gap between blacks and whites and acting shocked when accused of racism.
Note that he also played the same game with the following reasoning:
1) Women have higher degrees of neuroticism, leading to anxiety in high-stress situations
2) High-level positions are often ripe with stress
Again, he does not explicitly state that:
3) Therefore, female employees are less likely to be fit for high-level positions
But the implication is still clear as day. Defending yourself behind "but that's not what I said" doesn't work: people are not stupid and can connect the dots, even if they aren't willing to take your reasoning apart in order to show you why they think you're acting in bad faith. The "but it's all statistical, I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either: if I were to argue that men are more likely to be rapists than women (statistically true) and therefore companies should abstain from hiring men (or at the very least, quarantine them to be safe and avoid "false negatives") in order to reduce workplace rape, men would rightfully feel insulted and write me off as crazy. "You're more likely to be a rapist" is a lesser insult than "You're a rapist" but it's still one, and hiding behind the adverb "statistically" doesn't change that.
For your first alleged implication, remember he wrote that Google "lowered the bar by reducing the false negative rate." You're relying on deceptive quotations right off the bat. Regardless, the claim that discriminatory diversity programs that boost female applicants' chances of getting an offer necessarily implies that female candidates who get offers are less qualified is untrue. Say a company introduces a policy that when men pass all the interviews, the company flips a coin and if heads they get an offer and no offer if it's tails. Women just get an offer after passing the interviews. Does this discriminate in favor of women? Absolutely. Does this make the women who got offers less qualified? Only if you consider luck to be a qualification. Lastly, if Googlers were offended by a correct statement about the company's discriminatory hiring practices then they direct their offense to the recruiters or HR people that instituted those discriminatory practices.
Yet again, in the second purported implication you're trying to claim that Damore wrote that female employees are less fit. This is not correct on two points. One, Damore wasn't writing about Google employees or women in tech. He was writing about all women, worldwide. And second, he didn't write that they are less fit to be in high stress roles. He claimed that these thoroughly studied differences in personality make the average woman less likely to want to be in those roles. Again, Damore wrote about preferences - the things that affect the choices that people make - not fitness.
Your last paragraph is difficult to follow and stretches my willingness to assume you're participating in good faith:
> But the implication is still clear as day. Defending yourself behind "but that's not what I said" doesn't work: people are not stupid and can connect the dots, even if they aren't willing to take your reasoning apart in order to show you why they think you're acting in bad faith.
Because you're to connect the dots in a way that does not hold true. Your reasoning behind reaching these "implications" does not hold up to scrutiny. And in doing so, you're stuffing words into another person's mouth.
> The "but it's all statistical, I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either
Women that choose to go into technology aren't in the scope of what Damore is talking about. Female Googlers (at least, in engineering which is what Damore was writing about) are part of the section of women that want to go into technology. Damore is not writing about their ability or their preferences. He's writing about why the group of women that want to go into technology is smaller than the group of men that want to go into technology. This does not say anything about the former besides its relative size compared to the latter.
Let me put this in simpler terms: The majority of both men and women don't go into tech. Say 99% of men go into fields other than tech, and 99.75% of women go into fields other than tech. Men and women are nearly identical, almost all of them don't go into tech. Saying that small minority that do is larger among men as compared to women due to innate preferences is an explanation as to why we have 99% vs. 99.75%. It is making no statement, whatsoever, about the capability of the 0.25% of women and 1.0% of men that do go into tech.
> I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either: if I were to argue that men are more likely to be rapists than women (statistically true) and therefore companies should abstain from hiring men (or at the very least, quarantine them to be safe and avoid "false negatives") in order to reduce workplace rape, men would rightfully feel insulted and write me off as crazy. "You're more likely to be a rapist" is a lesser insult than "You're a rapist" but it's still one, and hiding behind the adverb "statistically" doesn't change that.
I'm a man, and I am not at all offended by that statement. It's factually correct. Whether or not I a rape a woman is something within my control, so I am not at all offended when people point out that men commit rape orders of magnitude more often than women. Saying "men are more likely to be a rapist" is not at all the same thing as saying "you're more likely to be a rapist" to individual men. In fact, not only am I not offended by such statements I would like to remind those men that do take offense to such a statement that it is factually correct and that we should not take honest assessment of the behavior of men as a whole as personal insults.
And if the men in your social circles really would write you off as crazy then those men have some serious insecurity about discussing sexual assault. It probably means that conversations they should be having, aren't being had. I'm deeply concerned by this last point, because this inability to distinguish between society-wide assessments and statements made directly to one's person effectively makes it impossible to discuss many social issues.
This example is completely made up and does not appear on the memo. There is no reason to think Damore was thinking about examples like this when he was talking about "lowering the bar", nor is it clear what he meant by "reducing the false negative rate". "Reducing the false negative rate" in a way that doesn't involve "lowering the skill bar" is either an admission that Google hires its applicants in a completely nonsensical way past a certain interview stage and that doesn't transpire at all from the memo. It could be true, but there's no reason to think he thought this, at all.
>Yet again, in the second purported implication you're trying to claim that Damore wrote that female employees are less fit. This is not correct on two points. One, Damore wasn't writing about Google employees or women in tech. He was writing about all women, worldwide. And second, he didn't write that they are less fit to be in high stress roles. He claimed that these thoroughly studied differences in personality make the average woman less likely to want to be in those roles. Again, Damore wrote about preferences - the things that affect the choices that people make - not fitness.
I didn't claim "Damore wrote that female employees are less fit". I claimed he strongly implied that female employees were less likely to be fit. (Talk about putting words in other people's mouth.) Again, I don't see how that could not be the case given the previous two assertions. And again, that's not just my opinion, but the opinion of the National Labor Relations Board.
>Let me put this in simpler terms: The majority of both men and women don't go into tech. Say 99% of men go into fields other than tech, and 99.75% of women go into fields other than tech. Men and women are nearly identical, almost all of them don't go into tech. Saying that small minority that do is larger among men as compared to women due to innate preferences is an explanation as to why we have 99% vs. 99.75%. It is making no statement, whatsoever, about the capability of the 0.25% of women and 1.0% of men that do go into tech.
Thank you I took statistics 101 too and got that the first time, but it's not the reason his firing was justified. I admit that "innate differences" is the part that got the most people riled up (partly because of the underlying sexism, mostly for the bad science; notice how not a single evolutionary biologist - not psychologist - agreed with him) but it was mostly ignored in the decision of the NLRB.
>Saying "men are more likely to be a rapist" is not at all the same thing as saying "you're more likely to be a rapist" to individual men.
If you can't possibly imagine why saying "people with an innate quality you possess are more likely to be bad" could be offending, you probably need to hone up on your social skills. If someone explains over ten pages how people with innate quality X are more likely to be bad, with only a little disclaimer that the magical words "statistically" and "populations" make it all okay to say, and it doesn't raise any red flags, you definitely need to pause and ask yourself: "Is everyone collectively mad and only I am correct, or did I mess something up?" I mean it, sincerely.
I'll give an example of this that I've encountered at several companies. We tag women and URM candidates as "diverse". For entry level candidates from non-traditional backgrounds (majored in something other than CS, EE, Math, etc. or learned coding in a boot camp) interviews are only given to diverse candidates. Non diverse candidates need to come from traditional backgrounds. For phone screens, we broadly grade on a Non, Maybe, and Yes scale. For diverse candidates if a candidate gets a second chance at the phone screen if they scored a Maybe. But the on-site interview remains the same.
So does this system discriminate in favor of diverse candidates? Absolutely, at several stages of the interview process candidates' chances at progressing are directly reduced by a non-diverse status. But does it affect the strength of recruited candidates? No. We don't generally consider the phone screen to be useful beyond assessing a coarse grained litmus for whether or not the candidate has a chance to succeed at the onsite. The final offer decisions is made based solely on the one-site interview performance.
It "lowers the bar by reducing the false negative rate" without affecting the quality bar because it only increases the rate of false negatives - that is, the people who could have passed the onsite interview but failed. Asian and White men who came from non-traditional backgrounds or fumbled the first phone interview but could have passed a second and the subsequent on-site are excluded. Diverse candidates, which includes all women as well as men that come from URM do not get erroneously excluded at those stages, thus reducing the false negative rate. The false positive rate remains unchanged: nobody gets a free pass at the stage that is used to test qualification for the job. I really hope I've made this point clear because you really do think that any lowering of the false negative rate necessarily results in lowered caliber of hires, then this is a statement that applies to many of my co-workers.
There are some that don't think the interview process should be discriminating on the basis or race or gender, but that's it's own conversation. The point remains, that what Damore wrote did not imply that these women were less skilled. He was pointing out the existence of policies like these.
As for the exact policies, remember that the intended audience for this memo was Gooogle employees and we read it in the context of being leaked out of this intended audience. From the footnotes of this memo
> Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race. (next bullet point) Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.
I know that he's talking about with respect to OKRs: orgs were assigned "representation OKRs" that set a goal of achieving specific percentages with regards to race and gender. He's saying that this has the potential to cause discrimination, and that a better way is to try and target positive responses for inclusion on employee surveys. I don't know what "Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum" are but the intended audience probably did.
As for the science, why are you emphasizing the opinion of biologists on how he applied psychology research? Biology is the study of organic life. Everything from how proteins are made, to how fish get oxygen from waters, to things like pediatric biology studying children's development. Some biologists study human behavior, but most don't. By comparison psychologists study human behavior and interaction. And Damore was discussing sex differences in human behavior, so this is much more applicable to the realm of psychology than biology.
> If you can't possibly imagine why saying "people with an innate quality you possess are more likely to be bad" could be offending, you probably need to hone up on your social skills. If someone explains over ten pages how people with innate quality X are more likely to be bad, with only a little disclaimer that the magical words "statistically" and "populations" make it all okay to say, and it doesn't raise any red flags, you definitely need to pause and ask yourself: "Is everyone collectively mad and only I am correct, or did I mess something up?" I mean it, sincerely.
At this point I am genuinely wondering whether this conversation is in good faith, and I am not ashamed to say this to a 2 day old account.
If someone points to the fact that close to 100% of the people incarcerated for rape are men as evidence of sexism in the justice system, and another person objects and points to the fact that higher male sexual aggression are observed universally across all civilizations and that there is strong evidence that this behavior is largely the result of men's own actions rather than state injustice is the latter the bad guy? This is just absurd. Men do commit rape drastically more often that women, it's an unambiguous fact and I most of my co-workers would agree with it without. I'm a man in control of my own body and impulses. All I need to do to avoid being a rapist is to not rape anyone. I don't find it particularly hard. While I'm disappointed by the behavior of other men demonstrated this statistic to a degree, it does not make any statement about the character of those men that don't rape.
The words "statistically" and "populations" aren't just disclaimers made to make otherwise sexist statements okay. It means that the statements in question are about the aggregate behavior of many people. Saying that statistically women are less likely to commit violence than men isn't making any sort of statement about individual women or individual men. Women commit ~5-10% of murders last time I checked. So there definitely are some women capable of committing acts of violence, but the point remains men still commit the majority of violence by a factor of 3-5x at the least. And most importantly, it doesn't say anything at all about the overwhelming majority of men and women that don't commit acts of violence.
And you should take your own advice as far as that last sentence goes. Polls of the general adult population showed that 61% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats, and 56% of independents responded that Google was wrong to have fired Damore [1]. Along racial lines this wasn't much different either. 58% of whites, 49% of Hispanics, and 55% of Blacks responded that Google was wrong to have fired him. The memo was definitely controversial, but the majority of the population thought the memo did not justify firing.
1. https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HHP...
It seems it was either an honest misguided attempt to help or an honest well guided attempt to help (I leave it to you to judge) that was shot down.
It is ironic that the same people who'd happily blame all men, happily blame all white people except themselves etc are so dead set on claiming that everyone else is something *ist.
Many of us aren't. I've put effort into the issue myself to help women get jobs in tech. For no other reason than wanting to help them - and maybe the company. More than once.
But I'm so tired of being told I'm a racist and what not. By people like on PyCon, the super privileged woman who got two devs fired over hearsay while posting far worse stuff on Twitter herself.
I guess it is this mindless stupid hypocrisy we react to.
Am I privileged? You bet! Compared to 94% of the people in the world I'm privileged.
Does that mean I should be ok with being picked on by ten times more privileged people working for Google?
My answer is no. By the time someone joins Google or other similar companies they can safely stop calling other people privileged whatever race and gender those others have. Edit: except, on a case-by-case basis for their colleagues, certain politicians and movie stars and other exceptions :-)
This article in The Atlantic is the best one I've seen on the issue: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-mos....
This directly debunks the claims that women avoid software development for biological reasons unless they suddenly had a massive biological shift in 1984. It's a silly argument often used as a way of painting all women as somehow being less technologically inclined and one I am no stranger to.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
If you look at Scandinavian countries where equality of opportunity are enshrined in their culture, there's a broad variance of career choices between men and women as a whole.
Aside: I do feel that at least some of the differences can be attributed to the toy marketing which put the girl toys in the "pink aisle" and the computer games with the "boy toys" ... this has shaped a lot of culture and I think we're seeing things starting to normalize. But even of those women that I've worked with in software more than half move towards testing and management or out of the field within 3-5 years post-college.
The culture for software crafting tends to be one of strong negotiation and opinion, which tends to be unnatural for many women. I would like to see more education/training programs for women to get better and more comfortable with asserting and injecting opinion in a group setting. I think that would help, it still won't increase the natural variance, but it would probably keep more women in the development side of the coin.
All of the statements about "men" or "women" above are generalities, there are broad exceptions to everything said. There's a difference between outliers at under 20% and the norm.
While I am not pleased by lower diversity in computing as a result of this, I cannot bring myself to condemn the fact that women are freer to choose careers even if the result is less women in CS.
A theory that tries to explain gender segregation need to explain why profession flip and sometimes oscillate between male and female dominance, why the gender equality paradox in places like Sweden where 85% of both women and men work in gender segregated work places, and why even within the same work place women and men tend to gender segregate even within the same profession (such as teachers gender segregating based on teaching subject).
A really old but fairly accepted theory is that a person feel more safe and confident when in the dominant group. People will thus have preference to such places. The theory is pretty good in explaining why people gender segregate but not why professions flip between male and female dominance. A common theory to explain that is than gender roles pushes men towards high income professions and socially punish those that don't, creating a preference for men but not women to prioritize high income professions over professions that offer other benefits.
What amazes me about this document (which continues to polarize people) is how many different ways it's been interpreted. People impute their own beliefs onto his language.
The whole idea he lacks "emotional intelligence" is just a sop to people who went on the attack because he's an ideological enemy. His intelligence is just fine, he simply is less tolerant of unintellectual nonsense masquerading as morality than most people are. And why should he not be? Damore challenged Google to rational debate and too many Googler's completely failed. The lack of intelligence isn't on Damores side.
Should we care about people with low EQ? (Not saying he has low EQ - seemed more like a witch hunt to me).