James Damore and three others end Google suit
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
As has been said before, if your CEO learns your name for the same reason he has to end his vacation early, you probably should start polishing up your resume.
"firing the leaker is going to rile them up more."
It seems our society has devolved into satisfying the mob rather than doing the right thing these days.
I've seen some of the comments from internal Google groups that were since leaked after this incident. Some of the most horrible thoughts and opinions were posted, with actual real names, but nobody got punished or fired. Why? Because they were progressive/hard-left thoughts and opinions.
This is all about politics and has nothing to do with right or wrong.
It's just more proof that these large tech companies are becoming the equivalent of fascist governments that police our thoughts and opinions....and punish us for wrongthink.
Actors with power exercise that power by enforcing their will over those with less.
Googlers being mostly neo-left is irrelevant. Were they neo-con, Google would've done the same and appeased them by firing a single employee as a scapegoat. In reality, Google doesn't care about politics because it, like sovereign states, is only mindful of its own self-interest, political games are only one tool in its aresenal to get there; and just like sovereign states, Google is effectively a stateless yet sovereign state of its own, not strictly bound under any state's power, like the citizens of any country are.
The truth is, buddy, politics won't do anything for you. They've been bread and circus since Ancient Athens for the labor classes so they wouldn't cause too much of a mess.
This is often a useful abstraction for predicting corporate activity in general, but not explaining specific actions by specific people in the company.
As far as I can tell, people seem to be reacting to ... a lot of translations, cherry-picking, inaccurate summations, and strawmen when it comes to this Damore deal.
I agree with you; however Damore is only partly to blame... IMO the leaker of the memo is just as responsible for the PR mess as Damore is for writing the memo in the first place (no leak = no PR mess) (no memo = no PR mess) (memo + no leak = no PR mess).
I think he would have gotten fired even without the leak.
I don't think so, it had to go all the way up to Sundar before he got fired, Sundar wouldn't have taken a break from his vacation if it wasn't a PR mess. Internal messes happens all the time at Google and they almost never end with someone getting fired.
If I were him, I would have personally sued the person that leaked the content and continued the fight until they had no money left. They really need to be taught a lesson that it's not okay to do something like this with the intention of destroying a person's life.
I sure as hell don't write screeds at work, only design docs that would be completely uninteresting to national media.
He published under his real name, at work.
A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting.
Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address.
A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company...
Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed.
From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
And especially not if you post it to a huge internal mailing list.
(I'm also curious as to what the overlap is between believers in "at-will firing is great and there should be no notice requirements on employers" and "Damore should have had far more process before being fired")
For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.
I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did.
Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?
As for Yonatan, if you don't believe he's a deranged lunatic go read the insane diatribes he was posting in 2017 about how Trump is literally Hitler and that Muslims and Latinos needed to flee the country as soon as possible for their own safety. The man is detached from reality. It disturbs me that someone so psychotic was able to occupy a senior position at Google.
Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.
1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot...
I'll also suggest, reading this memo was incredibly painful for many of my female colleagues and friends inside and outside of Google. I don't think they should have to read the entire thing carefully in order to have an opinion on it. Indeed, I am not a well-read expert in many schools of thought that I nonetheless object to.
> Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.
OP's claim was that this was intentional with the goal of creating sensational clickbait. I guess the idea is, the full memo was tamer and, had it not been excerpted, people would not have reacted as strongly.
Do you agree with this?
>How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?
Because you can't begin to know what someone meant unless you read what they wrote.
That seems like a testable hypothesis.
1. If it were true, I'd expect a significantly higher proportion of Googlers to be on his side than the proportion non-Googlers, since all Googlers had access to the full memo. Is that true?
2. If it were true, I'd expect a significant number of people who ended up reading the whole memo to say, I initially had a negative reaction, but after seeing X specific figure or citation, I changed my mind. Has anyone in this thread said that? If not, why not?
(Is your feeling that first impressions are everything, and after that, people's views are ossified past the point of being able to change?)
It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.
The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.
I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.
Charging into a room trying to start an argument isn't the best way to work out what is true; but there are young engineers who are going to try it because they are under a lot of pressure to be technically correct and not under a lot of pressure to be socially savvy. They're in the process of learning that it isn't politically feasible.
Even a full blown "Engineer holds crackpot opinion!" should never be front page news unless it is a risk of a building fallen down. Let alone "Young Engineer tries to start a Stupid Argument".
Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way.
Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his own time. But what he was doing was vigorous workplace activism. Activism that not only contradicted the goals of Google execs and the bulk of its employees, but was carried out in a way that actively damaged ongoing Google efforts and caused a significant workplace disruption.
You could argue that Google's management made a mistake in allowing a young engineer this much power in the first place. Or by not reining him in earlier. But rolling their eyes was never an option here because Damore was having a significant negative effect on the company.
It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.
I'm not coloring his response when I call it a divisive political opinion piece. It's explicitly framed as "the politics of the majority of people at Google is a big problem". And whether or not their initial request technically was broad enough to include his response isn't the issue.
Either Damore was reasonably smart, and he knew that this would at best be enormously divisive. Or maybe he was just incredibly clueless. (Personally I think it was the former.) When bosses (or anybody) ask for something, technically complying with the literal meaning of their words is not enough. One has to consider goals and context, and respond accordingly.
This is false.
Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.
It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.
If Google HR was going to have a problem with what he wrote, then mentioning that to him privately when the had the chance would have been the appropriate move. Their initial silence is a big reason for why things turned out the way they did.
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This is false.
Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.
It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.
* He attended a voluntary HR run seminar on diversity, and feedback was solicited.
* He wrote the memo and submitted it to HR
* HR sat on the memo without response for a month, after which he started sharing it on some internal mailing lists
If HR had an objection to Damore's memo, the appropriate time to address that would have been when he initially submitted it. They had a whole month to respond before he shared it with other people. They could have had a private conversation with him and resolved any disagreements or misunderstandings without it ever becoming a fiasco. By inviting his comments but then failing to address them, Google HR bears most of the blame for the fallout.
His decision to share the memo with his colleagues was his, sure, but he wrote initially it in response to a request from HR. If management asks for your feedback about something but then ignores it, seeking validation from your colleagues is a perfectly logical next step. Especially so at a place like Google, where open discussion was supposed to be a hallmark of it's internal culture.
He wanted a big reaction. He got it. He didn't get the outcome he wanted, but that was never his to control.
Is it not the job of HR to address employee concerns? Is it not the job of HR to manage the liability incurred by employees? I fail to see how HR does not bear responsibility here. Had HR said "sharing the contents of the memo at work will get you fired" then whether he shared the memo or not at least he would know what to expect. However, it's pretty clear that at most he expected a heated discussion, not termination.
And he did not publish it "broadly". He posted it to some sort of internal "skeptics" discussion group. The idea being that this would be the normal venue for employees to discuss controversial ideas in good faith and with an open mind. It was others who published it "broadly".
Damore's disagreement (which was not even necessarily a disagreement about values, but about facts and policy) was not an attack. The failure to make that distinction on the part of Google leadership and the media is why this became such a big issue, nor was this failing Damore's fault. Fortunately, it seems that most people (if not necessarily the loudest people) are able to make that distinction.
It's the job of employees to manage their own behavior. It's HR's job to do their best to contain the problems when employees fail to do that.
The dude created a go link, the purpose of which is to make something available to the entire company. Publishing it into an open internal group fits my definition of "broadly". It's not like he handed it to his manager or a couple colleagues and said "I'd like your feedback on this." He intentionally put it out to a wide audience.
If you don't see it as an attack, I guess that's your prerogative. That's certainly how it was received. And given that the go link was titled pc-considered-harmful, it's clear that Damore saw it as a shot in the broader culture war. Something confirmed by his post-firing behavior, where the first people he talked to were strident antifeminists: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...
A reasonable question I suppose, but fruitless as no-one has contradicted his timeline of events.
> It's the job of employees to manage their own behavior. It's HR's job to do their best to contain the problems when employees fail to do that.
You have yet to make the case that Damore's behavior was somehow irresponsible. On the other hand, an HR department doesn't respond to employee concerns and that only deals with the fallout of situations after they occur is not very effective or responsible.
> The dude created a go link, the purpose of which is to make something available to the entire company. Publishing it into an open internal group fits my definition of "broadly". It's not like he handed it to his manager or a couple colleagues and said "I'd like your feedback on this." He intentionally put it out to a wide audience.
Access control restrictions are not particularly relevant. He did, iirc, solicit feedback from some select colleagues before publishing it internally. He also submitted his concerns to HR (unless you've forgotten). After that, he shared it with an internal forum devoted to discussing controversial ideas. What else should he have done?
> If you don't see it as an attack, I guess that's your prerogative. That's certainly how it was received.
By some, certainly not all.
> And given that the go link was titled pc-considered-harmful, it's clear that Damore saw it as a shot in the broader culture war.
Please explain how criticism political correctness amounts to an attack. Arguing that "political correctness is something only bad people complain about" is not sufficient. Feel free to include anything within the actual contents of the essay that also amounts to an "attack".
> Something confirmed by his post-firing behavior, where the first people he talked to were strident antifeminists
This whole "guilt-by-association" is very tiresome and low-effort. All the moreso considering that it was quite evident that "acceptable" media sources were never going to give Damore a fair shake, nor were they particularly interested in what he actually had to say.
As to "what else should he have done", assuming that he really was trying to help with something totally outside his professional expertise and personal experience, I think a good start would have been understanding the topic on more than a superficial level before charging in to say they so blinded by their biases that they were doing it all wrong. That's not the way to get anything done anywhere. Taking a few classes in relevant topics would have been a great start. He also should have aggressively depoliticized his document.
And then if he were really serious about making change in an organization that size on such a big topic, he should have spent a lot of time getting to know the people involved, socializing his ideas, and learning how to pitch them in a way they could be heard. That's how most things get done in large companies when one isn't a high-level executive.
I'm glad we both now agree that he published it internally. Thanks.
If you honestly can't figure out how using a term of political attack is seen as an attack, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. If you're not a native speaker, I recommend reading up on the history of the term.
And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence. So is his choice of a right wing lawyer. So is his lawsuit that conservative white men were being discriminated against at Google.
There's also the lack of him doing anything particularly indicative in the other direction. If his goal was really to improve things for women, as has been claimed, he's had years to take action. Or just to write new pieces.
I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling. He's obviously smart, so it would be weird to think somebody normally as precise as a Google engineer was just suddenly very sloppy. Instead I assume he wrote what he meant to write and upset the people he wanted to upset. Apparently he thought he'd somehow win the day, but that's not the first time an engineer would have arrogantly leapt in to something thinking they had solved it all. Or, for that matter, somebody with a physics degree: https://xkcd.com/793/
I am both a native English speaker and familiar with the term "political correctness", which actually was coined by the left. Suffice to say, there are those across the political spectrum who believe that it is possible to criticize political correctness as a pattern of behavior, without attacking the identity of the people whom political correctness was intended to protect.
> And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence.
If the only behavioral evidence that you choose to look at is who he associated with, then "guilt by association" describes precisely what you are doing. Did you even watch those interviews? Or any of his other public appearances?
Also, the article you linked to is very telling. It mentions all of these horrible attributes about Molyneux and Peterson, without noting (for instance) that Dr. Peterson is also a subject matter expert in the fields of psychometrics and psychology of personality (his research is highly cited) and who had a business using psychological profiling to aid businesses in hiring decisions. That sounds exactly like the kind of person that ought to have some interesting insights on Damore's memo. Yet his only salient quality to you is that he's "antifeminist"?
> I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling.
Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?
If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.
> If the only behavioral evidence that you
I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.
Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd. Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research. He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.
> Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?
It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse, as demonstrated by their lining up behind a guy who publicly muses about injecting bleach. The kind of conservatism I'm most comfortable with is of the small-business-oriented, Rockefeller-Republican sort, now basically extinct. I frequently appreciate the principled stand of Amash, even though I disagree with the bulk of his actual positions. I regularly see pieces in American Conservative that are sensible and well-reasoned, although I often don't end up agreeing. And I'm a big fan of being conservative in the sense used in engineering or accountancy, but again, being prudent, modest, and careful are anathema to most of the US right these days. And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.
That the modern usage has a negative connotation, and even is sometimes invoked as a slur, does not mean it is not used to describe a real phenomenon[1]. To put it simply, political correctness is the censure or censorship of speech not primarily because of it's truth (or lack thereof) but because of the perceived harm such speech does to disadvantaged groups. Whether this leads to the suppression of important truth, and whether that suppression actually benefits the disadvantaged, is very reasonably up for debate.
> I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.
I will concede you made other (weak) arguments regarding behavior, but I will amend my point here to say that the fact that you treat those associations as evidence, particularly without providing any connection to the content of the interviews themselves, to be a rather clear example of "guilt by association" whether you intend that or not. Being interviewed by Stefan Molyneux no more makes Damore a white supremacist than being interviewed by Joe Rogan makes him a stoner or being interviewed by Dave Rubin makes him gay. Damore chose his interviews because he was being viciously smeared in the media and these were people who had a large audience and were willing to give him a fair shake. Similar reasons can established for his legal representation.
Also, as a purely tactical matter, to the people who find Damore's memo itself persuasive (or even those who just didn't find it immediately offensive) this kind of argument comes across as being in bad faith. It seems like a way to disqualify Damore without having to engage with his arguments directly.
> Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd.
I never said anything about neutral. He is however, uncontestably an expert in the relevant science. Of course, there are other experts, and they don't all share the same perspective, but if anyone were in a position to correct Damore for being radically off in his representation of the scientific literature Peterson would be a fine choice. The fact that he (among others) thinks Damore does a fine job in representing the literature (for a lay person) means that at the very least the science is not so settled against Damore as many would have you believe.
> Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research.
He actually had quite a big audience for his psychology lectures before any of the political stuff happened. You should check out the series on personality, it's really quite interesting.
> He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.
Dismissing Peterson's scientific credentials is one kind of wrong. Thinking he is alt-right is quite another. To the extent that he is on the right, he's quite mainstream politically. To understand what the alt-right actually is, I recommend The New Right by Michael Malice[2]. It's very good journalism that is both fair and (at times) highly critical.
> It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse...And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.
I appreciate the examples you give in this paragraph. While it was within the parameters of the question I had asked, I was kind of hoping you had specific examples of conservative thought on the issues touched on in Damore's memo. You mention the American Conservative, what do you think of this article from them on the memo[3]?
[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-per... (full disclosure, Jordan Peterson was a co-author on the research cited)
[2]https://www.amazon.com/New-Right-Journey-American-Politics/d...
[3]https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/james-damore-...
When the memo hit the public, it became an issue of whether the company was perceived to be supporting a Title VII violation. Then the company doesn't have the option of rolling their eyes and going about business as usual anymore.
Damore is a self-described classic liberal so I assume he’s fine with this arrangement.
Now replace "women" with any other group, such as people of color, Jews, armed forces veterans or Republicans, and see how it goes.
If he was uncertain about hiring policies and thought those were negatively affecting productivity, he should have taken the question to his manager or to HR, along with some evidence.
This is the original post I'm responding to. If I found an old blog post of yours which revealed life-altering information, should I be sued if I send it to a reporter?
It's fine to disagree with him, it's not to missrepresent what he said.
>Would you like this in the press?
>Would you like this at Brand X?
>Like to read it on the stand?
>Like it in the government's hand?
https://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2006/12/over_at_white_...
https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Here is another that is more detailed but doesn't talk mention individual scientist opinions
https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...
If you can't reproduce the results consistently, it's not science. Results in psychology are very frequently not reproducible.
The real error Damore made is buying into the idea that studies in psychology can really tell us useful info at all.
>Damore’s assertion that men and women think different is actually pretty uncontroversial, and he cites a paper to back it up, from a team led by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and director of the International Sexuality Description Project. The 2008 article, “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures,” does indeed seem to show that women rate higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
Good. Wired article agrees women rate higher on neroticism.
> The first-order criticism here is easy: Damore oversells the difference cited in the paper. As Schmitt tells WIRED via email, “These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.” The other 90 percent, in other words, are the result of individual variation, environment, and upbringing.
In Damore's memo, on the subject of trait differences between men and women Damore writes:
"I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."
This is written right under an illustration of two overlapping bell curves with one curve shifted slightly to the right as an example of the overlap he is talking about. It's hard for me to take anyone as honest interlocutor if they are interpreting this as "overselling the difference" as the Wired author does.
On the subject of whether the differences are biological or cultural, Damore cites the fact that trait differences are consistent across cultures and that they are linked to prenatal hormones and heredity, among other points. Perhaps the extent to which trait differences are cultural or genetic is more debatable, but it is beside the point of Damore's essay. Whether trait differences are biological or cultural, Google still acts within a context that they exist . Damore's argument does not hinge on the differences being genetic.
Wired writes:
>Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmitt’s meta-analysis, sure, but he doesn’t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
The researcher is saying that it is unclear to him if neuroticism would play a role in Google employment. That is not exactly disagreement, more the researcher saying he doesn't know. Damore is actually in a better position to judge than the researcher as Damore is not only aware of the research, but also employment practices at Google.
Furthermore, the researcher isn't calling this an unjustified leap in logic or disputing Damore's evidence or interpretation of the facts, just the conclusion. That's perfectly fair, but it isn't fair to take a point like "It isn't clear to me if neuroticism affects Google employment" and act like that is a rejection of the Damore memo. The conclusion isn't clear to one researcher.
Wired:
>In general, he notes, women prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things—the implication being that Google is a more thing-oriented workplace, so it just makes sense that fewer women would want to work there. Again, the central assertion here is fairly uncontroversial. “On average—and I emphasize that, on average—men are more interested in thing-oriented occupations and fields, and that difference is actually quite large,” says Richard Lippa, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton and another of the researchers who Damore cites.
Again, the researcher and the Wired author admit Damore has the right science and shrug at the question of whether the science can be applied to Google. As before, the researcher is not rejecting the conclusion and is not claiming Damore misrepresents the facts. The researcher is saying that they do not know if the conclusion can be reached.
Damore lists "pre-natal testosterone" as a biological cause of sex trait differences and then links those differences to different career preferences. Wired writes:
"Still, most hormone researchers agree that these differences are real. But that they’re directly linked to prenatal testosterone? Not so much. And to differences in career choice? “There’s 100 percent no consensus on that,” says Justin Carré, a psychologist at Nipissing University in Ontario. “The human literature on early androgen exposure is really very messy.”"
Again, there is conflicting literature and evidence and the point is debated, but what the "actual researcher" says is not "Damore made an unjustified leap in logic" but rather, "There's 100 percent no consensus on that".
That's it as far as scientists responding to Damore goes - or perhaps I missed something more substantive?
However, just because the science is not settled on the subject does not mean one cannot put forth a reasonable hypothesis.
And for the record, the idea that these sex differences have no influence on inclinations towards these specific jobs is also a hypothesis.
Damore may be wrong about the nature of that influence, but I think most people would be surprised if the "no influence" hypothesis was true.
For example, Damore's memo has a section where he reasons that one reason women may not be promoted as often is because Google is organized to recognize and reward individual accomplishments rather than participation in groups. Damore theorizes based on cited research that women may be more inclined to contribute in group based settings rather than all alone, and so perhaps aligning promotion to recognize group contributions too would help diversity.
I'm curious your source on this information.
It's character suicide.
In practice the entire content of that document sums up to "Since current diversity efforts are not solving the problem it could be time to admit that the current google structure is on average slightly less attractive or rewarding for women (or for individual in a slice of the population that contains slightly more women than men)" together with some suggestions of what those changes could be.
That's not what the memo said. Instead, the memo claimed women were on average more neurotic.
I guess that a good deal of them are measurably more prevalent in one gender/sex or the other.
Damore point is that if you design a highly competitive system so that Quality A is rewarded but Quality B is ignored you are going to have an imbalanced workplace if women on average have slightly more B and less A than the mean and men the reverse.
The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender.
We should design our systems so that the minuscule differences between men and women are not overly amplified and not abused, not just pretend that those differences do not exist.
That's two paragraphs of the memo in the middle and the bit at the end. Most of the memo is setting up a case for fundamental differences in gender, strawman depictions of the "morality of Google," a claim that men have a higher drive for status (which is, fundamentally, the sort of thing that a company would be put immediately in violation of Title VII if it agreed with), and a claim that Google's anti-discriminatory practices are discriminatory.
I'll note that you've just imagined the "intention of destroying a person's life" bit. There were plenty of reasons for releasing that that have nothing to do with Damore. Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it.
Not sure I agree. There is no big tech corporation in current America where having your name tied to a memo like that won't destroy your career within the company l.
Damore certainly should have expected that if leadership disagreed with him, he was in for a bad time. However, he still is within reasonable bounds to go after whoever leaked the internal memo externally regardless of whether or not you agree with the content.
If people here are just saying Damore should just harass people by file frivolous lawsuits that will quickly be thrown out, then fine, let them say that. But the theory that there's legitimate grounds for a lawsuit that could actually succeed is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1600/1600...
"A cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress exists when there is ‘(1) extreme and outrageous conduct by the defendant with the intention of causing, or reckless disregard of the probability of causing, emotional distress; (2) the plaintiff’s suffering severe or extreme emotional distress; and (3) actual and proximate causation of the emotional distress by the defendant’s outrageous conduct.’ A defendant’s conduct is ‘outrageous’ when it is so ‘extreme as to exceed all bounds of that usually tolerated in a civilized community.’ And the defendant’s conduct must be ‘intended to inflict injury or engaged in with the realization that injury will result.'"
Quoting somebody's actual words is in no way "outrageous" under that standard. People in civilized communities quote what other people say all the time. And even if the didn't, the first amendment strongly protects political speech, and quoting somebody else's political speech is pretty obviously part of that.
Yes, I did read it, thanks for being condescending and violating HN guidelines. As I said already, I sat on the jury for a similar case that did go to trial in California so your rationale for thinking this wouldn't doesn't make sense to me and seems based on no actual experience. This is not an instance of someone simply quoting another person - the individual who posted the memo online did so deliberately to cause harm and bring unwanted media attention and public hatred toward another individual, which pretty much ruined his life. Further, your focus on the "outrageous" portion only shows you're cherry picking what you want this particular tort to say rather than the whole definition. So yes, it is reckless disregard under that standard and any lawyer could probably bring it to trial if they so desired. Whether the jury would find the tweeter guilty or not is another matter.
You having sat one one whole jury does not make you an expert in this topic.
I am not "cherry picking". I quoted the whole standard. It has three parts. I pointed to the part that in my view clearly does not apply. If you think it does apply, feel free to argue it. But standing on your expertise of being in the same room with lawyers once does not cut it for me.
Should your logic be applied there?
That's an interesting take considering how little success Google has had in making their tech workforce more gender diverse.
One cynical view might be that the entire thing is a PR exercise, designed to make it appear that Google cares about gender diversity. For the cost of a small amount of money to write some press releases, and no real changes to their hiring policies, they get some good press and stave off criticism.
Damore's memo threatened this from both sides: it makes it look (or was made to look by adversarial press coverage) like Google is hostile to women, and it also threatens to call attention to the diversity Potemkin village set up by HR.
There isn't a debate to be had in a public forum (even internal public) because the law has already decided the question.
But, of course, who gives a fuck. The rage machine rages on.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden...
I know this site is full of Snowden apologists, but for goodness sake you don’t have to swallow every easily disprovable lie he tells.
You’re on the run from the US because you committed espionage, and you fly to Russia?
That’s called defecting.
I’m not sure what that proves.
CNN famously lambasted Republican lawmakers for refusing to appear after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso last year.
What you have described is that liberal lawmakers are willing to face adversarial news coverage while conservatives are unwilling to do so.
So what exactly is your point in this scenario?
I care more about the content than where it's hosted.
Humans will always be judged by the company they keep. You can be angry about that, but you’ve got to rage against human nature. He decided to repeatedly go on conservative outlets and be associated with alt-right figures; he should have been aware that he’d be judged by that.
I’m just saying that if Damore continues to associate with alt-right figures, he shouldn’t be surprised when people start assuming that he’s an alt-right crank, because that’s how people work.
I said no. Damore has the same choice.
Saying weird stuff about the kkk having cool uniforms was his own choice.
You mean he had the choice between:
- not speak at all and let all the media portray him as a misogynist and generally horrible person
- or try to explain himself with whoever was willing to hear him, knowing that he would also be judged "by association" in a negative light?
Sorry but it seems like there was no good choice for Damore anyway in terms of reputation.
Well, this part is true at google...
I'm not blaming him for going on those shows, but he should have recognized - after all he tried to argue a complex problem complexly - that supporting very biased simple platforms won't do him and his arguments any good, especially on the long run.
This creates the false impression of "Fox News darlings" and ends up furthering the "us vs them" narrative.
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/04/17/dr-oz-dr-...
>Dr. Oz, Dr. Drew and Dr. Phil made these claims on Fox News. Now they're backtracking
>TV hosts Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Phil McGraw have all appeared on Fox News and made these misleading claims about coronavirus. Now, all of them are backtracking.
As of 2020, there is no mainstream news that has any reputation for moral superiority and truth.
I think the story just notes that he got a lot of positive attention from some specific groups.
Accordingly I don't see the headline telling me what he personally thinks.
Is mentioning that a problem?
[0]: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
[1]: https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversi...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/nationa...
When it comes to political topics, wikipedia is as unreliable as the news sources listed in that wiki article.
Lets see, his lawyer for this suit who is quoted a lot in the article:
>Harmeet Kaur Dhillon is an American lawyer and Republican Party official. She is the former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, and the National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California.
Wonder if it was pro-bono.
That’s all he needs to say to make his beliefs clear. If the whole country (minus some “open-minded” tech bros) thinks you’re a sexist jackass and you do nothing to correct them, I wonder...
It was originally a class action[1]...that case still exists, just without Damore as the lead plaintiff.
So, perhaps originally on contingency.
[1] https://www.dhillonlaw.com/blog/news/google-damore/case-upda...
The left-rights spectrum isn't supposed to capture the details of everyone's ideology: a spectrum that did that would be some kind of 20-dimensional hypercube. It's just supposed to capture who take who's side when it comes to that.
What does "use the internet way too much" mean?
I don't think Damore is a fascist. However, it seems clear to me that, he, along with a lot of other right-wing figures today are using the exact same tactic as fascists once did by presenting themselves as "centrist." If you don't believe me, check out this Twitter account: https://nitter.net/a_centrism.
The causes of action in the lawsuit were unlawful termination on account of political activities (which are protected in California) and sex (which is protected federally). Google made three motions to dismiss and lost all of them. Does that mean Google is guilty? Of course not. All it means is that the claim stated by Damore, if true, could convince a reasonable jury that Google violated his civil rights.
Google would much rather pay out settlement money than risk having an unflattering jury verdict or have to release even more unflattering documents in discovery. I'm sure Damore would rather not go to trial if he could help it as well.
People say "political views", that's how he might frame it, but I would assume Google would frame it as they fired him for making statements that women are less capable.
If someone is expressing political or even religious views that are so extreme that they create a hostile work environment, I don't see an issue with firing them over it.
(I am not interested in debating whether or not Damore's views reached the "hostile work environment" threshold)
There is a process, and step one in that process is asking them to please stop sharing their views in the workplace.
Expressing extremely wrong views can't be the standard for creating a hostile work environment because people are wrong about a bunch of stuff and the only way to figure that out is to express the view and be told why it is wrong.
Particularly in the Damore case, the standard shouldn't be how a third party feels. There is a long history of seeing how that standard plays out, it'll end up hurting minority voices. The standard needs to be how a first party responds when asked to do something.
Edit: burn, karma, burn
Some facts are not open to interpretation.
Damore would have had to prove that there was a active discrimination at google toward some political views. He had some good evidence for that (in terms of internal conversations and witnesses) but it is not so clear whether that was enough, or even if it was necessarily illegal in this case.
Far easier to settle with a non-disclosure clause and an agreement to halt all public appearances. James Damore went on a campaign of visiting universities and other locations to discuss his views. Honestly, it was a good move, his case was weak, but the publicity seems to have paid off.
You mean you think he'll lose this election but come back to win the next one?
Still not my first choice (and not high on my preference list) but still better than Trump.
Edit down voters love mega corps?
I sure as hell wouldn't want to go out that way though, even for fuck you money.
In architecture (a somewhat older profession, but also concerning things constructed by people), women previously did have a hard time, and often had to practice under their husbands/partners name.
Mercifully this ended some while ago, and now architecture schools and onwards are more evenly gender balanced. Nobody suggests that women are somehow naturally 'less inclined', and the profession is richer for it.
It would be great if engineering could get to this point.
Nowadays software dev is highly collaborative and social. It faced declining amounts of graduates that were women from the late-80s and onwards compared to engineering and the physical sciences which if I'm recalling correctly have steadily rose.
2. I personally don't find software dev collaborative or social in any meaningful way compared to other careers or industries.
In wealthy, western countries giving men and women the choice of what to study without having to think too much about where they'll end up in society, that's where you see the most gender imbalance.
So what happened from the late 80s to now that resulted in women gaining more freedom and therefore shifting them out of CS? And more specifically: Why has this only affected computer science? The gender equality paradox supposedly holds for the entirety of STEM and yet we've seen woman graduates in STEM steadily rise across the board except for CS. Therefore that would make CS an outlier and not the norm.
That's assuming the gender equality paradox holds true which is likely not the case considering the issues with the assertion brought up in the Wikipedia article you linked (which I hope you read).
The idea that male and female primates (including humans) have different ways to look at the world seems very sensible to me, and that would explain why "women care more about people" and "men care more about things".
Why did Computer Science of all STEM degrees face a drop in female graduates versus the others?
And if you're making the argument that 'women care more about people' and 'men care more about things' then I'm going to disagree heavily considering it doesn't relate to modern day software development. Current development is highly collaborative, constantly dealing with other people whether it's customers or members of your team. In fact, back when CS was at its peak of women obtaining CS degrees, that was when CS was more focused on things and less on people as a result of software still being a niche and local thing. That argument doesn't work considering the history of CS as a whole.
There are always exceptions, obviously.
I believe this to be missing the point. There are many women that are 100% aligned with the personality trait of an idealized engineer, no one (or at least not Damore) contest that.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing–systemizing_theory
Another example: what is the gender balance in pilots versus flight attendants?
The 'things vs people' dichotomy is extremely vague and obviously bullshit. Is Facebook not about people? Airbnb? Uber?
It may be that these companies, perhaps inadvertently, choose to hire people who don't focus on the people-related aspects of their roles. But it's obvious that empathy and an interest in people would in fact be very useful at many tech companies.
Is it? Or have you simply not taken a moment to do a little bit of research?
Here is a study with 500,000 participants, for example:
"Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension.
"Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests.
"Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. "
[1] Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests. Psychological Bulletin 135(6):859-84 · November 2009
Here's another:
"Career choices have been shown to be driven in part by interests, and gender differences in those interests have generally been considered to result from socialization. We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People.
"We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N = 125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure.
"Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People."
[2] Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People. Horm Behav. 2011 Sep; 60(4): 313–317. Published online 2011 Jun 12. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2011.06.002
It's dangerous to do a "little bit" of research. What you'd actually need to do to get any information (if any really exists in this domain, which I doubt) is to become an expert and read through thousands of papers and books, including all the critiques of the ones you cite.
Software naturally has that side too. And Google is ironically pretty bad at this, because somehow it always ends up too borg-ish. They do need more people-focused people, but so far they ended up just selecting for people who are willing to work for them, but haven't really changed. (Ironically, Damore was right in this.)
And there is no evidence provided for this at all.
He cited the big five personality trait model as evidence for why engineering culture is not welcoming to women.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-...
OTOH personality traits aren’t distributed equally between men and women. Personality traits don’t impact your ability to do engineering work, but they influence What type of workplace culture / communication protocols in which you can thrive. Damore advocated for making engineering cultures more accommodating to people who have personality traits resembling the distribution that women exhibit.
The problem is that our community isn’t very friendly or welcoming to women. How can we make that cultural change?
Be precise, how is your community not friendly to women in ways you cannot fix in five minutes? If its obvious, its trivial to list them, if its subtle then its worth doing the exercise.
We have to accept they may just not want the gig. Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
One of the more obvious problems is that software especially seems to have issues with sexual harassment. An example of that can be readily found with Susan Fowler's blogpost about Uber's rotten workplace culture.
Techbros. Techbros everywhere. It's not what people want to hear, most people would love it if the field and the educational pipeline leading to it had more professional norms all-around. But it's a real thing. (FWIW, I don't think of Damore as part of the problem, indeed his proposals would help a lot if widely adopted.)
https://www.businessinsider.nl/coronavirus-kushner-impact-te...
>Jared Kushner’s coronavirus ‘impact team’ mocked as the ‘Slim Suit Crowd’ and a ‘frat party’ descended from a UFO
Incidentally the techbros you describe are majorly young cs graduates from my observation. Why are unis teaching them to be tech bros? Are unis at fault for making tech non inclusive and toxic?
Me and my wife are both AI academics in the UK who do a bunch of programming. I have no "interesring stories" to tell, my wife has a dozen including men punching walls because they were beaten by a woman in a board game, being sent death threats and dick pics (not from the same person), and being assumed to be my non-tech wife when we go to events where she was invited and I was going as her partner.
Now, these events aren't daily, or even weekly, but they stick with people and make then feel unwelcome and unsafe.
> Toxicity
Probably you don't need to go further than that.
* A strong focus on being "right" over working collaboratively (especially in domains with no right answers).
* Hyper competitiveness - to the detriment of effectiveness.
* A lack of empathy (e.g. PRs with "your code sucks, suck it up and stop being such a baby").
These things are hardly good from the perspective of any software developer (except particular kinds of men who thrive under these conditions) but they're particularly off putting to women.
I tend to find that this aggressive behavior is most frequently exhibited by "senior" developers who aren't actually very good or clever but have built up a reputation that they wish to protect. Some developers are very territorial.
This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different (otherwise why would these things pose a greater challenge for women relative to men)?
Let me get this straight:
1. Most women were programmers.
2. Women aren't sexist, so they let men in.
3. Men overwhelmed the women.
4. Men are sexist, so they stopped letting women in.
5. Now we need to deliberately reverse the results of stage (4).
Is that the sequence of events as you see it?
Women would not have been in charge of hiring, so no to 2. (The programming jobs men were hired for would likely not have been considered the same kind of job.)
Not sure what you mean by 3.
Roughly yes to 4, although the issue is systematic sexism, not the personal prejudices of men and women. Society in general, including many women, disapproved of women becoming programmers once it began to be seen as a high-status high-skill profession.
Yes to 5, with the preceding caveats.
These arguments seem to go in circles a lot.
First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women. Ok. Then it's society in general that is sexist, but actually it's only certain professions where this "general sexism" manifests itself, for no apparent reason. Ok. Then you have the most egalitarian countries in the world seeing more disparate outcomes than other western countries. But this is apparently because sexism and cultural norms are so nebulous and hard to pin down that there must still be some sexism going on there too, we just can't see it. Ok.
There are a lot of claims being made with no evidence whatsoever. While I personally don't put much stock in psychology, at least Damore's points had actual studies behind them. And though it has been thrown around in this thread that "some of the authors disagreed with Damore's interpretation!", I have actually read the studies and found nothing factually inaccurate with the interpretation. That's what is so difficult about a lot of psychology – the hard facts are few and far between, so effectively every result is subject to interpretation. An author of a paper can disagree, but that doesn't make Damore wrong.
Because those industries accepted that they had a problem and took steps to fix it. Altering the perceptions of the broader society can be a big part of that. People no longer see anything unusual about a woman being a lawyer or a doctor. Fifty years ago, that wasn't the case. So there's no paradox here. "General sexism" includes stereotypes about appropriate occupations for men and women. These can change over time, as we've seen in the case of lawyers and doctors.
>First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women.
It matters because it shows that women were, at one time, both interested in and capable of programming. No-one has said that it doesn't matter, so your 'but' makes no sense.
You're quite right that there's nothing to be learned by throwing around citations to half-read and half-understood studies (which is why I haven't done any of that). All you have to do is listen to what women in tech say. If James Danmore had done that for five minutes instead of wasting his time on his half-assed "research", none of this would have happened.
Anecdotal evidence is worse than psychology studies.
That's not necessarily true. Hence the analogy.
If you have many good / attractive options and you choose one, you probably have an interest in that thing.
If you have precious few, not great options, and you choose one, it does not necessarily indicate the same.
I shouldn't need to provide copious examples for this to be obviously true. Money is only one of many motivators, but it is often strong enough on its own to overcome your interest (or lack thereof) in something if it means you get paid for it.
Take another example: many women throughout history have chosen sex work. That does not mean that sex work interests them. It just means they decided sex work was better than alternatives, for whatever reasons.
Doing something of your own free will does not mean you have a genuine interest in that thing. It can (and often does) just mean that thing is better than alternatives, for a multitude of reasons that are not "I find it the most interesting".
Even assuming that your assertion about sexism in tech is not in fact speculation, how exactly is introducing more sexist policies into tech going to help eliminate sexism in tech?
Because my stance (that sexism is a significant factor in putting women off from tech) can be trivially verified by, say, asking 10 women in tech about their experiences of sexism. Not to mention that it would be a minor miracle if tech were somehow completely isolated from the sexism that's clearly present in society as a whole.
Out of interest, have you ever tried talking to women about this issue? Or have you (ironically) formed your opinion that there is no sexism in tech without listening to their perspective?
I generally don't try to collect facts about life by asking randos for their opinions, no.
But yes, I have talked with women in tech about sexism. I have also encouraged other women to get into tech in the first place.
> Not to mention that it would be a minor miracle if tech were somehow completely isolated from the sexism that's clearly present in society as a whole.
Is this the same sexism that is causing the current generation of young women to go to and graduate university at a higher rate than their male counterparts, earn more money than their male counterparts, or commit less suicide than their male counterparts?
And this attitude is why it's going to be hard work to change things to the better. You have no interest in listening to what women tell you. You'd rather cherry pick studies of dubious quality and relevance, and tell your female colleagues (if any) that they must just be imagining it all.
>[young women] earn more money than their male counterparts
This seems bogus, at least in reference to the USA. At most, it may the case that women earn slightly more than men straight out of college. The gender pay gap still clearly favors men overall.
As for suicide, I think men have pretty much always been more prone to suicide than women. If that's an argument for the non-existence of sexism, then you'd have to draw the absurd conclusion that, e.g., there was no sexism in Victorian Britain. See figure 1 here: https://watermark.silverchair.com/dyq094.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...
All that being said, it is a common misconception that sexism is by definition something that harms women and not men. Sexism certainly harms men too. The root cause of sexism is the power asymmetry between men and women. Generally speaking, men exercise that power in their own broad interests. But of course there are plenty of individual men who lose out.
The root cause of much disagreement on the subject of sexism is on the claim that there is a power asymmetry between men and women, and the methodology of measuring personal income as the sole means of measuring power in society.
As far as I understood it, this wasn't the bit of the memo that people were attacking.
There are some low-level differences (e.g. ratios of different cell types in the brain) but there’s no conclusive evidence linking that to academic skills or job performance (just how does 3-d reasoning affect your ability to write Python, anyway?), but there has been a history of earlier results attributed to gender not holding up under scrutiny.
I don't see why it's the crux. It's really only necessary that men and women be socialized differently for this to be true - to grow up surrounded by people telling you that you need to be more "agreeable" and "not too pushy".
I think whether it is true or not is rather beside the point. Toxic working environments are anti-meritocratic and anti productive. Even if we didn't give a fuck how many women entered the profession we should fix them. Intellectual dick waving leads to worse code, not better.
It's not clear why these should be any more acceptable than the claims Damore made.
Incidentally:
1) An environment filled with intellectual posturing is not "hyper competitive". The fact that you could confuse the two is concerning.
2) My post may have seemed to you to make a set of assumptions about women's abilities but it didn't (just their preferences).
Because, if you really, really want gender parity, most programmers don't work at Uber or Snapchat. They work in mundane jobs at faceless companies.
Even more so when you leave the USA. (Since this is about principle).
In my experience, those below average places where people tweak payroll software (where I started out in my career) are the worst. I would expect the below average people in Uber and Google to be among the worst of the worst too, though (they are the most insecure, I think). A lack of psychological safety is what drives a lot of this.
As always there are exceptions, but as a rule, mediocrity breeds insecurity and insecurity breeds toxic behavior and no, none of this can be fixed in five minutes.
I don't see an equivalence to nursing or primary school teaching since by and large it's not the toxic aspects of these careers that puts off men, it's the lack of pay and status.
If this is true it's probably because the community isn't very friendly or welcoming to women like the poster said…
That being said, I don't think this is true. My only evidence is anecdotal, but at a previous company when we tried to recruit at events that weren't primarily male dominated, we got roughly equal percentages of responses from people who identified as female or male.
> Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
Let's assume for a moment these statements are correct: you're not starting from the right place. Why don't most women want the software job? Why don't most men want to teach pre-school? It could be because they've been raised in a society that says that the burden of child rearing should be placed on the women and that pre-school isn't a "manly" profession. Just because people don't want the job doesn't make it less discriminatory against women somehow, it just means the reasons are likely ingrained and harder to fix.
Amusingly, the damore memo was an attempt to address just this very question. Are we not beyond pretending responses outside the proscribed woke ideology will be engaged with in good faith, at this late stage?
It was not about "inclination", but rather that the current engineering culture tended to be lean a certain way when it comes to focus:
> Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
He argued that if Google wanted to change the gender balance in their engineering divisions, they had to change the types of things that can be worked on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing–systemizing_theory
Google wants more women in engineering (which isn't a bad thing), but do they have a similar program for getting more men into HR?
As to gender balance in professions: are there initiatives to get more men into nursing or kindergarten / primary education, and women into plumbing or carpentry?
My wife and I went through Physics grad school together. To say that the experience was hostile for her, and many other women, would be an understatement.
My daughter is contemplating grad school for next year (senior in college, its been an interesting year). We've been open/honest about the challenges she'll face in Physics, but the state of things is much better now than it was when we went through 30 years ago (ouch). Given that she runs circles around most of her fellow students, I'm not the least bit worried on the academic side.
My concern, as all fathers of exceptional daughters should be (I guess that's all of us?) is the cultural aspects of programs, and potential jobs. I use the word "place" below to discuss grad school and/or jobs.
If the place is overtly hostile, its a hard pass. No need to waste time with that. Think Uber, and other tech-bro places.
If the place is passive aggressive hostile, there are strategies to cope, but again, biased towards pass. Passive aggressive hostility wears on you.
If the place is open, and sane. Worth a look.
Think about the economic aspect of this. You the enlightened consumer/producer of product (grad school, job) have more information than ever about the quality of life at these places. If a place is just bad, they will lose at attracting sufficient consumers/producers of producers. Which means they will have lower ability to operate in market.
Bigger picture. Women are not intrinsically less able to do quantitative or analytical work. Environments that are not conducive to them doing this work will tend to depress the population of them doing this work. Environments which are freer from these stresses will tend to accumulate population doing this work.
I think it might be simple as that. Its not about ability. Its about environment.
Agree, but it's also about preferences. When a woman has to choose between medicine, arts, economics, law, education, IT and other fields, they tend to prefer IT less than men. It's just that there are so many other good options.
If you control by the amount of time invested and passion you would probably see little discrimination.
Why would you disadvantage her by poisoning her mind like that? Also, were you open/honest about the advantages she'd have for being a woman in physics? Extra programs, scholarships, internships, guidance, resources, etc set aside for her?
> My concern, as all fathers of exceptional daughters should be (I guess that's all of us?) is the cultural aspects of programs, and potential jobs.
If it was all of us, then it wouldn't be exceptional would it? It would be commonplace/universal, the opposite of exceptional.
> Its not about ability. Its about environment.
It's about personal choice. In wealthier liberal countries where women have choice, they don't go STEM careers. In poor traditional countries where women have little choice, they go to STEM careers. It's not about "passive agressive hostility" otherwise no women would work in nursing. It's about having the ability to do what you want.
"What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. They posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
"The trend was most pronounced in places like Norway, Finland, and Sweden. Although this region is known for policies and a cultural outlook that supports greater gender equality, relatively few girls pursue STEM degrees there, when compared to places like Algeria or Turkey."
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-downside-to-greater-ge...
From my point of view the current situation is that many organizations are both hostile to women and desperate not to be. what I think was really useful of the Damore memo is that it tried to point a way on how to change institutions to be more inclusive by default.
For sure it would not solve 100% of the problem, maybe just 5%, but I actually think it would have made the remaining 95% easier to solve also.
Which is how I interpreted what Damore was trying to do with his memo: saying that women are capable, but that the environment was not appealing to them. Either/both of (a) what they got to work on, and/or (b) how they were treated.
IMHO, men and women perceive and react to the world differently, and treating them the same is foolish and counter-productive. Damore was simply pointing out those differences.
I found The Female Brain a good book on this topic:
I've worked with/for brilliant female scientists and engineers before. I personally believe that what makes a good scientist or engineer is a profound insatiable curiosity, and a drive to understand. I've seen this in both females and males.
My point was, when you encourage this, and you help the person understand and adapt to challenges they may face, society is often better off, as we have added to our scientific and engineering pool of talent. If you discourage this by saying "your brain is different", or "you are more interested in feelings than quantitative science", we wind up with a discouraging environment for 1/2 of our prospective scientists and engineers.
I don't see how the latter is a good thing. Damore had a right to author his text. I'd argue that sending it out to others in his company was a bad idea ... generally one should separate personal politics from corporate life. But I disagree with numerous things in the text (I read it when it came out).
The difference in chromosomes trigger all sorts changes in the development cycle of humans. Unless you want to argue that males having 10x the testosterone levels has no effect on behaviour. Not to mention all sorts of differences in brain structures.
Yes, there are. A lot of public construction projects have goals for minorities and women as a percentage of the labor on the job site. Firms owned by women, minorities, and service-disabled veterans are given priority in the bidding process through different mechanisms. Most of the trade unions have programs to recruit women into the trades.
We have to have this discussion is virtue signalers and far leftists keep spewing lies.
> It would be great if engineering could get to this point.
If it were, then it would mean that a significant number of women are forced into the field out of poverty or familial pressure.
"Some would say that the gender STEM gap occurs not because girls can’t do science, but because they have other alternatives, based on their strengths in verbal skills,” she said. “In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
We have decades of research on this already. The wealthier a nation is and more equal a nation is, the greater the disparity in STEM.
"What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. They posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at."
I suppose she has to be cast to the “Intellectual Dark Web” for daring to suggest the obvious fact that our brains work differently.
The ultimate irony is that someone can deny such differences while simultaneously arguing for the importance of diversity. What a walking contradiction.
It's impossible to have a scientific and open minded debate about the differences between genders. Even theorizing biologic differences exist makes you a sexist. Let alone bringing up this question in public.
Edit: Yes, his memo is totally tone deaf. I thought his wording was very questionable. But the his core argument (regarding differences in biology leading to differences in distributions) is worth debating.
Example: There's a noticeable distributional difference in 100m running times between genders (due to biology). That said any number of men or women are faster runners than me :) Population doesn't mean anything for the individual.
Eggs vs sperm -- plumbing aside -- is a fundamental biologic difference. And bringing a pregnancy to term, and delivering without bleeding out, sort of requires a uterus.
But of course, it's gotta stop there.
Edit: If someone wants to explain away such differences, I'd love to see the argument.
The hormones made me more impatient. I had lots of female friends and one of the qualities they loved about me was that I was a great listener. After being on testosterone, they informed me that my listening skills weren’t what they used to be
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...
What about higher amount of testosterone making men have more muscles and better sprinters?
There are biological differences that affect performance in various activities. How much in comparison to nurture, and in what activities, seems to be an open question
I'm not sure how "making broad generalizations about your coworkers based on their gender" differs from all the other stuff most people have to keep quiet about as they go about their work.
Why would I? My boss is very smart and talented :) No, seriously, I'm anonymous here so it's not because my boss would be reading it - I just not enjoy working for idiots and I have the luxury of being able not to do it for long.
But in general yes, telling people they're idiots doesn't usually go well, so don't do that either.
> "making broad generalizations about your coworkers based on their gender"
Oh it has nothing to do with gender. If've seen hyperwoke males as much as I seen females. It's the type you want to bite your tongue around, not gender.
As someone that also read it, those arent the words he used, but that is very much what he was saying. A facade of misrepresented psuedoscience doesnt change the intent, motivation, or reality.
I don't have an opinion on whether he's right or wrong but I don't think he shouldn't be able to make that argument...
Imagine how you'd feel. Imagine people would generally claim that someone who looks like you is a bad engineer (say, someone with your hair color). And then imagine that people would expect you to constantly disprove that assumption, just because of your hair color.
You'd be on the edge all the time. You'd never feel at home in the field. And whenever you interact with someone who doesn't have past work experience with you, they'd still assume you're a bad engineer.
You've now rephrased your objection that you would have a problem because you would assume female programmers were less qualified, which is not what you said in your original comment.
- There is a score threshold you must cross to get a job;
- score is normally representative of competence;
- individuals belonging to group X get a score boost.
It follows that it's possible for someone to cross the minimum threshold thanks to the boost given by their belonging to the favoured group, and not because of their competence alone. It's not a matter of "the point of view of the woman" or "my point of view". It's not a point of view. It's a logical consequence that can be inferred by women, men, everyone, equally.
As the moderation bears witness, we live in an age where positive is somehow negative.
Damore deliberately chose to cast doubt on whether the women Google hired were as good as the men. Otherwise, it's easier and less controversial to just argue that any form of discrimination is wrong.
Nowadays I think it's a better strategy at Google to not discuss if you don't agree with its policies. It's still a great workplace as long as you can discard politics.
There are large swathes of people who can't just "discard politics" because they are directly affected by the current political status quo.
It's great to have empathy for people in a less fortunate position, and yes we have a lot of problems in our society, but FAANG software engineers are arguably the least oppressed people on the planet.
Or is that a too naive view of what Googlers are supposed to be capable of?
What I learned over time is that it's just better to work 8x5 days, don't do overtime/weekends, because it's not worth it anymore. For 8x5 hours of work Google is amazing.
Heterosexual cisgender white christian male FAANG software engineers may be. Racism and other bigotry doesn't stop affecting you because of economic class or other social position of advantage orthogonal to the basis of the bigotry.
Similarly, police officers are also a relatively privileged group of people, but 90% of mistaken identity shootings of off-duty police by police between 1982 and 2010 were shootings of black or hispanic officers.
That's an interesting statistic. Can I have the source? (This is a genuine question, I'm not trying to cast doubt on what you said.)
You cant have so much more women than the rest of the industry without that being true. There literally is not enough women coming through engineering schools to allow for that without you a) discriminating against men based on sex, and b) lowering the bar for women.
There is no doubt. It is a mathematical given.
So even if we accept that the average female engineer is not as good as the average male, and there are less female engineers than male, and that Google hires more female engineers than other players in the industry (relative to male hires), it is still absolutely possible that the bar is not lower. Maybe they look harder, maybe they pay more to female engineers with a given competence level, maybe there's no difference, etc.
The rate of female attendance in comp sci has been in decline since the 70s. At my university it was quite literally 100 to 1.
You cant have a 50-50 hiring pool without some fuckery there.
And for what its worth i absolutely do not accept that the avergage female engineer is not as good as the average male engineer.
If anything, they are anecdotally better equiped.
> All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).
So what amounts to increase their total comp because theyre female and you have a quota to fill?
Thats sexual discrimination is it not?
I really need to say while im passionately pissed off about the way identity politics has infected this industry i am more than welcome to more females joining the industry and more than hapoy to see the broculture fuck right off.
This needs fleshing out. One goal is to give equal preference to equally deserving candidates, say candidates with individual score x, regardless of their group membership. It's not clear that you can pick based solely on score x and still achieve that goal, no matter how carefully you pick. If you're picking on x and group membership, you're harming one group of people with score x (assuming a fixed headcount, where advantaging one person means disadvantaging another).
My take is that when you optimize for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity you break something at the opportunity end (its either or, not both.)
Regarding a or b, this is mostly b, lowering the bar. But its also a, sexual discrimination.
If you think its not, please explain how you think it would go down if google was focusing hiring efforts to hire white males because they wanted to match the current male to female ratio seen in engineering schools and currently have too many females in the office.
Because i fail to see how aiming to hire more females than the industry schools can bare simply because there are too many men in the office is anything but sexist.
Yes, it still leaves open whether the following is true:
> when women do prefer the field, they tend to be amazing engineers
Hence I'd say there is nothing wrong with the statement.
If they think 50% of engineers should be women, I would like to hold them to an even higher standard by requiring that out if that 50% of women,each national origin,ethnicity,political/ideological upbringing and social status (mother,single,divorced,etc...) is also proportionally represented. If this is about making up for historical prejudice then let every women of a wronged group be equally represented. You will soon see the silliness of the pursuit.
It is the cause that needs policing and adjustment (upstream) not the effect.
> Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts
Lack of interest in a subject does not mean a lack of capability.
"happy with" is not the same as "interested in" however it seems like the last 2 decades have had a lot of focus on letting people follow their passion.
Can you direct me to where I suggested there is no systematic career discrimination towards minorities? If that's how you interpreted my comment, then I apologize for that. There is absolutely substantial structural discrimination; I don't intend to minimize that.
The comment I was replying to did in fact specify as an assumption (the antecedent of the conditional) that "society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something." This framing excludes the possibility that something else (namely biology) may affect a person's preferences.
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption - again, little scientific evidence supports that view. (Even intuition does not support that view: I don't think most people would argue that men for the most part are "brainwashed" by society to have sexual preferences for women. Likely some of this is biological; in fact, there is a good evolutionary reason for it!)
[1] http://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/4753/6/symplectic-version....
my point was pretty simple. If society at large, in ways small and big, encourage women from joining a field, I think it's likely fewer will participate.
This is the argument behind Sheryl Sandberg creating stock photos that demonstrate more inclusion. If all I see are white men with grey hair in photos as doctors, don't you think that might bias women to think that's who doctors are? That's not 100% of what influences an interest, but it's an important one.
Current research generally does not find evidence that variations in preferences, psychology, or personality stem from genetic or biological factors. Rather, they’re primarily attributed to culture and socialization.
A rebuttal a year later in the related section points out omissions from this paper and offers a deeper perspective on the differences
20 years ago there was a lot less of a push for women in tech and you actually did hear lots of people espouse this view, now the programmes and encouragement is everywhere and the social cost of a different view is your job.
What is being argued and and what is happening don't seem to correlate.
I have, and I regularly hear depressing and disturbing examples.
But all things being equal, I would rather hire the person who is more motivated and interested in the field than the person who isn't because skills can be learned and motivation produces results.
He was literally preaching for equality. His point was that affirmative action programs do companies a disservice by making minority/women employees seem like they didn't get there through their own merit, and also punishes companies that don't have sufficient women due to a lack of interest women have in programming - which may or may not be innate.
...and he was fired for that. Crazy.
Being blind to the widespread dismissive, discriminatory, and derogatory behavior that routinely drives women from the industry does not inspire confidence. Choosing to ignore the quantities of good science on the topic in favor of what he did does not inspire confidence.
Then he chooses to widely declare this and demean large swathes of his coworkers. I'm all for open communication, but that doesnt absolve you of social consequences. When you make a big chunk of your company uncomfortable with you and how you view them....yeah, consequences, yeah, fired.
The only reason this is a surprise is because it happened to some like him and not the groups he was pretending to defend. I assure you most of them would be outraged and frustrated but nearly as surprised had the interaction gone the other way. All you have to do is watch and listen to know that.
Nobody seems to have a problem when it comes to auto mechanics, medical sciences, teachers, social services, lawyers, etc. Why are different interests such a controversial thing to accept?
2) tech is just the latest in a series. Comp sci degree enrollment for women DROPPED for recent decades - that's not a biological lack of interest. This has occurred in many professions - when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out.
3) you are proving the problem in the original memo. Instead of looking into any of the research on the topic, you are repeating what feels true. You speak with such confidence on the different interests of different genders, without considering how you know what the actual interests might be. (You're assuming what you see must be the result of interests, and use that to prove a difference of interests is the cause. That's a tautology) You assert that "no one seems to have a problem" with imbalances in other professions, when it is trivial to find people definitely have problems.
The research on the topic covers what I state about different countries and societies showing how different interests affect professions. Here are some links:
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...
https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
I've talked to Pr. Emeritus Mallard a lot three year ago, who was a biology researcher studying genotype and phenotype in animal/vegetal populations (for context, he got his degree around the time we discovered ADN). From what he remember, there was a lot more than 50% women when he started, at least as "programmers", although they were barely viewed as clever seamstress at the time.
Each time he wanted to do a computer-assisted statistical study in the early days, the programmer was a woman (again, from what he remembers) and he always thought the field was dominated by them, at least for grunts work.
I don't know what happened, by the time my daughter was doing CS the number of woman was < 10% and she and her compatriots were literally hounded out of the course by the bro-culture - personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days
Could you elaborate? - interested in hearing more about this.
Computer science predates gaming, particularly online gaming with a social component, by a lot. You're committing the "all things with 4 legs are elephants" fallacy.
Here's once quote: "Starting when computer technology first emerged during World War II and continuing into the 1960s, women made up most of the computing workforce. By 1970, however, women only accounted for 13.6% of bachelor's in computer science graduates. In 1984 that number rose to 37%, but it has since declined to 18% -- around the same time personal computers started showing up in homes. According to NPR, personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to men and families were more likely to buy computers for boys than girls." ( from https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-... )
Here's a graph of the data: https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw.... ( found via https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer... )
Those are only talking about successful degrees, there are plenty of more datapoints to look at when you consider entry vs completion, and similar stats from post-graduation careers. This doesn't prove causality, but their statement stands as viable.
This is cherrypicking in the most bizarre way: if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation? Which also doesn't line up with the type internet gaming which was exploited around the 2010s mark where alt-right groups began aggressively recruiting out of the gaming community via the "gamergate" movement.
In every case you're datapoints don't make any sense - there weren't 12 years olds playing Call Of Duty in 1985 and learning to scream racial and sexual epithets in voice chat. Games with a substantial violent component - the first person shooters - Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992.
Which still doesn't actually explain anything, because it's not remotely clear how "shooting nazis" lines up with excluding women from CS.
Clearly women in the 1970s had no other obstacles - they couldn't obtain credit(!), much less be on equal footing in so many other ways. The issue is not "but there is an earlier oscillation", it's "if women have been slowly moving in direction of equality, what reversed that?" or "If women were able to 'be interested' back then, how can we claim they aren't now"?
Sexist (and racial) exclusionary behavior ticks up once a field becomes commoditized and the general populace move on in, because the general populace carry with them the prevailing attitudes of the times.
If you're going to claim that women were only hired as secretaries for software dev work I hope you have actual data behind your assertion.
I've seen this idea around and I think it's quite problematic. Some countries may have relatively "free choices", but that is just one cultural dimension. A culture is an inconceivably complex phenomenon. A culture also has education strategies, gender roles, specific kinds of toys and games, specific languages and sub-languages, a myriad of sub-cultures that youth will cluster around, cultural specific concepts and ideas and so on.
I'm not ruling out that biological factors play a role, but I see biological factors as just one part of a complex, and, additionally, if you look at history, it's very clear that cultural factors can and will override just about any biological imperative, from the will to live to the will to procreate. This should make it clear that cultural factors need to be systematically ruled out before we can begin to consider that biology is to blame.
Affirmative action policies literally make it easier for one group to get a spot in [insert institution here] than another group. And yet we still see discrepancies. We publicly shame and fire anyone who says "maybe biological differences play a role". And yet we still see discrepancies.
If we haven't ruled out cultural factors in the West at this point, I'm not sure how we can.
By effectively every metric, it is easier for a woman to become an engineer in 2020 than a man. There are many, many programs and initiatives which encourage women to get into STEM from an early age – the same do not really exist for men. Women get into (and graduate from) university at a higher rate. There is more funding available specifically to women that are pursuing STEM And yet still you have more men choosing to be engineers than women.
How could they be? That is an intractable problem. Cultural factors permeate our existence from birth. You'd literally have to catalogue every single thing influencing an individual's life from birth to the time they enter the workforce.
I have two daughters and I've seen just how powerful subconscious messages from media influence the way they think. My oldest daughter is only four and she is absolutely adamant that girls can _only_ marry boys. That's clearly because the Netflix shows and Disney movies she watches all have a "girl marries boy" narrative. Think about that: my daughter is only four, I've never talked to her about marriage, and she is already firm in her belief that same sex marriage is not OK.
You are talking about funding and affirmative action, but have you considered gendered advertising towards toddlers? Have you considered gendered concepts in TV shows and movies? How about in toys? Do you know how elementary school teachers, not to mention parents, are subtly encouraging and discouraging boys and girls by their words and actions? Children absorb these things and they are solidified into semi-permanent activation pathways in their developing brains.
There are a million factors here that we will never grasp. Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.
> Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.
This is exactly my (and, funnily enough, Damore's) point. Affirmative action / quotas are a bandaid that does not solve the problem and can actually make it worse by encouraging resentment (from non-affirmed groups) and increasing self-doubt (among affirmed groups). The solution is to treat individuals as individuals and not look at their race, sex, religion, etc. The only way to move forward as a society in the long-term is to truly look past any groups a person belongs to and see them as an individual. Continuing to lump people into groups and make decisions based of those groups has the opposite effect and will only hurt us in the long run.
> Your four-year-old daughter assuming that the norm is the only way to do something is her jumping to conclusions, not a mark against society
I didn't say it was a mark against society, you read that into my argument. If I thought this was wrong or bad, I wouldn't show her that kind of media. I am simply pointing out how _everything_ in a child's environment will influence their thinking, I made no moral judgement on the situation.
> Likewise, if she grows up thinking that girls shouldn't be programmers, that is on you.
I agree, but I think most adults aren't thinking "I'd better make sure my daughter knows she can be a programmer." If they aren't, then their children will be subject to myriad influences. That flows into my last point.
> This is exactly my (and, funnily enough, Damore's) point.
I read Damore's paper and that is not the part I take issue with. He claims the scientific evidence has established that women are _biologically_ less interested in engineering. I don't believe that has been established.
The parent comment referenced a study by Jordan Peterson that shows that in countries with more freedom of choice, women continue to choose people oriented occupations. My point is that freedom of choice _doesn't matter_ unless the entire society is focused on treating children equally. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement either way, just pointing out that the study doesn't take this into account. IIRC Jordan Peterson himself remarked that the results could be the effect of gender roles or culture.
You vote with your job. If you don't like things, quit. Either the people working at the company are discriminatory and don't care or you are the problematic one. If you think you are right that a big company discriminates openly, then wouldn't you have to admit that most people at your company don't care about discrimination as much as their paycheck or they are discriminatory themselves. If a company can easily replace employees, then the society doesn't value equality. We should fix that foremost.
If we had UBI, wouldn't discrimination of any kind be detrimental given that workers wouldn't be forced to work for low wages and companies which discriminate based on pseudoscience be at a disadvantage because they won't get talent that other companies can. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Why are people not pursuing UBI for gender equality?
As for an opposing view point, check this - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... which says fewer women take stem in developed countries than under developed countries. There will always be more differences. We shouldn't do a shut down case for either. It's not yet clear what percentage are affected by it. If it is, mention the source.
I'm sceptic to this claim because discriminatory and derogatory behavior in medicine or law are much more widespread. And female students flock to these professions.
It could mean that woman who are driven away from software engineering by discriminatory and derogatory behaviour are somehow exhibiting differences to their law / medicine counterparts.
Is there any research in to this question?
https://www.girlsglobe.org/2019/03/12/time-confront-sexism-m...
I can't imagine sexism or work environment (looong hours and exhausting shifts) are substantially worse in engineering.
What is different is, in my opinion, that medicine/law is perceived as higher status than nerd stuff. There are popular tv series idolizing the glamorous life of New York lawyers and the heroism of doctors/nurses. When are techies depicted favorably and not as social autists? The goth chic in Navy:CIS maybe, but not much else.
This is the absolute crux of the entire paper, and it's very easy to view it with whatever politicising lens you want.
So lets try to flippantly and dispassionately break down how he constructed the statement
1) Women in absolute aggregate seem to not like CompSci.
2) We want more women in CompSci.
3) We should make CompSci more attractive to women.
4) What do Women in aggregate seem to like?
5) Is there room in CompSci fields for things that women like?
6) Yes, lots, it would be absolutely amazing if we could promote the things women in aggregate prefer to do in the field compsci. Those tropes of introverted men sitting in the basement should be subverted.
7) The current method of attracting women is harmful, we should instead change our desired behaviour of engineering to incorporate feminine ideals which could easily be incorporated.
> We should make [x] more attractive to [singleton].
Why?
Unless the field is more toxic to [singleton] or there is more productivity due to "diversity" at which point you are admitting that people are different on biological (or social) level and have different interests, views etc.
My mother explained diversity to me this way:
"We are each of us, unique but equal. Meaning that while you will grow up and be stronger than me, I will be able to produce children. This doesn't make either of us better, both should be respected as equal. There is value but difference in both." (not verbatim)
If we assume that on average women are more prone to overthinking, then it likely follows that having a women the team designing a product with a man (who, on average are more likely to be dismissive and flippant) then there's a necessary conflict, and the product will be better for everyone if it happens.
We should not be judging a fish by it's ability to climb a tree, we should instead be asking, how do we define the value of swimming and how do we ensure we have great swimmers working with us.
I think we are agreeing.
That's why I highlighted more attractive to [singleton] when you could be more inclusive by avoiding singletons.
Why shouldn't a field be attractive to everyone - blind, deaf, disabled etc equally?
Imo, focusing on singletons is detrimental because by doing so, you will end up discriminating automatically because there will always be other groups that you won't or don't see.
Why focus on women now?
Because there’s a lot of women in the world and they seem to not like this field.
I don’t really have a good answer, I thought Damores memo was pretty good and I thought it might provoke the powers that be to approach the distribution of underrepresented factions a little better.
For instance, if you want to hire blind people (and you should want to hire a few blind people) then offering accessibly tools to them is a no-brainer.
And if you’re not getting any applicants, maybe you should look at why. Maybe your job board can’t be read by blind people. (To keep the analogy going).
Source. I have seen few and they do show women working in the field not liking it. The problem with that is it could be those women are outliers given the gender ratio in some CS fields (I will ignore non biological genders), the field could be attractive but don't have good working conditions for women, women don't have much interest etc.
All of those can be true and change your steps to make the field more attractive.
As an example, you can look into construction field which is heavily dominated by men and women in the field feels the same but outside, it's a different story in terms of interest.
How do you make construction work more attractive for women?
I am curious to hear your opinion about below too. What are the problems do you see with this approach? -
You vote with your job. If you don't like things, quit. Either the people working at the company are discriminatory and don't care or you are the problematic one. If you think you are right that a big company discriminates openly, then wouldn't you have to admit that most people at your company don't care about discrimination as much as their paycheck or they are discriminatory themselves. If a company can easily replace employees, then the society doesn't value equality.
If we had UBI, wouldn't discrimination of any kind be detrimental given that workers wouldn't be forced to work for low wages and companies which discriminate based on pseudoscience be at a disadvantage because they won't get talent that other companies can. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Why are people not pursuing UBI for gender equality?
Well, what I mean is that we're not even close to a gender parity, it would be fine at 35-40% female in my opinion but the industry is closer to 14-25% (depending on country) and to me that indicates a problem.
I think quota's and the extreme bias towards education programs that favour women is problematic though, in my opinion it infantilises Women which I dislike because I really believe women are just as capable as men in this field.
That's why I liked Damores memo, it spoke to the idea that instead of having quotas we should seek to bring in a more human centred approach to asking the question: what do women bring uniquely to the table and how can we ensure that women know that this is desirable and that they're welcome.
Killing the trope that Tech work is isolationist was one example from the memo that would likely cause some traction.
> As an example, you can look into construction field which is heavily dominated by men and women in the field feels the same but outside, it's a different story in terms of interest.
> How do you make construction work more attractive for women?
I think drawing a parallel to construction is a fine one, but I would argue instead for Architecture.
Construction doesn't need a diverse set of views, neither does nursing or mining. But Architecture does because the consumers of architecture is everyone.
And I think that's the crucial difference here: things that are designed for everyone should have a diverse set of eyes on them.
Teaching, especially pre-school teaching, is going to be tough to make attractive for men.
And for a lot of parents too.
One of the teachers I most learned from was male, he actually sparked my interest in computers because he ran an after school computer club for 20 pence.. which for a poor household such as mine was affordable..
Then you will see gender bias. :)
I think I missed something.
Secondly, I don't understand why it has to be CS. A product requires more roles than a CS graduate. UX/UI, design, support, marketing, management, documentation, etc.
There can be more women in any of those roles and there seems to be in some.
A team of CS graduate wouldn't pull off a global product even if they are diverse because they are CS graduates.
Sorry, I thought we were still discussing the James Damore memo, because he said and backed up the assertion that women seemed to not _want_ to join compsci programs or join the associated industries in aggregate when compared to men.
I think you're assuming that I am the poster child for diversity and inclusion; I am really not. I just make my own decisions I'm definitely on nobodies side and I'm not going to go down the path of defending other industries.
I can just see a value in diversity in teams that work on products we all use, and I think I communicated that effectively enough in previous comments.
And I wasn't talking about damore memo.
I like the idea of diversity and support it but it depends on what cost. My country suffers from reservation (quota) and it's wrecked.
Although I wanted to talk more about organisational diversity. Whether organisations as a whole have 50/50 gender ratio at scale. Whether roles are "diverse".
Because that would be more interesting.
Quotas are terrible no good bad and ugly hacks which will cause a lot of harm and the reasons why are controversial.
I think 50/50 gender parity is a stupid goal too, I think more representation but if it's not 50:50 then it doesn't mean that there is sexism, 60:40 is fine even 70:30 is ok, wether it skews more to women or men, it doesn't matter, the point is that women, men, blind, black- everyone needs to have their voices heard on teams that design global products.
The closer you try to force it to 50:50 the worse and much harder it'll be, bureaucrats will love you though, at what point do you stop breaking down societal boundaries? I'd argue that getting a few voices from each are is a good thing but I don't think exactly defining the distribution of the country is a good goal.
Instead of quotas, we should investigate what would make the industry more appealing to those under-heard voices.
Damore says that women tend to favour flexible working hours, that's great Tech can support that.
Damore says that women tend to favour jobs that have a high emphasis on collaboration, excellent, tech can support that.
This is why I dislike the overwhelming criticism of Damores paper, because it's the quintessential attack on the author for daring to insinuate that women are different, instead we should boulder through the idea that Women == Men, and anything other than that is sexism, but also we want 50:50 gender parity... and why isn't it happening! sexism! therefore men are bad and we should hire women over men using quotas! that will fix it!.
It's egregious, and stupid, and harmful. And a conversation about why and trying to actually improve the situation is more fruitful than shit slinging because the only people to let Damore speak are right-wingers.
If you're left-wing (as I am) you should want him to speak, he's promoting equality and compassion.
Does it really make a difference if the same feature is implemented by a man versus a woman?
Based on what? They don't end up there, but we have evidence (based on decreasing enrollment in degrees) that they USED to be "more interested" (If you use that as criteria). Do you think they generationally are just more aware of what it really is now?
How would that happen without ALSO becoming more aware of the absolute vile GamerGate-type shit women have to face, from the smallest "let me assume you don't know anything" to the "let's make rape jokes" to the "Can a woman have confidence she probably won't be groped"?
If you start with the premise that women "seem to not like CompSci", you've already assumed the problem and normalized a lot of factors that don't have to be normalized.
Sorry for that.
> Based on what? They don't end up there, [...]
Well, yes, you can argue the factors here but there is a trend that something is off-putting. Either Gamer-gate (something which is absolutely mired in controversy of its own right) or 'rape jokes' but more likely the tropes of: long working hours with a dead end at the end of it, competitiveness, isolation and the notion that if you're in technology your job is your life.
Frankly to assume you and I know the true reason is rather arrogant, I'm not a sociologist I can only read the corpus of their work and believe that they came to the correct conclusions.
Your comment indicates that there is an aggressive amount of sexism in tech, rape jokes and groping not withstanding, and I'm not going to ask for evidence of that despite my conviction that this is not nearly as endemic as you indicate; instead I'd ask the question: If marketing is also inherently sexist (and definitely more "boys club groping the ladies" than tech) why is there a much stronger representation of Women there?
I think you have internalised a mistruth about the tech industry at large.
"Biological sex plays no role in life choices / job preferences" (which is different than: "we should not prevent people from going into X choice/profession because of their biological sex". A priori considering the former as "truth" / "obvious" etc is also a political idea.
What about all the people that were made uncomfortable by his firing? Can we fire those responsible for that? This got so silly so fast
I don’t agree with how he went about pursuing the issue but your assessment does not comport with the views he’s shared with me or our contemporaries who stay in touch with him.
No it's not. Nowhere in the paper did he say that women can't become good engineers. You're literally defaming his work. Either support your accusation with evidence, or don't comment.
His "work" does a fine job of that on its own.
> Nowhere in the paper did he say that
You both are saying the same thing- he did not use those exact words.
The parent comment is saying that despite not saying "Women can't be engineers", the entire purpose of the paper, in the view of that reader, was to insinuate that women can't be engineers. It's not terribly hard to promote an idea without ever saying it explicitly. Perhaps you didn't read the deeper meaning out of the memo.
And demanding those who interpret things differently than you "don't comment" doesn't promote discussion, it ends it. When someone says something you disagree with, don't tell them to shut up, ask them why they see things differently. Debate. Discuss. Grow.
Although his intentions were unclear by his vague approach to the subject, I believe he didn't mean to say women can't be engineers.
Most of the time he gave population-based examples of how women decided not to be engineers. His thesis was to show that forcing women in STEM fields is not a fair practice to both women and men who want to be STEM professionals.
Please take this idea with an open mind. When you arrive a singular purpose to the paper, it may say more about your views than it does about the author's. He didn't have a thesis that stated directly that he meant to "insinuate that women can't be engineers", so you're literally putting words in his mouth.
And the "don't comment" line explicitly said it was in response to statements that are unfounded, NOT statements that disagree.
Putting that all together, you seem to be having an argument with a ghost of your own making.
Ok, please explain to me how the memo suggests that women can't be engineers.
Ah, the classic "so you mean (something not said, and never meant)"...
Edit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo... page 4 has a diagram at the top explicitly explaining that.
It is not what he was saying. Why do so many people absolutely insist on misinterpreting it to the point of willful distortion?
How did I "convince myself of an ulterior motive"? I read what was written, and then I asked questions and did research. Are these studies he cites credible? [No]. Why would he bring these up? What motivations would be involved? How do the people he is talking about feel? Did he consider their feelings? If I were Google, what are my options, and what are the results of those options?
Dog-whistles and micro-aggressions thrive on failure to ask these questions. It empowers the status quo to entrench so long as they avoid the absolute most stark of statements.
Whether or not you agree or disagree, it clearly had an impact of making a very large and significant segment of female employees at Google feel as if they were biologically inferior or otherwise not suited to do their jobs. You can sit here and say "Oh, that's nuts, that's not what he said" - but you're also not hearing the same internalized misogyny and bias that a LOT of female engineers are, day after day, at every company they've ever been at. He should have known it had the potential to have that impact, so I have approximately zero sympathy in that regard; what his true intentions are/were is irrelevant.
I would bet any number that the largest cohort of people who are baffled by the reaction to his memo are white men. I'm sure it's not even close.
Blame that on the attention seekers and clickbait journalists. A lot of things quoted out of context cause people to be offended. If you misrepresent citing a study that says that women score higher than men in neuroticism in personality surveys, as “Damore thinks women are neurotic,” of course women will be offended.
But here's the thing: every time this comes up, this is framed, as you do, as a failure of "everyone else" (meaning left-leaning general folks, often women themselves) failing to understand the truth of what he wrote. But what you don't do is actually defend what he wrote.
And that's because what he wrote was really kinda vile. Indeed he didn't say "Women can't be good engineers". He said: "Women at Google aren't good engineers", which is quite frankly no less offensive. Now, sure, sure, his point was that this was because Google's diversity policies were incorrectly boosting these candidates. But that doesn't change what he said.
So... I don't see that the "female engineer" you were talking to really had it that wrong. You're focused on what to her was a minor fact, and while you seem to be oblivious as to why she might find the "correct" interpretation offensive too...
... you aren't. Because you know it's not really that defensible either and don't want to be held to account for Damore's opinions yourself. So you content yourself with what the rest of us view as nitpicking.
You quote this, which isn't a quote. Feel free to draw out the passages of his memo where this is explicitly or implicitly stated.
It's strange for that to be so controversial. Not having an interest in a field does not mean you're not capable. Perhaps that's the nuance that's missing.
And before people make the claim that programming was glorified hole punching as it seems to come up by that point in history we already saw the rise of modern abstractions and higher level development. It's controversial because it's trying to abstract some sort of universal biotruths by vaguely linking data with psuedoscience and correlation.
I find it hard to believe an explanation that proposes an industry has become more sexist since the 70s.
That was literally his conclusion - and it's spot on.
He shared a manifesto about gender differences in the workplace. In it, he calls women neurotic.
Whether people's read on the manifesto is reductive of his overall argument isn't the point.
He showed a serious lack of judgement writing and posting that in his workplace. He should not have played the part of expert gender/psychology expert. A researcher he cites specifically disagrees with his takeaways.
There are productive ways to have these kinds of conversations, he chose to go to the opposite wrong end of that spectrum.
Women have enough BS to deal with in tech, the last thing they need is a tech bro mis-using uncertain psych research to justify telling them they should find more appropriate roles.
Saying that men and women tend to have different preferences doesn't make a statement about their capabilities, nor is it really that controversial. The pursuit of a 50/50 ratio is counter-productive to free and open choice. Encouragement and opportunity should be the goal, not a forced ratio outcome.
How is the statement in a general population inaccurate? I agree it can make people uncomfortable but it looks pretty accurate to me
um, because there is no credible science behind his assumptions. Many of the researchers he cites dispute his conclusions.
I'm not ignoring his argument, I'm saying it's a really bad argument with almost no evidence to support it.
What "conclusions" are disagreed?
Can you really not see how this would apply in real life with personality differences? It seems obvious and intuitive not even mentioning the science, women are more social on average, men more into things that make a whirring noise. What data am I missing?
You are proving my argument. Nonsense like this has prevented women from feeling like equal participants (and equally capable) in many fields for decades.
How does that prove anything for you? You haven't shown anything except that you disagree, that doesn't give us anything except your opinion and definitely won't convince people who know the science also... The personality differences between men and women are not edgy science. I have a degree in psychology and I'm pretty confident you have no legit science (and haven't even give logical reasons) to back your claims but feel free to post something different
You also seem to have a lot of misinformation in this thread. Calling his memo a manifesto... Mixing neurotic with neuroticism... Basic facts you are smearing... You aren't giving people a reason to believe any of what you say so maybe you should think about why you have such an extreme view
He wrote a post. Not a manifesto.
"There are productive ways to have these kinds of conversations"
Well obviously there aren't when posting a comment in an internal company forum gets you fired.
So...shrugs
He's not wrong.
If his intent wasn’t sexist then his failure to perfectly negotiate the complex social way those points have to be expressed isn’t a moral failing on his part.
Edit: I’d rather posters took the time to argue against rather than downvote. My point is just that ‘socially colourblind’ people probably shouldn’t be punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety. It doesn’t mean they can’t be corrected or educated, of-course.
This attitude leaves me almost speechless. When someone makes an argument that at least tries to be well reasoned, and people attack him based on misunderstandings and how it makes them feel, maybe the problem is not that he's autistic. Maybe it's those who are offended and refuse to engage in a civilized debate that have some form of disability.
It used to be that dispassionate reason was the highest form of discourse (the only one on which it's possible to reach agreements). What happened to that standard, when the responses boil down to "how does it make you feel"?
That's because he is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam...
That's a very deliberate choice. He's no martyr of rational thought.
Is Joe Rogan not a centrist? He is self proclaimed liberal on most topics, right wing is a silly label
Watching his interviews with various people who are more left leaning doesn't give me the impression that he is alt-right.
If he were more 'soy' and less 'bro', while having the same mostly-liberal opinions, he'd get an entirely different reaction from the elite cultural left.
Think culturally lowbrow vs cultural elite. Rogan came up as a cage fighting commentator. In Europe there would be a lot more techno blasted out of a much smaller car.
Big Tech's contrived and readjusted and out of touch practices have been written about in NY Times, Wapo, even freaking SFGate ad nauseum.
Adding some points that overlap with misogynist communities means address the misogyny in isolation, and also factor in the points.
Neurotic, as he uses it, is not the same way it is used in everyday parlance.
Neurotic is part of the Big 5 personality traits, for which there is substantial academic evidence. The traits are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
Eh. He's using the psychological/clinical definition, but then draws conclusions on no scientific basis.
This is what he said in the memo:
> [Women, on average, have more] neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance): This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
And this is a quote from the person who actually did the meta-analysis which Damore cites (emphasis is mine):
> These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.
> It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Also, and fact check me on this, does accounting for 10% of variance (aka 0.1 * sig^2) mean accounting for sqrt(0.1) * sig, aka 32% of the standard deviation?
No, he says that on average they score higher on "neuroticism", one of the Big Five personality traits. [1] And it is an empirical fact. [2]
If you say "he said women are neurotics" it means you didn't understand neither the language nor the logic of what you were reading, something that should give you pause.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
Probably doesn't help being autistic.
Very few can handle the truth when they feel something different inside. You don't win over people with facts, fact support internal believes or they get ignored, blocked or morphed.
Those aren’t the words he used, but it’s exactly what he was saying.
Are you saying: "This statement is false, so I must argue against it."
Or are you saying: "I cannot accept the implications of this statement, so I must argue against it."
There are productive outcomes possible by parsing and separating those issues.
I think it has been a big mistake of tech platforms - and really the people in the geographical area they are in - to simply be content with deplatforming people, assuming they are irreconcilable. It only emboldens, it doesn't stop the spread of disagreement, and from my perspective there really is a lot of common ground which is really just angst in implementation of progressive ideals.
Want more rights then work in a union. Otherwise, don't forget you're employed _at will_.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html - Paul Graham's 'What you can't say'
That's my observation of these threads - it's a curious game - the only winning move, Professor Falcon, is not to play. How about a nice game of Chess?
What is it about this story that keeps people engaged? Are other engineers concerned they could be fired like Damore for saying the wrong thing?
If you're going to come into this thread to refute Damore's memo and downvote people who don't tow your petty little line, your need to reexamine your principles, if you've got one.
You are free to hold any belief you want, but once you’re in my ear with some misinformed ideas that are potentially hurtful to a large group I am free to tell you to be quiet or leave. Of course, it’s your right not to listen to me... but if I’m your boss you can expect to be fired.
The idea that Google fired Damore for anything other than bad publicity is not supported by evidence. They asked him for feedback. He provided an intelligent and well researched document. They debated it. A social media mob got mad, and Google, being greedy cowards, fired Damore.
"James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
To my knowledge this account has never been contested by Google or anyone else and is the agreed upon account. I agree it is possible that Damore is lying about why he wrote it, and that if Google said he wrote it under some different circumstances there would be ambiguity because Damore's own account could be self serving - but, just because it is possibly Damore is lying doesn't mean we should assume he is. There is no dispute about why he originally authored the memo, is there?
I never said it was the same individual though, I said it was Google. I think it's splitting hairs to take what I wrote "Google asked for feedback and fired him" read it as a claim that it's somehow the same individual firing him, and then try to dispute the unintended interpretation you just invented.
Regarding sharing it broadly being Damore's idea - true. He shared it first as feedback and then tried to develop the ideas further by sharing within the company. For opinions not verboten by Google, this is common at the company.
This does not mean that it was irrelevant he was asked. Google talked to Damore about diversity and asked for his opinions. He was working to provide it and fired by Google for it.
Your construction seems to imply that Damore was fired for sharing his diversity feedback more broadly. I don't think that's true. Damore wasn't fired or censured when he gave the original opinion and not when he shared internally. He was only fired when social media began brewing an outrage mob. The point is, it shows Damore wasn't doing anything objectively wrong. He wasn't punished until popular subjective opinion went against him. He wasn't fired for his opinion or for sharing it internally, he was fired because people were tweeting about it and Google lacks the intellectual and moral integrity to stand behind their people against mean tweets.
It's true that sharing opinions is a common activity. But that again elides key facts. A highly political document attacking company programs and company culture was not the sort of thing people normally pass around for discussion.
Your notion that Damore just, gosh golly, thought he was sharing some helpful feedback is hard to square with the content or with his subsequent behavior both before and after his firing. I think what fits better with the text and his behavior is that he was engaging in political activism, and was well aware that he was going to cause a stir.
I agree that it's possible Damore wouldn't have ended up being fired under a variety of circumstances. Maybe it's true that if it hadn't hit the press, he'd still be there. Although given that what made news was the level of internal upset it was causing, he could well have been fired anyhow. And regardless, any employee should know that, "Don't cause the company a giant PR problem" is a reasonable rule to follow. Indeed, that apparently is explicitly part of Google's orientation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124750
Your objection is that saying "Google" did each of those things "hides relevant details". I disagree given that I've explicitly stated those details in this thread. Taking a single sentence and complaining it lacks details which are readily available in the wider context seems like splitting hairs.
Your point about "what fits better with Damore's text and behavior" may be your opinion. I don't share it though based on Damore's text clearly offering suggestions to improve diversity and different ways to think about it. To me, it seems much more likely Damore interpreted the Google diversity people as being honest actors and gave his honest feedback.
Your final point about how Damore should've known he would be fired is true, and I agree he should've realized Google is not an honest actor and doesn't want genuine feedback. That's kind of beside my broader point though, which is to highlight Google's lack of integrity in this instance. Damore was naive and trusted Google, he should've known not to. We agree there.
Setting that point aside, do you think if Damore was genuinely trying to give advice, and I know you don't think that, that he should've been fired for it?
But let's say you're right, that his very best effort to collaborate with his colleagues was a divisive attack on their politics. That his very best effort to collaborate involved sticking to his guns to the point it was causing a major internal problem, and then a notable external one. In which case, he's so uniquely bad at collaboration that I don't think they could do anything other than fire him.
But personally, I don't think Damore was almost uniquely incompetent.
I don't think you're being honest or fair here and don't see the benefit of continuing a conversation with you.
I'm being perfectly honest, and I'm doing my best to be fair. If you don't like that, well, I did my best.
Google correctly gave employees a lot of power to have internal discussions because they thought that would benefit them as a company. And the great bulk of people used that responsibly. Damore didn't and paid the price.
A lot of people here want to be the boss of their own start-up, which means they won't want their future (perhaps hypothetical) employees organising against them.
1) Damore may have felt just as uncomfortable as his coworkers with what was being said, just in the opposite direction.
2) Damore, being a little spectrumy, attempted to derive an answer to a question about gender inequality in a cold and rational way, having no understanding that what he wrote would upset people. That's not the same as suggesting what he wrote is "correct." Correctness is irrelevant. As a person also on the spectrum, I can relate to this happening all.the.time. It's very difficult to understand what will upset people if you don't already have a mental rule about it. And rules are narrow.
If you're going to solicit feedback and then fire someone because you don't like it - at least specify that it must be non-dissenting feedback. Be honest here about the dishonest game being played.
If a company can't handle honest, carefully researched and presented feedback - they shouldn't ask for it.
That would be one way to run a company, I guess. But I've never heard of one that actually works like that.
I think Demore's memo has little place in a company, but neither does the diversity program that spawned it. Better to keep politics out of the work place. But given the context, it was fully justified, regardless of its merits or lack thereof and I think the person who leaked it committed a real sin here, as did the company for firing him.
It's got nothing to do with men's or women's rights. I'm dismayed by that whole argument. Let the meritocracy rule and the chips fall where they may.
What I want to say is I don't care about left or right or the agendas of either. Focus on the product, the customers, and the fight. Alexander the Great never had a diversity program. I'm not going to say he was the pinnacle of morality here, but maybe it's a good idea to focus on the important things if you want to be successful.
If you want to be a reactionary, fine. But please own it.
How the hell do you expect to get anything done in a society if you presume that any hurtful idea is misinformed?
How can you seriously pretend that gendered differences in humans magically stop above the shoulders? You're denying realty. It's black and white.
You can bend over backwards and sweep rational arguments like Damore's under the rug, or you can accept that consistent inequality of outcome across the time and culture is very obviously indicative of at least some degree of intrinsic cognitive differences.
Would you be okay with firing an LGBT person because they "made the workplace less comfortable" for some conservative employees?
I'm not saying anything false, but you can clearly see that this is not only a bad faith argument, but actually poisons the discussion, and still it can be argued that indeed we need to be wary about astroturfing and social network manipulations.
I wouldn't have fired Damore, but let's not kid ourselves by saying "we're simply stating facts". Mainly because that's not really the conversation, the tacit implication of "minorities who almost passed the bar", but letting them in anyway, is that the "bar" might be wrong, and that the company might be getting more results with this kind of hires than just measuring "mad hack skillz". Damore rightly points out that "without evidence this is just veiled (left) ideology" the point where he misses is that there has been at least attempts to get this evidence, we can discuss the results and even if they're valid (reproducibility crisis), but Damore just plain ignore's it. The only extension he has to offer about this point is: "[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”" which is just bullshit by the account of anyone who knows the basics and history of marxism or social science. So these are not even "facts", but youtube tier analysis.
From what I recall in the memo, I'm pretty sure he never said that women were less effective at their tech jobs (fortunately, because there isn't any evidence remotely suggesting that !)
What he did is that, when Google asked for feedback on their mandatory diversity training, he challenged the prevailing view being taught in these classes about why less women get into tech than men (basically: not because of inherent lack of interest but because of societal pressure)
He pointed out that the latest science on "interesting in things vs people" disagrees, and he supported his argument with citations.
In a company that prides itself on making data-based decisions, starting a discussion in this way with a reasonable argument (even if later refuted) ideally shouldn't be a firing offense.
Now, was it politically, humanly, emotionally smart for him to say things in this way without consideration for their impact on coworkers ?
Of course not. But still, I can't help feeling somewhat sympathetic to someone with child-like naiveté who spoke the uncomfortable scientific truth (or at least, a very reasonable theory) that adults don't want to hear.
OK, but I don't think it's right. Here's why.
We as a society have said, employers can "discriminate" (meaning "choose") employees on some axes but not others. They can discriminate based on where you went to college, where you've worked previously, how friendly you seem to be, but not based on your gender or race. That's true even if working with a Black person or a woman would make some people uncomfortable.
The question, which I'll leave as a question, is, what's the difference between these two sets, and in which one does LGBTQ identity belong and why?
Not just any group of people, naturally, but particular groups.
Politics necessarily makes certain groups uncomfortable. A discussion of wealth redistribution makes the rich incomfortable, should such things be impermissible? Politics enables certain groups to be favoured, and others to be disfavoured. This is a good reason to ban politics in general, but if you allow it, you need consistent rules regarding which sorts of views are permissible, rules that aren't themselves political.
It is impossible to have apolitical rules regulating which political discussions are allowed.
Hell, just banning political discussion - any political discussion - is a political act. It's always a political act.
I'm a big believer in the principle of freedom of speech. It's sad that employees don't have freedom of speech in the workplace.
Google could have done the following:
- Recognize that any damage caused by the memo had been done. The toothpaste was out of the tube.
- See that Damore's memo wasn't written with malice or intention to make people feel uncomfortable.
- Allow Damore to keep his position so long as he does not participate in such political discussion at the company again. This would have been reasonable, given that there's been no word that Damore was anything but a competent employee.
Instead, they chose to fire him over something political, which was inevitably going to blow up into a news story and a talking point on social media. Nowhere in Damore's story, to my knowledge, did his employer offer him any sort of option, despite everything he had done being within company policy(and his opinion being solicited).
This isn't to say I misunderstand why Google did what they did. But, had they been a more benevolent organization, I'd have hoped that they not simply get rid of employees that make one relatively minor mistake.
I'm sorry, but I don't want to live in societies where people are made pariahs if they make such mistakes.
I don't think this was minor, and I don't see any indication it was a mistake. One doesn't accidentally write an 8-page memo, especially an explicitly political one.
But even assuming it were a minor mistake, then it was absolutely on Damore to own that. I'd never fire somebody for a mistake. But for doing something harmful and then refusing to admit error, let alone make amends? I don't see an option other than firing, because there's no reason to think the person won't keep right on making "mistakes" that are similar or worse.
I agree with this statement, but I think it's a sentiment that is in tension with everything else you've said so far. I don't believe Damore has said that he thought his memo or its contents were a "mistake." He has totally failed to engage with the critiques of his position and has instead focused on critiquing the responses of others.
The essential aspect of allowing people to recover from mistakes is that person meaningfully engaging with what they did wrong (which does not have to be a blanket apology). An excellent example of engaging with wrongdoing (even serious wrongdoing) can be found in Dan Harmon's apology for his behavior towards a coworker[1]. The person who's made a mistake must identify what they think the mistake was!
Does having people yell at you make this harder? Of course it does. People still have a right to complain about the things they find upsetting. Damore himself was complaining about something that upset him when he wrote his memo. You've spent a good amount of space pointing out (correctly, I think) that Google is still obligated to do "the right thing" even though Damore complained[2]. I think if you want to hold Google to account, it's equally fair to ask for accountability from Damore (with the understanding that Damore, being a single human, may struggle a little more to act perfectly than a giant corporation).
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/674/get-a-spine/act-one-5 [2] Personally, I think Google did do the right thing.
Damore definitely hasn't backstepped on his memo in any way, although that doesn't necessarily mean that he couldn't have been given the option to begrudgingly disavow his position in order to remain at Google. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think that was possible for him. I guess that's the point I was trying to make. Whether he failed to engage with critiques of his position really doesn't change whether his circumstance was fair or reasonable.
I don't think the analogy of Dan Harmon completely holds up.(though to be fair all analogies fall apart at some level) The two "mistakes" aren't really equivalent. Damore was solicited for his input, and provided a reasoned feedback with the intent of helping people(whether it was wrong or misguided is a separate issue), whereas Harmon was doing something that an average reasonable person would recognize as victimizing someone. I think most people have the capability to deserve a second chance, but Harmon's case is different in that he was shown to be predatory, however low-level it may have been. I don't think someone can credibly call Damore a predator or dangerous. If they can, then the very act of you and I talking about this could be seen by someone as potentially predatory. Of course, I find that idea absurd. In any case, I think it's possible that Harmon could also be allowed to recover from his mistake given enough time and displayed sincerity. And that's likely going to happen, if it hasn't already, since he's an entertainer. (I stopped following him and Rick and Morty, so I don't have a good idea) Damore will be ridiculed by a good number of people for the forseeable future.
I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding, because I don't think Google should be held to account. It's likely they were in their right to fire him at their will, even if I think the more optimal decision would have been to limit the damage of Damore(and treat him like a human) rather than ultimately make the issue more public than it needed to be. At the same time, Damore didn't seem to grasp what his peers, the company, and the public actually wanted. Perhaps he didn't care. This is why I get pissed internally when people claim that I think I believe Damore did nothing wrong.
Sorry if that was rambling and didn't have much of a point. I spent way more time replying to people this morning about "James Damore" than I thought I ever would, so my brain's scattered.
Looking at the very basic timeline of events, I'm really unsure this is true. Wikipedia says there was about a month between the initial memo and his removal and that Damore did add an addendum to the memo generally denouncing sexism (though, I think, not engaging with the critiques of his writings as "sexist")[1]. I suspect that if he had, in that addendum, retracted some or all of what he had said, he had a real opportunity to keep his job.
That said, I also want to question the idea that a just and fair resolution of a mis-step should necessarily include an opportunity to be perfectly restored to your previous situation. It's common, for instance, for a project to go in what turns out, in hindsight, to be the wrong direction. The people in charge of that project might be removed to let someone with fresh eyes come in - not because they're being punished, but because that's how humans work. People removed in that way are seen to have...performed suboptimally, but not failed exactly. I think it's totally possible that Damore writes a memo that is filled with sexist tropes and ignorant reifications of sexist hierarchies and is removed from his current position, but it's understood that his response enables him to go on to new positions. An older example of this is the standard of conduct for US judges, which says that even the appearance of impropriety is banned. I think Google is well within its rights to remove people for the appearance of sexism and those people who appeared sexist have the opportunity to demonstrate that they're not, in fact, sexist and go on to further positions.
Again, I don't believe Damore has tried very hard to prove that he doesn't actually hold sexist views.
>I don't think the analogy of Dan Harmon completely holds up.
I think you're quite right about the difference between their contexts. I thought Harmon's apology was just a great example of addressing serious misdeeds after the fact. Harmon's apology was positively received by his victim and, as far as I know, he's gone on to success in new ventures[3].
> I don't think someone can credibly call Damore a predator or dangerous.
I think I generally agree with what you're saying here but I think the word "dangerous" deserves more examination. One of the core tenants of the critique of Damore's work is that it supports a generally misogynistic world view. He's highlighting that women perform differently than men on certain measurements and that those measurements are also associated with being an effective engineer. This ignores the problem of how these terms come to be defined - if nearly all engineers are men, any measurement of the 'good' engineers will find they almost all test 'like men.' So saying that the weakness of female engineers is revealed by their failure to test 'like men' is ignoring the historical slant to the data. To me, that is dangerous. You can see this same problem in the Amazon AI that scored resumes from women more poorly because Amazon had previously hired few female engineers[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
[2] https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/code-conduct-unit...
[3] It's worth saying that lots of people who have credibly been accused of sexual assault also go on to great success. The idea that accusations destroy someones career are overblown.
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...
2. The "outrage mob" isn't real. You know who got James Damore fired? Himself. It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually wrote the memo.
How am I supposed to take you seriously when you're denying the sheer amount of negative media attention, all the outrage Tweets, and the general sentiment in online discussions like this one that are happening years later?
We can discuss the extent of the outrage mob, but your idea that there's no outrage mob at all is baffling.
> You know who got James Damore fired? Himself.
No, he didn't get himself fired. His employer fired him.
> It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually wrote the memo.
"Zero fault"? Your telepathy is way off, because I didn't say once that Damore has no fault.
The outrage mob "isn't real", yet you are so quick to dismiss those who think that Damore is defensible.
2. Yes, he got himself fired. Nobody made him write that, and even after writing it, nobody made him post it on a large mailing list where an entire workforce could read it.
3. You don't think his actions were what caused him to get fired. So whose fault was it, if not his? You're more intent on making a statement against the "outrage mob" than actually acknowledging why doing what Damore did might get you fired at any company.
Again, it's especially telling that you and the people who defend Damore attribute zero fault to the person who actually wrote the memo.
> Again, it's especially telling that you and the people who defend attribute zero fault to the person who actually wrote the memo.
I've been honest and I replied in good faith, and yet you just sidestep and lump me in with some made up group of people whom you say attribute "zero fault" to Damore. You didn't listen to me at all. You didn't even ask me what faults I would attribute to Damore after I denied your perception of what I'm thinking. Why should anyone have a conversation with you?
EDIT: I mistakenly thought your comment was from the person I was having the conversation with.
You have got to be kidding me.
Outrage mobs are by definition 'consequences for some behavior'.
But the implication that someone should be vilified globally for having an earnest and not entirely unreasonable intellectual opinion makes his responders an 'outrage mob'.
Damore had no malice, ill will, his opinion was made ostensibly for some positive will, among a relatively private group.
If he was beating his wife, then there'd be a legit consequence for his behavior right? And some outrage would be justified.
But that's obviously not the case.
The response is the most 'outrage mob imaginable', with people still 'outraging' themselves on HN years later.
Despite reasoning his point of view well, it does not mean it's right, healthy, or valid.
And while Sexism and Racism are not equal, there do parallel in many ways.
How different is his memo than writings that discuss how the Negroid is a lesser form of human species, and there for it's condition is justified?
Scientifically, there is very little, if anything, that differs between a man and woman performing a job in tech. Why then do women continually report about discriminatory behavior in the work place?
Are they just making things up?
This is not about whether Damore was 'right or wrong' - it's about whether he was within his right to make a reasonable statement and not get publicly murdered for it.
Also - your comment has also demonstrated the intellectual dishonestly against him by misrepresenting the thrust of his argument.
There are considerable differences between genders, this is not a scientifically controversial position, and in an entire 24 years of general upbringing, imbued with gendered differences and possibly marginal - but material - biological differences, is going to yield very different outcomes.
There are many fields in society that have unequal gender ratios and it's not remotely specific to 'tech'.
It's obviously a thorny subject, which requires some dispassionate thinking. We don't need people screaming 'Nazi' at the first hint that they might think someone, somewhere committed a 'thought crime' against their personal and very narrow view of the world.
This is the kind of bigotry that is not 'right, healthy or valid'.
The mob is much, much scarier than Damore.
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty...
"Women are just as equal as men" does not seem to be a very narrow view of the world.
> This is the kind of bigotry that is not 'right, healthy or valid'.
What bigotry is that--calling sexism for exactly what it is?
Thst wasn't the argument made. The argument wasn't about job performance, but job preference.
He didn't fire himself, Google fired him.
> It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually
It's funny that you and the people who attack him always seem to completely ignore everything the parent comment you're replying to said, and write a comment that basically amounts to "but, you're wrong!"
This is the most visceral and obvious example of an outrage mob possible.
If this were truly a matter of 'opinion rocking the boat' - then there would be a bunch of other firings, policy changes etc. - but that is not the case at all.
One can't reasonably try to reach a large audience with something intentionally upsetting and then be surprised that those people are in fact upset. Freedom of speech cannot mean freedom from other people's speech.
'Zero' and 'whatsoever' are simply wrong. It's a strawman.
> The "outrage mob" isn't real.
I would certainly characterize the collective behavior of the Google employees as a mob. You can see it for yourself in the exhibits in Damore's suit:
https://www.dhillonlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/201804...
Numerous employees take the stance that violence is acceptable, as long as it's directed towards hateful people. Numerous employees vowing to shun, ridicule and ignore anyone who remotely suggests support or agreement with any part of the memo. Numerous employees taking the stance that dissent is a violent act for which violence must be returned. Shamelessly of all, a senior Site Reliability Engineer vows to "keep hounding Damore" until one of them is fired.
This is not acceptable behavior for a group of people that are ostensibly at the top of their field. They are not faultless. They share, at minimum, some of the blame.
Of course, if you meant your statement to be hyperbolic, then you are being flippant, and needlessly so.
If you mean this in general (not just the Damore thing), with the likes of twitter, it's pretty well documented that the outrage mob is real.
Yet the very act of any type of business dealing is inherently political. To deny that is to misunderstand the word itself. It's a shame that people have weaponized this term (political) and use it as a pejorative. Similar to the term social justice 'warrior', for people showing solidarity.
To not see this truth is to be culturally grandiose, in my opinion. Read Yash Tandon's 'Trade is War' for more.
That being said, what I also dislike is someone who seems to have no core beliefs whatsoever and instantly runs to the "intellectual dark web" bashing "the left", without acknowledging that what he refers to is a rather vocal minority, nor acknowledging the authoritarian tendencies of "the intellectual dark web" and basically just going with whoever is willing to air his grievances in a completely sympathetic, uncritical manner. It smells of opportunism, rather than some sincerely held belief.
Then there's the question of whether it is wise to communicate such issues across your company in the manner that he did. I am not saying it's right, but the world is a certain way and if one wants to change it, he/she needs to also be prepared for the consequences.
And who wouldn’t talk to people willing to listen?
Just notice how the IDW feels strongly about free speech, but when it comes to the issue of Palestine and specifically incentivizing disinvestment from Israeli occupied territory in the West Bank, they suddenly have less than nothing to say about it, not to mention the issue of U.S. States passing anti-boycott laws censoring BDS and yet crickets from the IDW.
Being selective in your concern for free speech and only criticizing one side seems hardly "intellectual" to me and I can't take it seriously.
P.S. While the IDW is not exactly defined, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web#Associat... has a decent list.
Dave Rubin for example has had several offers from some prominent left-wing commentators to debate the issue, among others, yet he's always busy or some other excuse.
Sam Harris definitely knows about it as well, (has even spoken about BDS itself, just not their censorship), Ben Shapiro too, yet besides "Israel has the right to defend itself", (which is not the issue), crickets.
This is not an issue like whether they have played Animal Crossing, this is an issue where several states already are in violation of the First Amendment, an issue, they claim, is above all for them.
This is wilful ignorance because it would require leveling criticism at some of the same people they usually praise, instead of the usual college students and Twitter mobs, that's the issue.
I don't think there is any way of knowing, but I suspect different individuals listed on that page have different reasons and motivations for saying what they say and not saying what they say. I'd bet on Ben Shapiro genuinely supporting Israel, but some of the rest I'm not sure about (I suspect at least some of those on that list are genuinely antisemites. For instance: https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/ukip-candidate-carl-benja...)
Anyway my point is it's much easier to judge people based on what they say, rather than what they don't say.
That I do not know for sure, but isn't their trademark to speak openly regardless of what their opponents would label them as?
It's easy to attack college students. If they're afraid to criticism Israel, they can't claim to stand for free speech regardless of what they opponents think, as they often do.
That's not clear to me, no. To be frank it's not clear to me the 'IDW' categorization has much worth at all if it includes people as diametrically opposed as fervent zionists and antisemitic neonazis. It's a very loose categorization at best.
The point is not whether he is deemed unpopular or takes a risk....the idea is that the ability to have that conversation should be honored. It is a debate and if there is an argument to be made, let it be made.
If the majority disagree that is their right but respecting the fact someone has a differing opinion is the point.
"Great minds think alike....lesser minds seldom differ".
Let's take your statement and apply it to something else. Are you indicating the early women of the #MeToo movement got what they deserved for speaking up about the disgusting acts committed against them in the early days? The ones whose careers were destroyed?
This cuts both ways and what we are looking for is balance.
I agree that the ability to have a conversation should be honored by the broader society, hence why I dislike Twitter outrage culture.
This is separate from whether there would be consequences for your employment at a company wishing to minimize negative PR around itself.
So to reiterate, his ability to have the conversation outside of work should absolutely be tolerated and protected. Within a work environment however, it is currently unreasonable to expect the same free speech rights as one is guaranteed from the state, regardless of my opinion that this should not be the case.
Therefore getting dismissed should not be a surprising outcome.
What is your definition of "neoliberalism?" To my understanding, it is a center-left economic ideology that promotes globalization, free trade, and cooperation between nations as a way to lift up the poor. Neoliberals might be critical of some of the policies that you point out (e.g. free college) due to implementation concerns.
However, isn't this orthogonal to one's attitude to culture war controversies? At least from my experience lurking r/neoliberal, the people there seem reasonable and don't seem to be the overzealous "outrage culture" types, but they perceive that "neoliberal" has become a negative label associated with center-left people who disagree with say, some of the policies proposed by Sanders.
I'm usually apprehensive about getting involved in these culture war threads; please understand that I'm not advocating for any political position, I just want to understand what "neoliberalism" means from your point of view.
With regards to medicare for all and free college, I am an European, where these policies have been implemented to various degrees rather successfully.
My issue is with the way neoliberalism seems to be clinically used to rhetorically support many left ideas, while in reality not doing anything to get them close to reality, if not outright undermining them.
They're the ultimate 'human interventionists', so where neoconservatives will just outright acknowledge they're in it to show America's muscle, get U.S. business access to new markets, confront a competitor etc. the neoliberals tend to use a more veiled language, but ultimately peruse similar policies.
So while the Iraq War was drawn up by neocons, the Libya intervention was drawn up by neoliberals. The difference? Neoliberals used much more soft, humanitarian language, for what was ultimately a disaster of similar proportions to Iraq, including the return of slave markets.
That is my problem with neoliberals, the cynical use of floury, high-minded language in persit of ultimately goals not so different from neoconservatives after all.
https://twitter.com/RepJoeKennedy/status/1258900004623835136
I'm not sure the onus is on the other party to "offer" a chance to receive forgiveness when they have been offended or wronged? That's generally not how society or even the legal system functions. The accused has to "show" remorse and "ask" for forgiveness, otherwise what's the point of offering something you either don't want or don't deserve?
Are you saying that it's wrong for people to judge actions as right or wrong without first offering to forgive the person who did the action?
That's an interesting standard, I've never heard something like that before.
How do you handle the fact that the statement itself does not meet the criterion it's advocating? That is, you're saying it's wrong for people to do X, but you didn't offer forgiveness first. Isn't that what you're saying one shouldn't do?
> We would never tolerate companies that encourage religious discussion but fire employees that say things against the Christian faith.
Surely there exist church-backed business encourage discussion about certain religious topics and would fire you for holding beliefs that don't comport with their particular religion? I'm thinking e.g. church-backed hospitals. Or even churches themselves, although perhaps you wouldn't consider them to be a "business".
But more to the point, I wonder if there are limits to what you've defined as "political". What if my political belief is that Black people are intellectually inferior to white people (and that explains why there are disproportionately fewer Black people in tech). Am I not allowed to have a workplace where some political discussion is allowed (say, a newsroom) and at the same time not tolerate this (or any?) belief?
How do you know that?
I'm a Googler who has zero insight into the Damore case, and opinions are my own.
That being said, in all my experience, Google does not fire for making (honest) mistakes, and Google does not fire on the first offense. If you want to get fired, you typically need to intentionally and maliciously violate express policy, repeatedly.
I don't know if that was the case with Damore, it's just how things are typically handled.
Would you have said that to people in the civil rights movement or the labor movement? They were hated and mistreated by many as well and yet your words would have justified that.
The sword always cuts both ways. Your viewpoint will hurt causes you believe in just as much as causes you oppose.
All the rest is noise. He simply wasn't worth keeping. Google keeps sexists, racists, and the like in it's executive and senior ranks. The difference is Google thinks they're worth it.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
It's so utterly and transparently self-serving, it's disgusting.
If the topic needs discussion, it needs long and nuanced discussion where each party is trying hard to understand the other - not rapid-fire three-line comments on a news site.
Frankly, if this controversy had happened at... I dunno... Coca Cola, it would be completely uninteresting.
"It made a horrible kind of sense, for Cold War values of sense: not a real rocket motor, but a vile way of getting your enemy’s best and brightest to kill themselves by trying to reverse-engineer an impossible nightmare."
I wonder how much of it comes from people first seeing opinionated reporting, misleading excerpts, or edited versions (one of the key statements - that differences in populations cannot be applied to make decisions about individuals - was part of a diagram [1] that was missing in initial leaks), or not having seen it at all.
However, I believe it acts as a scissor statement even for people who started by reading the full version, which is extremely interesting, and which I'd love to understand.
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo... page 4 top
I don't understand how that statement discredits anything I said.
Politics is peoples' opinions and is subjective/normative (eg. things "ought" to be this way). Science attempts to explain how nature works (eg. this is why things are this way), and is objective. That memo was not political.
> how things “ought” to be
Those are the same thing.
> Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political
Yes if his memo was a paragraph saying "We should change our gender policy to X, Y, and Z", then yes it would be political.
Instead it is a 10 page document explaining how biological differences may explain gender imbalances, and the implications of this.
But sure if you want to dismiss it as "politics", then I guess there's no reasoning with you.
You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. Whether or not that was his original intent doesn’t really matter, the interpretation of his post was both predictable and understandable. He should’ve seen that coming, and to argue that he was just apolitically interested in the science of gender is disingenuous.
The memo certainly challenged Google's corporate policy. So what? You think anyone who has an opposing view on a corporate policy and can back their view up with facts and evidence should be fired?
Personally I'm not big on authoritarianism/totalitarianism, but maybe that's just me.
All I’m saying is that arguing about policy is politics. That’s it.
Discussions about how society ought to be tend to be vague and aspirational: “society ought to be more just” is more vague than “we should spend more money on these programs”. The latter might serve the former, but it’s also specific and actionable, which is why I draw the distinction where I do.
Also, if Congress weighs in on something, isn’t it de-facto political?
As with the SRE who tried to play epidemiologist the other day it pays to be skeptical about the evidence and opinions presented even if they are delivered with citations and in an academic tone. Especially when both are playing far outside their fields of expertise.
I haven't seen a single comment in this post disagreeing with the memo that actually critiques any specific points in the memo. Every single criticism I've seen is more along the lines of "but he was being sexist". Ok, can't argue with that I guess.
I realize asking you to debunk the whole memo may be a bit much, so can you just point to the single most consequential unscientific part of it?
I read the memo and was horrified by how badly people treated him because of it. To me it seems like a rational and well evidenced document.
IMO, that kind of discussion is frankly uninteresting and unhelpful.
A paper on neuroticism in older women compared to older men - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031866/
"testing gender differences at the level of latent traits revealed higher levels of Neuroticism (d = .52) and Agreeableness (d = .35) in older women than older men. The consistency of these findings with prior work in younger samples attests to the stability of gender differentiation on Neuroticism and Agreeableness across the lifespan."
A paper trying to asses the genetic component to personality traits - http://midus.wisc.edu/findings/pdfs/1779.pdf
"Research has found observed phenotypic sex differences in the BFM. Women, for instance, tend to have higher mean levels of Agreeableness and Neuroticism than men (Chapman, Duberstein, Sörensen, & Lyness, 2007; Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001; Feingold, 1994)."
A paper looking at personality trait differences across the world and in other cultures - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12265
"In terms of the personality traits known as the Big Five, men tend to score lower than women in neuroticism and agreeableness"
A paper looking at gender differences in neuroticism and extraversion across 30 different countries - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14018323_Gender_Dif...
"Women obtained higher means than men on neuroticism in all countries, and men obtained higher means than women on psychoticism in 34 countries and on extraversion in 30 countries."
A paper on neuroticism differences in men and women among college students - http://mpsi.umm.ac.id/files/file/723%20-%20728%20Djudiyah%20...
"Table 1 showed that there was significant difference of neuroticism level between males and females (t-test = 2.138, df =49, P<0.05). Males tended to have lower neuroticism personality level (Mean=111,833) than females (Mean=127.303). Thus the hypothesis that males have less neuroticism level than females was accepted."
I could go on for a long time just finding different studies on this topic and quoting their results, but there is no need to. That women have higher rates of neuroticism is likely the least debatable and most scientific thing Damore asserted. Can you find a single study or paper where it was concluded that women had anything but higher levels of neuroticism?
I trust that you will either have one or more such references, or you will admit that this claim is scientific and not really debatable. If you admit that, I would expect some revision of your general opinion given that this is an example of one of what you believed to be one of the more significant things Damore got wrong.
Additionally, dealing with discrimination can lead to self-esteem issues, which are tied to neuroticism.
When thinking about this you should ask what your priors are. If neuroticism is widely, across ages and cultures, found to be higher in women and men, and it is, then wouldn't your prior, without a Google specific personality survey, be that Google women likely have higher neuroticism than men?
To me it seems like an impossibly high standard to expect Damore to do a personality survey of Google to figure out if this oft repeated neuroticism result also holds true for Google employees.
Keep in mind that Damore is a single person giving feedback to a diversity course. He doesn't have the resources, time, or mandate to survey Google's employees to test whether or not this general trend holds. Perhaps, before acting on Damore's recommendations it would be a good idea to do some tests on Google's employees to see if general trends hold true in their specific subset - but that is a really different claim than the initial claim that Damore was unscientific.
If Damore had written that smoking causes lung problems and therefore Google should start taking some actions to stop employees from smoking, it might be merited to do further tests to see if the link between smoking and lung problems holds true for Google employees as it does for people in general. It would not be merited to call Damore unscientific because he had not yet done that research prior to making his suggestion.
Do you find this statement offensive? Should I not say this because it might hurt men's feelings?
Or is it only wrong to say something negative about a race/gender if it implies something negative about certain underrepresented genders and races?
>Neuroticism is one of the Big Five higher-order personality traits in the study of psychology. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness.[1] People who are neurotic respond worse to stressors and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. They are often self-conscious and shy, and they may have trouble controlling urges and delaying gratification.
Is there truly a common thread between these various emotions that ties them all together as neuroticism, or is neuroticism an arbitrarily chosen set of emotions? It's far from clear to me that these listed emotions have much to do with each other in the general case. If I'm feeling fear or worry because the sidewalk I'm walking on is covered in ice, that's not related in any way to anger or envy. Does it only count when these emotions are irrational? What then does it mean for these emotions to be irrational? If I am alone and feel lonely, is that irrational? Is loneliness only indicative of neuroticism when you're actually surrounded by your friends? Maybe you'd feel lonely in such a situation because none of your friends can related to you about something you've been worrying about. Is there any truly objective measure of the rationality of an emotion? I don't think so.
Wikipedia goes on to say that there's a lot of disagreement over what this term means:
> Neuroticism is a trait in many models within personality theory, but there is a lot of disagreement on its definition. Some define it as a tendency for quick arousal when stimulated and slow relaxation from arousal, especially in concern to negative emotional arousal; others define it as emotional instability and negativity or maladjustment, in contrast to emotional stability and positivity, or good adjustment. Others yet define it as lack of self-control, poor ability to manage psychological stress, and a tendency to complain.[6]
It says that 'personality theory' is a scientific study, but I'm a bit skeptical of that.
Yes. It's something that shows up in one specific factor analysis as one of five dimensions (i.e. parameters) that effectively summarize your answers to a bunch of questions about personality. Different analyses/models come up with different parameterizations, e.g. the HEXACO model has six parameters, with the Emotionality factor picking up the bulk of "Neuroticism" from the Big 5, but some ending up under Honesty-Humility (reversed) or even under Agreeableness (reversed)!
Suppose for example a woman lives in an environment that's dangerous for her but not so for men. On the questionnaire, she reports that she often feels afraid. Is that answer considered evidence of neuroticism? It seems to me that it shouldn't be, but you'd need to examine the individual circumstances on a case-by-case basis to tease out the difference between rational fear and neurotic fear. From a logistics standpoint I don't see how that analysis could be done at scale, hence my skepticism that any of this is actually scientific.
The problem is when you synthesize ideas from research without expertise. The problem wasn’t his citations. It was the conclusions he drew from the citations and the policy proposals that he made in his document.
“It has citations” is not a valid reason to consider something well argued and scientific. Even flat earthers include citations.
A recurring pattern in this debate is that people criticize Damore for a lack of expertise. Which is odd given that Damore, a Harvard Masters Degree holder in Systems Biology, is clearly conversant with the research and the context he is giving advice in. Furthermore, I have yet to see anyone point out a substantive specific error that Damore made, its just general things like "he lacks expertise."
Tell me, what is the most obvious or least controversial example of Damore's lack of expertise in terms of his argument?
Oh boy. I've got a PhD in CS from one of the best programs in the world. I'm wildly unqualified to synthesize research in another field and would surely make terrible errors if I tried to connect the dots between citations, especially if I started with my connections and went looking for associated citations. Having a familiarity with research is absolutely not evidence that his conclusions will be strongly considered.
This discussion has been had a thousand times. People he cited have responded to his writing. There can be no productive discussion about "were his conclusions correct or not" at this point.
You think the authors Damore cited rejected him. Perhaps you have an example of that. I haven't seen anything beyond the authors agreeing with Damore's interpretation of the facts and saying they don't know about the conclusions. It's obviously not very compelling given that Damore was metaphorically tarred on feathered on social media and fired, so researchers saying they "don't know" about the conclusions might be because they genuinely don't know or might be because they don't want to invite backlash of their own.
I cannot personally derive a conclusion about Damore from the literature. What I can do is ask world experts about their thoughts. In general, this is an effective way of developing reasonable opinions about the state of research. I'm friends with a few social psych faculty who study workplaces and let's just say that they don't hold Damore in high regard.
I'm super uninterested in having an argument about the merits of his essay since that discussion has been had thousands of times and no progress can be made. But "well he has a master's degree from harvard" is among the least compelling arguments in his favor.
If world experts have weighed in on Damore, link to their opinions. I'm happy to discuss those.
Right, so you personally disagree with his conclusions, thus it must be "problematic".
Unless you're going to elaborate as to what specifically you find problematic, there's not really much to discuss here and this is a pretty useless discussion.
For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative". I find it baffling because most of my beliefs are pretty permissive. Ask me about any individual stance, and I can assure you that the answer will most likely be a liberal one. But I'm considered "conservative" because my ideas are not all Liberal(with a capital-L). For instance, there's nothing particularly conservative about believing that biological sex has a determining(or at least predicting) factor on a person's behavior and preferences, yet because this is a stance that today's Liberalism looks down upon, it's considered de facto conservative merely on that basis. The same goes for things like libertarianism and having negative conclusions about socialism. They don't really have anything to do with being conservative in isolation, but if they aren't Liberal then they can only be conservative, in accordance with how the establishment media judge these things.
There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform, but "conservative" works well from an optics perspective because it's been effectively vilified.
EDIT: LOL Am I being downvoted because I said people think I'm conservative? One of you people please tell me.
Reasoned ideology has long ago left the room.
This goes for both tribes, of course. With some exceptions on both sides.
The left is nuclear power and biology denial.
Overlap on antivax.
Welcome to being hated by both sides of you actually use science to form your opinions, rather than justify preconceived beliefs.
So you jump on the bandwagon with whoever you hate least, and pretty soon you find out that’s almost all you have in common with the rest of the riders.
They could dynamically band together on a per-issue basis and have more reasoned discussions focusing on those issues instead of making sure to pronounce “shibboleth” correctly.
Democrats is just as extreme. You have the science part of Democrats who vote for them since Republicans largely rejects science for religious reasons (see evolution etc). Then you have the identity politics part of the Democrats. I am 100% certain that a majority of software engineers doesn't agree with the identity politics parts of the Democrats platform, yet they still vote Democrats since they at least doesn't have the religious fanatics on their side which are even worse.
In countries where you can vote right wing without voting for science denial software engineers tend to vote right wing since it gets them lower taxes. Left wing parties are mostly for people with less money.
Rather than the old paradigm where political left == liberalism, I think there needs to be a distinction between the new progressive left and classical liberalism since both hold some views and philosophies that are incompatible with each other.
It may well be that, like me, it is not you that has changed necessarily but more that what is considered the left nowadays has drifted away from old school liberalism and you find yourself as alienated by progressives as you are by conservatives?
Liberalism doesn't, and has never, meant "left-wing" except for in America.
It feels like in many circles the most accurate word would be “heretic”. (and the same is true in many conservative circles - if you don’t hold the right beliefs in the right way you are a “liberal” - in this context, meaning “heretic”). It’s fucking exhausting to get into politics with anyone at all because it’s all just witch hunts and inquisitions.
Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics.
Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power.
For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.
There's an enormous difference between the references you made because they are all trying to rationalize treating a race/gender as inferior. On top of that, there is no real scientific evidence backing anything up and it all basically amounts to inferring causation from correlation (ie. they are inferior because they are poor).
James' memo does not in any form attempt to rationalize why women should not become engineers (the analogue to your comparisons), rather it tries to explain why women do not pursue careers in tech at the frequency with which men do.
Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be? That is what the memo tries to investigate. There is nothing "sexist" about asking or attempting to answer this real life phenomenon.
In terms of gender differences, the author lists points such as "women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things" , "women on average are more cooperative", and "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average", hardly statements that anyone can consider as insinuating female inferiority.
I'm guessing that the most contentious part of the memo is where the author states that women tend to have higher degrees of neuroticism, but he did cite Wikipedia which states "Research in large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men." and references a research paper [1]. I'm no biology/psychology/gender expert and have no opinion on the authority of the source, but the legitimacy of the paper is certainly not a question of "politics", but of science.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...
I always thought Reddit was a better platform for people more interested in a echo chamber safe space where they can post low-effort 1-2 sentence comments and be patted on the back with other similar comments all saying the same thing.
Gee, that must be some sort of biological factor! Certainly not related to social aspects outside of signing up for a high school computer science class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans?wpro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology?...
Given that these arguments have been consistently proven wrong but always come back in a different form, the 21st-century versions should be carefully scrutinized to see if they're the same politically motivated reasoning. And we should never pretend that they're not political, however much they're cloaked in objectivity. Indeed, people who value science should especially object to political argument wrapping itself in a lab coat.
The only things that really worked was to create softer versions of degrees. Like make computer science program with a focus on UX or design, then you get a lot of women applying. You still wont get more women into the more technical roles, but at least you get more women's perspective into the industry. Also you know how so many say that communication skills is the most important part of their job as a software engineer? Why not just make a degree related to that directly? Women would flock to such programs.
With each side discarding the inconvenient truths of science whenever it clashes with their tribal narrative. It's an absolute disaster.
Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics.
Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions.
That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces.
> “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky
Oppressors don’t exactly have a history of saying “yeah we are doing this for evil reasons.” Instead they hide behind bogus arguments to justify why their behavior is actually good for those they harm.
“We should change how we hire women because of structural differences between men and women” is not only a political statement but one that comes with centuries of baggage attached.
Please tell me which of Damore's recommendations amounted to opression. I see "we can make software engineering more people-oriented" and "allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive". Nowhere do I see anything even remotely comparable to Nazi treatment of jews or denying women the right to vote. In fact his suggestions attempt to improve the workplace satisfaction of women.
If you look at how we hire women today, it's clear that your quote accurately describes current reality. Men and women are attracted and hired differently today. If you disagree with this, you are choosing to ignore the biases every human possesses.
It really doesn't matter how much evidence backs his view or not. It doesn't matter how much logic he mustered or didn't.
Lipstick on a pig.
Racism is racism.
Sexism is sexism.
If you want to be a racist, sexist person, do it on your own time, not on the company dollar.
The degree of "I'm tired of the left being outraged at the right tearing our country apart but i also couldnt care about the right tearing our country apart, oh also let me normalize hating women" makes me very sad for our future.
In other words for hurting their bottom line by demanding Google be better (each in their preferred way) for society and its employees?
I don't think firing Damore was?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Yes? If I hired someone to clean my apartment and instead of cleaning my apartment he or she spent the whole time writing up long diatribes demanding that I be better, per his or her understanding, for society and my employees you can bet I would not be hiring that cleaner again!
You hired the cleaner to clean. They do their job as per agreement. You are satisfied and so are they. Then one day they find out that in addition to cleaning normal office mess, they are now cleaning blood. Blood from victims of the company's activities. Should they remain ignorant of the company's real societal impact? Should they voice their opinions to fellow cleaners? Should they take advantage of the purported freedom to speak their minds their companies advertised during their hiring?
Life rarely offers us an easy black or white judgment on complex realities.
He's an adult. He bears responsibility for his actions. Ignorance is not enough of an excuse to save him. But even that's not valid here because he repeatedly defended the same views in the media long after someone who was merely bumbling would have realized the error of their ways. He doubled down on it. What started out as bumbling, didn't end that way.
I recognize that for some this imposes significant hardship but changing everyone else’s human nature is not a reasonable accommodation.
The kindest thing those of us that know young people of this type can do is pull them aside and explain how the world works. It is unkind to feed their delusions by vigorously agreeing with them online and then turning around and continuing to act pragmatically in our own lives.
Of course in a place where everybody is imaginary temporarily inconvenienced millionaire, expecting to soon join the "employer" side and with no regards for those on the other side, the above might not be a problem...
"Bettering society" is supremely complicated. There are some weird legal traditions, eg, rules of evidence, which are better for society but they sure don't look like it in the small.
Edit: removed a too snarky question.
It’s unclear exactly what the limits of such a forum are; if I were to hypothetically respond with a pro-nazi screed, I think that most people here would be fine with me being fired. But there’s certainly a gray area.
I will say that it was extremely short sighted of google to setup such a forum in a public and non-anonymous manner. That was just begging for trouble.
"It doesn't seem right" is one thing, but that's not why it's still brought up 3 years after the memo was written. A lot has gone on in the world in the past 3 years that doesn't seem right that we've forgotten about or didn't hear about in the first place. Damore is used as a data point (in fact, as a central data point) in the thesis that "political correctness gone awry" or "social justice warriors run amok" are problems that rank highly in a list of society's most concerning. I think it's absurd. That this random dev's firing is doing so much work in bolstering this thesis just highlights the absurdity.
They only fully cracked down on political speech like a big boring company last year:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/23/google_politics_cha...
Google had fostered a culture were it was expected to respond with to new policies from management that you didn't agree with.
Google wasn't a normal job where whatever management says gos. Although, it's certainly seems to be moving in that direction from the outsiders perspective.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...
Especially since anyone who rightfully calls themselves a "political conservative" has long since left the Republican party after it left them, and doesn't consider themselves an "alt right" Trump supporter.
This is only political because right-wing political organizations have chosen to defend someone's sexist memo AFTER THE FACT, to drive the narrative of how Google is anti-right and is a left-wing puppet company. Calling this a political firing is only coopting their ridiculous narrative that he was fired for expressing "conservative values" or their sexist narrative that those conservative values include the fact that women are biologically inferior.
Just reread his memo and couldn't find this. Where did he say this?
As freedom in a society increases, women increasingly choose different professions than men. The extent to which these reflect their innate interests rather than those imposed on them by society has a direct relationship to their relative capabilities to men in these fields in the aggregate.
People wrongly think he said women are bad or stupid but that's not what he did say. He also didn't -just- say men and women are different.
He did say a 5-10% difference in certain traits is why there are huge discrepancies of women in leadership and science/engineering positions. And maybe that's ok and we should just let it be.
Sorry, but "girls don't like to make hard choices or do 'nerdy' things" isn't a real thing. Hundreds of years of "stay in the kitchen" is what proactive programs to bring women into these positions are trying to reverse. It's not biological.
Why do you think that?
The difference in interests is biggest in the most "proactive" countries, those that try the hardest to help women reach social equality with men. It's obviously not "biological", but it looks like some complex interaction of subtle social dynamics, not just women being told to "stay in the kitchen".
This is what the debate is about -- can we accept these kind of ex cathedra declarations without data or not.
Being a programmer is not competing with "stay in the kitchen". It is competing with this:
https://www.eastvalleyanimalclinic.com/sites/site-6136/image...