Allegations: Google drastically rolled back diversity and inclusion programs

Art. 13 Right to privacy

Every person has the right to privacy in their private and family life and in their home, and in relation to their mail and telecommunications.

Think about a meeting of hundreds of people between 10 offices in the world who I will never in my life talk to/meet. They are boring for me anyways as a software engineer, as they don't discuss the engineering details, just everything on the product level. They don't help me in my job, but I would be there as a respect to other teams. But if the first 30 minutes is taken by the diversity without it being written in the official meeting agenda, that means a lack of respect from the company leadership.

Actually Larry Page himself said years ago (before the diversity trainings) that if we think that a meeting is wasting our time from being productive, we're allowed to go away from it.

For me the interesting meetings were about setting up production pipelines, fixing training-serving skew in the models (it's a huge problem for online training, when the training data is changing all the time), understanding the production setup of the deep learning pipeline, understanding the tradeoff, and planning capacity of the TPUs. But people in these meetings didn't talk about these for me hard problems.

I would assume for the same reason that threads involving this topic on this website often devolve into flame wars.

This sounds like a pretty dramatic exaggeration. I absolutely believe you felt that way, which is worth a lot. But I think the vast majority of diversity programs do not state "you (yes you, individually, benjohnson) have deep-seated biases, and it is because of your skin tone. Also, nobody with skin tones other than yours have biases."

This might be a bias due to the fact that most companies are started by men (probably more inclined to take larger risks), and that companies need to reach a relatively successful state before the initial members of board and management have been circulated.

This is backwards thinking. Companies who have 50/50 male/female management are likely smarter companies, picking up smart women who are looked over for other roles and because they are smart enough to do that they likely do other smart things. It is the effect of a well run company not the cause of it. If your company is working working the other way they are dumb.

There are studies for everything.

I love when people want to force something for “their own benefit”. I’m so glad you’re so concerned about my profits.

“Companies” covers a lot of territory. Market sizes, markets, local laws, etc.

The implication is that there is some innate quality in women that men lack and cannot acquire. Funny, the feminist movement spent decades fighting that myth.

But do we trust these studies? We shouldn't! I've read some of them before and they usually make basic errors of logic or statistics. For instance sometimes they take the gender makeup of boards across the world, and then look at how much (absolute) money the companies make. They end up including countries like Saudi Arabia in that, and in the inverse, countries with laws that force women onto boards. So they end up concluding "companies with women on the boards make more money" but all they're really measuring is "companies in richer countries make more money than poorer countries".

It's a sexist conclusion anyway. These studies are basically arguing women are better decision makers than men. Would people so passively accept studies concluding that companies do better when women are kept out of certain roles? I bet not.