They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.
"At Google, just as we strive for a diverse workforce, we also encourage the free flow of ideas and along with that, support the vigorous discussion around those ideas. We don't comment on specific HR issues." (EDIT: Minor grammar edits for my faux PR statement)
And that would've been the end of it, had they had the fortitude to ignore the witch hunt.
Except, as has been pretty well documented elsewhere, it was not intelligent discourse. Whatever productive content may have been present, it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.
Endlessly, emphatically parroting what is ultimately discriminatory nonsense is an aggressive action against others, not "just an opinion". E.g. [1], and numerous other examples. My favorite, which I'm having trouble digging up the citation for, is a recent-ish study that compared test performance of various minority/gender groups based on social anxiety measures (e.g. "girls aren't good at math")... and found that it was literally possible to turn this difference on and off like a switch based on triggering vs disarming these anxieties as part of the test setup. This literally flies the in face of the schoolyard "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" mantra so ingrained in US culture. It turns out, we have increasingly good scientific evidence that humans just don't work that way.
Let's be clear about that: being a toxic jerk to {insert out-group here} actively harms those people, and can directly harm their performance orthogonally to their actual potential capabilities. "Yeah, I'm meritocratic in footraces, but only when I can stick thorns in my competitors' shoes."
> a recent-ish study that compared test performance of various minority/gender groups...
You are referring to the idea of "stereotype threat" which, alas, did not survive the replication crisis.
Quote "After correcting for publication bias, this literature shows very little evidence that stereotype threat has a notable and practically significant effect on women’s math performance (Flore & Wicherts, 2014)."
> it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.
This is why what Damore did is important and why having the discussion is important. People like you either mistakenly believe this or are being deliberately manipulative and misleading by claiming the science is settled. In fact, the science is not settled, and if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor. That you and people like you want to believe one thing very much is not a substitute for the actual truth to the rest of us, and never will be.
You know, every single person on the internet that I've seen argue that the science is solid in the Google memo point to this article in The Globe and Mail. It's bizarre.
I've tried to toe the line and not get into the argument as much as I can because, as evidenced by the previous HN thread [1], it's just two sides yelling past each. Some are citing scientific papers stating they are correct (which a single paper does not make), others are arguing based on remembering other scientific papers and virtually no one seems to be an expert but are all commenting as such.
What I would like to point out is the article in question isn't very well sourced. It points to "four - academic studies" [2] [3] [4] [5] but none of those are actual studies; they're all replies to a single study (Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic [6]) and none include a methodology to how they came to their reply conclusion as the full text barely contains anything additional to the extract. Now I'm not writing them off as wrong but those are being misrepresented as studies without having the proper information a study or research paper would require. Unless it's available elsewhere? It's unclear at least to me and appears, again to me, as very misleading.
Ultimately there is a boat load of research out there. Some of it is going to support the Google memo writing. Some of it will not. Some of it can be used to represent both sides of the argument. I think a better article, should one exist, should be used to defect your viewpoint should you side with the Google memo. Much of science requires a consensus and rock solid testing methodologies and I'm just not seeing that sourced in the article.
Again, I am not an expert but this is my impression from this article. Feel free to make any corrections to my statement :)
That article is circulated because it showed up here and, unlike a lot of the blogspam, the author has the credentials to have an informed opinion about the current research. Here's another one, but from a Psychologist rather than a neurologist.
> the author has the credentials to have an informed opinion about the current research
If you say so. I'm not an expert but as I wrote in my comment it appears either terribly sourced or the author equates replies to research as full blown studies.
> Here's another one, but from a Psychologist rather than a neurologist.
This one, as far as I can tell, mostly ignores much of the critical feedback that I've seen so far. Again, I'm not an expert but I'm surprised it doesn't call this out explicitly and in greater detail if the critics are wrong. Like, it has some small references to it but not a lot of direct discussion around it.
Not that all of the critical articles are better in terms of sources, etc I just haven't seen any of the articles in support of the memo be very well sourced or respond to much of the criticism directly.
What's funny about that link is that when she refers to the scientific claims she mostly seems to agree that they are well founded. Apart from that she seems to reading a lot of stuff into the memo that Damore probably wouldn't agree is there, and getting offended. I.e. he is a racist/sexist/alt-right bigot.
You mean she agrees that there are differences between men and women? Sure, most people do. But she doesn't agree that there is a basis for the idea that men would make better programmers than women because of something at the biological or genetic level, which is really the contention around Damore's memo.
>Apart from that she seems to reading a lot of stuff into the memo that Damore probably wouldn't agree is there, i.e. he is a racist/sexist/alt-right bigot.
Well his first interview was with Stefan Molyneux and he's done another with Jordan Peterson. I'm assuming Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern are next? Come on. The thing about writing a dogwhistling document like his memo is you have to keep your true beliefs secret. By running straight to some of the darlings of the alt-right he's exposed himself a bit and his dogwhistles become clear as exactly that.
>men would make better programmers than women because of something at the biological or genetic level, which is really the contention around Damore's memo.
Where does he say this?
As for the interviewers, so what? Either the claims are supported by the facts or not, who's agenda is served by those facts is an entirely separate issue.
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.
The "and abilities" part is the important bit because it's where he makes a logical leap. So here's what I'm going to ask of you as someone who seems to like Damore's document and likes the scientific process behind it. Can you find me scientific evidence that men are biologically predisposed to have greater tech abilities?
I'm not sure what Damore is referring to in that specific quote, but there is evidence of relevant differences, especially if you're talking about recruitment numbers for a company like Google:
"A 2005 study by Ian Deary, Paul Irwing, Geoff Der, and Timothy Bates, focusing on the ASVAB showed a significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%"
..."the study indicated that, while boys and girls performed similarly on average, boys were over-represented among the very best performers as well as among the very worst."
Except that same wikipedia article has a whole huge section titled Researchers in favor of no sex differences or inconclusive consensus and also includes this sentence: "The current literature on sex differences produced inconsistent results depending on the type of testing used." It sorta seems like you read until you found a sentence you liked and then didn't go any further... It's not a settled issue at all AND the ASVAB study you're picking doesn't actually connect anything to a biological basis. This is why Damore's paper is bad and why I'm sad that the community is taking it seriously as a scientific source. Some of his statements are cited but plenty aren't and because a fair amount of the people reading it already agree with him, Damore's leaps of logic don't pop out to them. It's not a good paper and it's not very scientific.
> when she refers to the scientific claims she mostly seems to agree that they are well founded.
What part of this answer makes you say that? She is quoting directly from the paper a bunch of times, offering refutations, and providing sources. I agree that she is reading into the memo. I don't agree that she is agreeing with the science -- she's spent thousands of words doing the exact opposite.
The willful misrepresentation of the memo is one of the reasons he got more support than usual. Most people who argued on the scientific basis mostly concurred and a few disagreed. There is nothing "overly debunked".
Even if what Damore wrote was "long-debunked", it's the sort of thing that a pretty big chunk of the U.S. population believes to be more-or-less accurate. Lots of people are wrong about things and don't know it. Them being wrong does not justify an attempt to burn them at the stake; it justifies an attempt to calmly yet firmly explain the errors in the subjects' beliefs (and then maybe burn them at the stake - figuratively, plesse, not literally - if they choose to ignore the counterevidence).
Having read the memo, I rather strongly disagree with the "toxic jerk" characterization you've given. Yammering fool, sure, but not (deliberately) malicious.
You know what is not intelligent discourse? Equating what was said in the memo as harassment by citing this:
> They asked 114 undergraduate female students to watch a video and imagine themselves as bystanders to a situation where a man made either a sexist catcall remark (“Hey Kelly, your boobs look great in that shirt!”) at another woman or simply greeted her (“Hey Kelly, what’s up?”).
Maybe you could provide a citation instead for this?
> the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.
Especially that few scientists are on record saying that the memo is solid on science, and the quoted research is not only not debunked, but also not even controversial in sociological circles.
> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.
But that's not the job of the people involved, or if you believe it is their job, only tangentially and in a way that might help in the long run.
When you have a major PR problem on your hands and you're a public company, you make it go away before it can adversely affect the stock. That's the the job of the highest executives, and that's what will be delegated to those responsible for fixing it. Would we all be better off with reasoned discourse? Probably. Would Google benefit from being the company to push it? Possibly, but I give that slim odds. The responsible thing to do for your job is to fix the problem that is immediately threatening the company.
>The responsible thing to do for your job is to fix the problem that is immediately threatening the company.
The problem is double talk. They pretend that they want open discussion and provide an internal forum for it, but when someone like Damore takes them up on it they see it as a problem. If you don't want controversy don't pretend that you do.
I hope they're willing to fire LGBTQ workers (or workers who are pro choice, or any other political third rail) when the right rages just as hard, if they're not a martyr and simply a business with no moral compass. If they're not prepared to perform those actions, they're picking sides, and should be prepared for the consequences.
This isn't about firing people with specific attributes, it's about firing people that have become associated with a particular cause publicly and drawn the company into that same discussion, whether purposefully or on accident. If enough of their workforce and enough of the public shared the opinion that LGBTQ workers should not be hired, and the company policy followed that, and someone became prominent in that discussion, I expect they would do the same.
I'm not saying I think this is how the world should work and it's the best situation, I'm saying our current mix social, political and economic systems make this the likely (but not required) outcome. It often takes a martyr to change that. We venerate those who make that sacrifice, but let's not pretend it's easy for them, or that everyone should make that choice all the time (depending on how egregious the offense being protested is).
> if they're not a martyr and simply a business with no moral compass.
There's a difference between no moral compass and picking your battles. Winning a war doesn't always require rushing the enemy with whatever is in hand immediately when sighted. You can call a strategic retreat cowardly all you want, but if it's part of a larger strategy it may not be indicative of the competency of the people involved or the future (not that Google's actions necessarily should be viewed in that light, I'm just pointing out that this is but one action and should not define them entirely).
Well, the government already said you can be fired for being queer: https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/08/f.... I feel like outrage from the right for firing someone for something they can actually choose (political ideology) would be intensely hypocritical.
Let the identification and firing of radical progressives (or even moderate progressives!) begin. Things must get worse before they will get better; otherwise, everyone will continue to seek out ways to forward their agenda in legal yet immoral ways.
If proponents of the firing encourage the use of at-will employment for the firing, I'll support its use against other activists with opposite leanings. Otherwise, this silicon valley witch hunt routine will never end.
If an LGBTQ employee publishes a 10-page diatribe about how straights are biologically less suited to working at Google, they'd have been fired too.
He wasn't fired because he was a conservative, and he wasn't fired because of his opinions. He was fired because he made hostile remarks about the majority of his co-workers that legally resulted in a hostile work environment under US law.
That's just like the Pauline Kael apprx-quote about how "no one she knew voted Nixon - how could he possibly win?". IOW, you are already in an echo chamber.
That the ratio of women:men in tech may never reach 1:1 even if historical biases against women are resolved (he lists some possible reasons). Therefore efforts by Google and others to improve this ratio to 1:1 at all costs can be counterproductive and discriminatory in and of themselves and should be re-examined.
He didn't though. He didn't say that at all. He simply said that LESS women are interested in this field than men. He didn't say NO women were qualified, or anything close to it. He said aiming for 50/50 might not be the best idea, because there simply might not be that many women interested.
As the other person said, that's a false equivalency. This memo directly affected the workplace environment by saying one group of people had less aptitude for working there. The examples you give are just groups who are seeking certain rights or equality in society have nothing to do with the workplace.
No he didn't. He said that one group of people had less desire to work there, and trying for 50/50 might not make sense. I went to a relatively small school, but there were 0 women who majored in computer science in the 4 years I was there. We certainly didn't reject anyone, there just wasn't 1 single person interested in making that their major. It's not unreasonable to suggest that computer science is a field that may not be exactly 50/50 in the type of people who want to do it.
Coal miners, fire(persons?), nurses, elementary school teachers and many many other fields are nowhere near 50/50. There are clear differences in genders and what they want out of life. He didn't in any way say the there are no women that can be good at this job. He simply pointed out that it's possible it might not be 50/50. maybe it's 60/40 or 70/30 and if you just try to hit a certain number you might not always be getting the best candidate for the position.
As a whole, if the tech industry was forced to be 50/50 tomorrow, we'd have to fire like 80% of the workforce. There simply aren't enough women interested in the field and qualified to do it right now. If you want to work towards having more women in tech, you have to start much sooner, at say the elementary and junior high age. Promote STEM more to them at those ages and maybe in 20-30 years we can be closer to 50/50. But it isn't happening tomorrow just because people want to change hiring practices. I hope that my daughter is interested in it when she grows up, and I certainly don't want her to be discriminated against, but saying it might not be 50/50 because different genders enjoy different things isn't in fact discrimination.
> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.
That's not really how things work in companies. In a University? Sure. In a company that doesn't really make sense and is far too idealistic.
Regardless of whether you support the contents of the memo or not, he created a disruption within the company. A disruption that made some feel alienated and others vindicated. This is not where you have any type of discourse. This is a simple "fire the person disrupting business".
> isnt disruption the whole point of Silicon Valley?
I could stand next to your desk and smash two pots together thus disrupting your work; surely you see how disruption of a market is different than disrupting co-workers...
Simply because the word "disruption" can be used in a positive context to describe aspects of Silicon Valley doesn't mean it's always positive regardless of context.
> Capitulating due to media pressure, if that is the reason, is extremely weak leadership and only made the problem worse.
This was never stated as the reason as far as I can tell.
It would've been a week of impotent whiny tweets, then the outrage machine would've moved on to the next faux issue. What kind of insane world do we live in where leaders are too cowardly to withstand mean internet comments? Now they've got a lawsuit on their hands (which will surely open the floodgates) and an anti-science stigma that will stick with them for years.
To clarify: you are aware that, prior to the memo, Google already a lawsuit on their hands from the Department of Labor with regards to alleged gender discrimination?
Google is accused of a "left wing bias" by many defenders of the manifesto and the writer himself. And yet, they don't want to turn over information that they're fairly hiring, firing and paying wages fairly?
How is being sly and secretive about your hiring practices and wage information "left wing"? Hardly seems consistent with the idea of supporting worker rights.
So how does Google (not to mention, it is a capitalist organisation) have a "left wing bias", as they say?
Are you serious? This is exactly the criticism leveled against the left. They've abandoned free speech, they judge people based on race, they've ignored working class voters in favor of coastal elites, yet they keep telling themselves they're "liberal."
I suppose I have a different idea of what 'left' means, then. For me, 'left' is at least strong social democracy and preferably [democratic] Socialism, Communism and anarchism. Not the US Democratic Party.
> Google is accused of a "left wing bias" by many defenders of the manifesto and the writer himself. And yet, they don't want to turn over information that they're fairly hiring, firing and paying wages fairly?
Then Google should cough up the data. But they won't, because they're hiding malfeasance.
Setting this particular issue aside, this really is a weird phenomenon that I don't quite understand, yet. So, a lot of people are condemning you on Twitter? I understand that as humans we don't like that feeling, but if you don't react to it nothing happens.
Pick a topic that's really, really important to you. Let's say it's fishing.
You're known as someone who fishes a lot in your small circle on Twitter. Suddenly someone steps in and says "Fishing is stupid. Screw you, fishing people!". Maybe one of your followers explicitly tags you in it to bring it to your attention.
Ignoring it is the right thing to do but could you? You probably could since my example is extremely contrived but in general I gotta admit sometimes it's difficult to ignore something that's right in front of me that I staunchly disagree with. I try but I'm human and I fail at it sometimes. Other times if I don't respond others feel like I'm letting them down.
I hate Twitter. I also enjoy it at times, too, which keeps me on it but I really do hate it the majority of the time.
I guess a boycott could happen, or employees might get emboldened to quit or sue. Google would get lumped in with Uber and others accused of being brogrammer haven.
Dude, this is a massive, for-profit corporation, not some leafy liberal arts campus. Their cultures and priorities may align to a degree, but there are some fundamental differences between them in terms of whose interests they serve, how those interests are prioritized, and the way conflicts are resolved (something Damore discovered the hard way).
What intelligent discourse could there be had? Damore's essay is heavily premised on Google's current policies being illogical, unethical, and even illegal, and other statements of apparently self evident fact. The memo is basically a giant prompt of, "Have you stopped beating your mother?" In which engaging in a dialog forces you to implicitly acknowledge something that is a total non sequitur.
I'll give an example: (sorry, unable to copy paste from tablet)
Under the subheading of Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap, his first example refers to how "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things". That's one of the biological facts he cited and I'll accept it as true for the sake of brevity.
Damore then points out that this has a silver lining, because if programming is made more collaborative, then women can naturally benefit. OK, nothing objectionable about that, I believe some companies incorporate pair programming in their recruiting and onboarding.
And then he drops the other shoe: "unfortunately there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles a Google can be"
What the hell does that even mean? What exactly are these "certain roles" that Damore is referring to? How can this kind of assertion lead to intellectual and open debate when Damore's argument: there exists jobs are just not suited/optimal for women. I'm completely willing to meet him where he's at on biological gender differences, but Damore's memo just does not invite discussion because he makes self-evident assertions and avoids specific detail or proof that he had really looked into things.
Because after claiming that there Google jobs too technical for women's people-preferences, a Damore randomly shits on Google's female coding classes. Because there are jobs for which there's a ceiling to the effectiveness of women's people-skill..."we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise"
Does anyone have context for this? What is Google deceiving itself about? Why are students involoved? Darmore's phrasing is so sloppy and lacking in details that he leaves things open to the imagination. I'm imagining that there was an incident at Google in which a woman was diversity-promoted into a highly technical job that had been designated for men. This woman believed her people-skills would make up for her technical weakness but she ended up causing killing her entire department in a fiery explosion.
The cherry on top is Damore stating: "(some of our programs getting female students into coding might be doing this)"
Again, what the hell is he talking about? What are the Googl coding classes doing, tying girls to chairs until they master recursion? Is it an open secret that these coding programs are horrible, or has Damore actually observed classes. Can he describe an example of when a Google teacher forced coding lessons on a girl who was clearly not born to do it?
A charitable reading of what I quoted would argue that Damore believes: *as a population, women will fail to be the best they can be as programmers. Because only so much that work would benefit from women's people skills. Google has been in denial to the truth, to the point that Google's coding schools are deluding female students about learning to code.
There's a lot that bothers me about this paragraph on women's people-skills and how those skills do and don't apply to Googl's work. I'll just ask about this: why does a Damore think that Google is "deluding" itself with its female coding classes? Is the curriculum bad? Does the curriculum aspire (in vain) to teach the skills and work that Damore thinks aren't optimal for women?
> How can this kind of assertion lead to intellectual and open debate when Damore's argument: there exists jobs are just not suited/optimal for women.
Truly: Is there any valid way to say anything about women in general, at a macro level, that won't be twisted as explicitly meaning all women like has been done here?
Like, if one suggestion were to start serving salads at the company cafeteria because that is likely to appeal more to women, would this prompt claims that all women only like salads, or that women aren't suitable for eating burgers?
We can discuss how to make a restaurant appeal more to women, or an apartment building, or a car. And we can do it without jumping down each other's throats, because we all acknowledge we're not talking about all women--we're targeting general preferences to apply to a general audience. Why is it that the same can't be acknowledged for software engineering or leadership roles?
First of all, I acknowledge that Damore premises his argument on populations and distributions. My example here was to point out that he jumps into assertions that make no specific reference to populations. In his criticism of Google's initiative to teach coding to females (students, employees), Damore says:
> "Unfortunately, there maybe limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this)."
How does population distributions apply here? Is Google attempting to push coding (and at what sophistication) onto far more women than is statistically sound? I had heard that Google had such classes, but that their enrollment was self-selecting and seemingly not at a scale that included the majority of girls/women. So what is the delusionary practice that Damore refers to?
I'm genuinely interested in the answers to these specific (albeit) minor questions. But I brought this up as one aggravating example of how open, intellectually honest discussion is difficult when the claims are unspecific and unsupported.
To apply my previous metaphor: We shouldn't be trying to get more women to like burgers. We should make the food we serve appeal more to women.
To step out of the metaphor: Perhaps we shouldn't be having software engineering roles that put so much emphasis on the parts that don't seem to appeal to women (generally) as much. We might have more success modifying the roles so that they appeal more to women (generally).
He's also acknowledging that some roles might inherently have facets that appeal more to men in a way that can't be easily changed. Just like a role that's inherently very social and perhaps deals heavily with small children might be difficult to make appeal more to men (generally). That in no way implies men aren't suited to be kindergarten teachers, or that the men who are kindergarten teachers aren't good at it. It just means trying to make it more competitive or take the focus off the interaction with the children isn't likely to work well.
> I'm genuinely interested in the answers to these specific (albeit) minor questions. But I brought this up as one aggravating example of how open, intellectually honest discussion is difficult when the claims are unspecific and unsupported.
Respectfully: It's difficult when any opposing claim is assumed to be sexist. Like I said, it's in fact very easy to have an intellectually honest discussion about how to make a restaurant, car, or apartment building appeal more to women--even without explicit scientific studies backing up every statement!
It is because people are choosing to infer meaning that wasn't there in order to be offended and virtue signal that it is difficult to have this discussion.
Google had a choice here. Piss off people who support intelligent discourse, or piss off the other set of people.
Personally for me I would choose to piss off the group who tends not to escalate things irrationally and let emotion drive the entire agenda until the bloody end. Not sure which group Google chose.
"At Google, just as we strive for a diverse workforce, we also encourage the free flow of ideas and along with that, support the vigorous discussion around those ideas. We don't comment on specific HR issues." (EDIT: Minor grammar edits for my faux PR statement)
And that would've been the end of it, had they had the fortitude to ignore the witch hunt.