Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point.
A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
Can you support this beyond being your own judgemental assumption? Assuming everyone that disagrees with you is acting in bad faith isn't reasonable.
CNN.com's headline article yesterday was something about him having said "women are biologically unfit for technology jobs" which is a malicious and willful misreading meant to give basis for the moral panic around the memo.
It is really shocking to see the misrepresentation of the intent of the memo. I normally stay out of discussion about those topics, it's too dangerous - but that development is just unacceptable.
This is something I feel that he genuinely wanted to discuss and was open to changing his opinion given that his assumptions/research was challenged. This unfortunately didn't happen.
In other words: don't dish it out if you can't take it.
> Note, 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.
It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's not coming from someone unqualified.
Because... no. Nobody's demonstrated that. What people have demonstrated are small average differences in performance on certain kinds of test tasks, and then Google dude and you decide that's "scientific consensus" for whatever conclusions you'd like to draw from it.
I did not say that, did I? The scientific consensus is that there are biological differences that have an influence on job fit and job choices. But we are talking statistics here, there are always people from the other sex that are a good fit for a specific work.
Did you watch the video I linked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw . Really, watch it.
Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders. If you think that, this is the warped media representation of the memo you are talking about, not its actual content.
Sure. The author just wrote it as a purely informative note about biology and genetics, and intended it to have absolutely no relationship to hiring or evaluation in any way, shape or form.
Hint: people don't write up this kind of thing if they think it shouldn't affect hiring and evaluation.
It is also terrible style to be so bad at math as to claim or imply that the tiny observed differences on skills tests would produce the gigantic skew in gender ratio we observe. But hey, just piling up more evidence that he was unqualified for the job anyway, and should be replaced by someone with icky girlskills like, you know, actually being able to research something and think critically about it.
If not, then they are just intelligently dressed up assumptions.
I found that aspect troubling too. This isn't a subject I know much about, so I was hoping for more balanced debate from both sides. Instead what we got was internet lynching and grandstanding.
While you may be legally required to give him the benefit of the doubt -- any person who works with him that gives him that same benefit is probably naïve.
As for the cherry picking; remember that he is trying to make a point here, namely that biological differences might play a role over aggregated statistical differences, and that this might be one of the reasons we don't see the 50/50 split, and that ignoring this might be counter productive for everyone. Is the biological studies he have presented cherry picked? I'm sure you have seen the Quillette article [1], and the scientists quoted there does not seem to think so.
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-....
And while biology may account for some of the gap, it almost seems obvious that it doesn't account for all of it. And this is just looking at gains women have made economically in the past 30 years.
I don't think most reasonable people at google think there are no bio diffs, but rather that we are still far enough from the point where we have exhausted other causes. Simply pointing out thst bio diffs exist, while effectively trying to use that to shut down other approaches of giving equal opportunity is purely a political and not science based position. Unless he has some much stronger science results he has not yet shared.
I agree the author should not have their arguments misrepresented. But this applies in both directions.
The research linked in the the document are based on The Big Five Personality Traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.
Having read Mr. Damore's document, I can find very little in it of substance. It deals with politics and gender in only the very broadest of terms. It does not delve deeply into the scientific issues at hand, instead sprinkling his platitudes with wikipedia links to give them weight.
That being said, I completely agree that the US's nasty brand of liberalism is in a sad state. Our response to this manifesto should have been a cold critique of its many flaws, not the blind hysteria we've apparently opted for instead.
These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e.
personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology,
but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.
In any event, let's not forget that sexism isn't merely something that men foist upon women; it's a culture that can be internalized and perpetuated by women, too. Which means that it's easily possible (and almost certainly likely to some extent) that wealthier, more egalitarian societies exhibit more exaggerated gender roles precisely _because_ women, in being able to self-segregate more broadly, are thus empowered to perpetuate culturally defined gender preferences into far reaching corners of society.
There was a great article recently about a woman who intentionally wore flowery dresses to the office as an expression of her femininity, in purposeful contravention of what she saw as a culture which forced women to unnecessarily and unfairly adopt more masculine expressions. I think it's fair to say that we'll always have a notion of femininity, and that most women would want it that way. Men may have forced dresses upon women at some point, but in our modern culture, at least for the time being, a dress is one marker of a certain kind of femininity that many women feel is empowering. For the past couple of decades, many feminists in particular have been at the forefront of re-introducing these sorts of social signals. This has been partly driven by the way that many men have responded to diversification--by spitefully demanding that all gender markers be erased (usually in favor of the default masculine model), after years of enforcing those gender distinctions to secure their dominance.
You can see how this interplay can become extremely complex. What happens when certain jobs are considered by many women to be too masculine, while at the same time a preference for overt femininity is on the rise (in a mostly positive way) among women? We can still easily trace the phenomenon to its origins in cut-and-dry sex discrimination within an oppressive, male-dominated society. Yet at the same time it's been co-opted--intentionally and unintentionally--by many women and become intrinsic to their sense of autonomy and self-expression. On the one hand that arguably makes those women complicit in sex discrimination; on the other hand trying to directly change those preferences can be (nay, is intrinsically) just as discriminatory.
Now try to untangle that from whatever innate predispositions we have. It's intractable.
The unspeakable truth here is that we have no good way of knowing the precise _extent_ to which hiring practices or work environments are quantitively and qualitatively sexist in the sense of being hostile to women. Some aspects of discrimination are effectively unmeasurable and perhaps even unknowable because there's no simple delineation between classes of perpetrators and victims. I don't think many people doubt that sexism exists, notwithstanding some rabid anti-feminist groups. The issue is 1) defining the problem and 2) finding solutions. But we'll never be able to satisfactorily define #1, and therefore #2 will always rest on some amount of speculation.
What the author of the Google memo fails to realize--and what many smart leaders understand is unspeakable--is that affirmative action programs are, on some level, _intentionally_ designed to cope with complicity of the discriminated group. When push comes to shove, I think most thoughtful people agree that there's a strong element of self-selection driven by incredibly complex social dynamics. At some level there's a calculated judgment that says the way to address self-segregation is to _engineer_ a situation where there are more women in a role than there might otherwise be given some perfectly meritocratic environment.
That judgment is almost certainly wrong. But there is no right answer. Discrimination, in all is forms, is a legacy that will never be extinguished; at least not anytime soon. It will reverberate for countless generations, tainting all our choices. And in as much as there's an innate tendency to discriminate, there'll never be a right answer.
IMO, whether you agree or disagree with affirmative action, there has to be a tolerance for solutions which might overshoot the mark relative to some platonic ideal, especially if you're a member of a privileged group. It's not feasible to address sexism without accepting that some men are going to be discriminated against. Likewise for racism. It forces a contradiction that America has been wrestling with since its founding. There's no having our cake and eating it, too. It's difficult to discuss these things in a completely open and honest manner because there's literally no way to resolve the conflict between American notions of egalitarianism and meritocracy. To do so forces you to recognize that both concepts are deeply flawed, and not many people are prepared to do that.
Rather all I've been able to find is the equivalent of how dare he say these things.
Does anyone have a link to a good debunking of the whole thesis?
EDIT: I looked at a link to the document on a separate comment on this thread, which appears to have links on some of the text that was missing from the Gizmodo article. Unfortunately, they aren't clickable, so I guess the most I can actually say about the citations is that they are rather informal.
> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.
It's unclear whether Gizmodo removed the links or whether the leaker did. Either way, I bet some of those links were to research or summaries of research.
1. https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
Annie Lowrey and others argued institutional effects far outweigh biological or IQ effects; basically, there's a much larger environment of harassment and bias, and Google has so many other levers in its control that the arguments advanced in the paper aren't really salient or important to the situation at Google.
Other folks have argued the vast majority of engineers at Google are doing the equivalent of string concatenation; it's not exactly a difficult or demanding job.
I think one reason people have been so angry about this is that women in the tech industry generally deal with much more harassment and bias than men do, see for example elephantinthevalley.com. To argue these are the biggest issues requires looking past everything in that survey, and implicitly declaring it not that important or salient. Imagine going to Flint, Michigan and arguing that a lack of charter schools are the community's biggest problem; you're going to get some bad reactions.
People also tend not to like it when you suggest they're dumb or inferior.
I didn't say it wasn't. Is said it was a bad venue for substantive debate. It's a fine venue for banal chitchat and voicing unsubstantiated opinions, which is what makes it so popular because that's a lot easier and more fun than actually diving into the depths of an issue.
Twitter, by virtue of being Twitter, is not a good medium for substantive debate. The forum is the most populated one in the entire world. It is amazing for equalizing influence and allowing democratic propagation of information (which would otherwise be under the control of media firms), but this also means the bar for voicing one's opinion is in the Mariana's Trench. Anyone can butt in an derail the debate.
Twitter moderation is also very clearly biased in one direction (if you were to simply compare how often each side's individual account's are banned) and thus not an open medium where those debating can speak freely without consequence.
There's also the greater scheme of digital communications which are notorious for not being in anyway productive.
Debate online just simply does not work with the way human communication biologically evolved.
From what I've seen, that's a decline in the proportion of women enrolled in CS, not a decline in the absolute number. So this could be adequately explained by men crowding into CS rather than women fleeing. Do you have the numbers to show otherwise?
Where does he say that? Or are you trying to be sarcastic?
wait, what? is that even remotely true? that sounds unbelievable on its face.
I completely agree. The original memo may be wrong, but it was a cogently and constructively stated position (if a bit thin on references) and it deserves to be at worst ignored, more likely respectfully rebutted, and (dare I even say this?) perhaps taken seriously. Because I think one of the reasons people are so up in arms about it is that they are afraid that if they start to try to rebut the argument they will find that it is not so easy to do, and possibly even that parts of the argument might even be correct.
I've seen mentions of the fact that the Gizmodo version removed most of the links/references/graphs that were included in the original.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
At least I'm pretty sure that is the original. It has the author's name on it.
Per the article itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14951042
A quick Google, have not read the below: https://www.fastcompany.com/40449844/5-debunked-gender-myths...
Of course, internet comments will be reactionary. Pretending that is proving the point of the author is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not saying you are inherently saying that, but I am sure many others will see it that way, as they already have commented in many of the threads about this.
I supposed one could take the time to rebut everything he wrote but there will probably be someone new with similar arguments next week.
What's important is that Google or any other organization striving for fairness (that is what diversity is partly about) isn't derailed by such sentiment.
Well I suppose that's my point isn't it? Expecting everyone who reads it to be "familiar with such attitudes" in order to come away with the "right" opinion is an awfully high bar to entry.
There is just a long history of his type of argument deployed in favor of his type of view. Frankly, rebutting such arguments can get exhausting especially for those who are the target of his post.
I'm thinking if you're going to report on it, you need to either pull it apart with rigour or accept that you're just increasing the reach of it without opposition.
That's how it should be treated. Nothing more. A lot of the pro-diversity arguments are pretty flimsy too so they should be treated the same way too.
Look, yes. It should be. But the author has made his best 10 page effort to do so and now I'm looking for someone who has the necessary background to critically question his claims.
That the manifesto has taken on a life of its own and spread as far as it has is only more reason for it to be succinctly and academically critiqued.
There are a couple of books which I can recommend that talk about why you see so few women in computing (as opposed to biology, math, etc) and also why you see so few black men and women:
* Unlocking the Clubhouse: http://a.co/8oXDROX
* Stuck in the Shallow End: http://a.co/9HXgvKW
But this memo has dominated a lot of the internet that I use and figured surely someone has done the work to pull it apart.
I'm not going to read two books just to figure out some google guy's 10 page memo - call me lazy but perhaps nobody is going to read two books just for that purpose.
Well, if it's any consolation, I wouldn't read it for that either. The blog posts and memos do accumulate, though, and at some point it's worth it just to have the sources to refer back to.
The is Google lol, not some guy from i hate women dot com. Perhaps based on his platform alone we can consider it an honest attempt at conversation and debate it with our own honesty.
I can tell you that the norm among engineers, even at Google, is to receive lore and anecdotes from people slightly more educated as if it were gospel, and to repeat it uncritically until someone else more charismatic comes along. This happens so often that someone wrote a book called [The Leprechauns of Software Engineering](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns) about the unsourced commmon knowledge that engineers will blindly repeat without thinking about it.
[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...
The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology. ○ Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression ○ Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
I've never heard that all disparities are due to oppression before. I think the problem is that we don't know how much of the gap is due to oppression. There are studies that indicate that there are factors in our society that do oppress the achievement of girls in math/science. How do we figure out how to clear up these issues?
And honestly, as someone who works in tech, I can honestly say that anecdotally I've encountered a LOT of sexist men in the field. I can't say it is the majority, but it is not a small minority. While I can't say with any certainty how much their biases impact the achievement of women in the field, I think most people outside of tech would be surprised at how much bias there is (because it is viewed as so much of a meritocracy).
And then his other point about discriminating to fix the oppression simply is naïve and ignores the day to day discrimination that happens against most oppressed groups on a daily basis. I get that a better solution would be for there to be no more discrimination across the board -- we are all born into a world where discrimination is gone (and past fruits of discrimination disappear too), but that isn't going to happen. Sometimes the choices we have in front of us are the lesser of two evils -- and yes, looking at an evil always looks bad -- but I guarantee you that the author of this article would never trade his life in for the roll of the dice of being born a black female.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
People who are taller all have tall coworkers. They work for a boss that's a little bit taller than them. Some of them start thinking that you know this is probably just natural, men who are shorter are just biologically unsuited to be a leader. They aren't aggresive enough and they just don't have as much drive, it's probably just written in their DNA.
The short men no matter how much they perform or how brilliant they are always seem to be sidelined for promotion. Some of them make it pretty far but they're performing 50x compared to their peers, and theyre always sidelined when it comes to executive promotions. Other executives think: "this guy is brilliant but what would people think about us... We better promote the other less brilliant tall guy. We could retain investor confidence."
Some of them break out and try to start a company. They can't get any funding, and no one wants to join their company. People think its a company run by a short guy, this guy is brilliant but he's not going to do well in the long term, so they end up joining start ups that have tall guys.
This network effects over a million times.
Now let's take people's perception, and assume people perceive men and women exactly the same. The catch here is that women are one standard deviation shorter than men. Just from height you'll see a discrepancy between men and women representation in leadership positions.
Let's end height discrimination first.
I believe this is a simpler explanation of the discrepancies in representation.
Edit: Clarified that I meant peterson's points and not the manifesto.
As for his thought process, it seems to be well agreed that his argument very strongly lacks a tight argument and seemed to base itself mostly off of creating stereotypes around gender and political opinions and then proceeding to use those to loosely reason for his points. Neither the stereotypes or his reasoning are very sound.
(The Truth Cannot be Sexist - Steven Pinker on the biology of sex differences)
It's just going to cost them more to fire him now that the trashfire is blowing full. They have nobody to blame but their own selves.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
he's also very balanced about his conclusions imho.
Someone spreading 10-page manifestos internally is generally toxic no matter which opinion they share. It essentially screams "I know better than any manager I could have possibly discussed this with privately." To boot, this manifesto isn't even tactical.
His career will stagnate, but somehow I doubt he cares.
There is no way he would've sent this out if he felt that he was a tiny minority with this view.
Not really. There are tons of things that it would be illegal to fire someone for.
For example, you can't fire someone for trying to start a union. You can't fire someone because of their race. You can't fire someone because they have workplace complaints.
The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punish an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.
Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."
Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".
These are some interesting argument that I hadn't heard until now. It will be for the courts to decide who is right. But it certainly is not as clear cut as you make it seem.