Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying reasonably to organize a union), but are actually broader: the NLRA protects an employee right to almost arbitrary "concerted action" to improve working conditions.
Damore was terminated by Google for authoring his anti-diversity memo. During the time he was authoring and distributing internal copies of the memo, he worked with (apparently) a bunch of other engineers at Google that shared many of his viewpoints (the memo covers a lot of ground). He was terminated after the memo, an artifact of his concerted effort to change aspects of how Google was managed, was published. He and his lawyer mounted an 8(a)(1) complaint.
As a starting point --- people with real-world experience or understanding of the NLRA should correct me where I'm wrong --- NLRA complaints get filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB adjudicates claims internally. If a complaint is found valid, the NLRB will try to convince the employer to settle with the employee; if that goes nowhere, the NLRB will itself effectively sue the company. If the complaint is found invalid, the NLRB will inform the complainant that NLRB is done with the case.
Most of these cases (there are tens of thousands annually as you'd expect) are handled by grunts in DC. Novel or high-profile cases are escalated to a special department in the NLRB called the Advice Division. This particular case was not only escalated but apparently handled personally by the director of the division, an NLRB lawyer who'd been with the board since 1988.
The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint. I think he could theoretically still sue in civil court? I don't think that's commonly done? Either way, his complaint was denied.
The basis for the complaint is super simple and kind of obvious in retrospect: employers in the US are required by federal and usually state law to avoid discrimination against protected classes. To the extent that Damore's memo was about organizing against discrimination of conservative viewpoints --- a phenomenon that is almost certainly real in SFBA tech! --- it was protected. But to the extent that it attempted to organize around changes to Google management that might (might) themselves violate EEO laws (for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women), they were not. You can't use the NLRA to organize in opposition to federal employment law. Wa-waa.
As it turns out, this was apparently super-apparent to Google legal and Google HR, who fired Damore precisely by the book, exclusively for promoting stereotypes about women and advocating for the inclusion of those stereotypes into Google's management processes.
I think an important thing to consider --- I'm no lawyer and am probably wrong about lots of this stuff --- is that if the memo had been exclusively about how SFBA tech discriminates against conservatives and could in a number of ways be made more accommodating to them, Damore would had been protected from retaliation. The Advice Memo says as much!
So for someone like me, who believes very strongly in both the importance of employee organizing rights (I think tech should organize into professional associations; "unions lite") and who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women, this is the best possible outcome. There's a lot to take heart in here; we do in fact have the right to organize that we've been saying we have.
There's still a civil lawsuit going ahead as the article notes.
Probably, but the entire conversation would have been different then, likely not even leading to his termination and the lawsuit in the first place
Do you think if he had kept his original memo to those acceptable points(the hostile attitude toward conservative views), that they might have gone forward with it? Or would it have still been too difficult to prove with the case?
It's a little fuzzy because the Advice Memo asserts up front that it's assuming arguendo that the memo, in both its protected and unprotected components, constituted protected concerted action. So it's possible that NLRB never really reached the question of whether this kind of organizing truly constitutes organizing for "mutual aid and protection" under the definitions of the NLRA; it didn't have to, because whether or not you're organizing under the NLRA, the memo says there's pretty extensive case history saying you can't do it to work against federal anti-discrimination law.
The NLRA does not eliminate employment at-will! You can get fired for all sorts of dumb superficial reasons. You just can't be fired for exercising your specific rights to concerted action for improved workplace conditions under the NLRA.
But before you go flex this particular right --- and really people should start doing this, like, a lot --- go talk to a labor lawyer and dot your 't's.
This turns out to be pretty easy to do: you can just contact @michelleimiller at Coworker.org, who facilitates this kind of stuff.
It's important I think to understand that the NLRB isn't saying that it's unlawful to write the Damore memo. They're not even saying that Damore's IQ and psychology claims violate EEO law. Instead, what they're saying is that they're close enough to the underlying issue of anti-discrimination compliance that the NLRB isn't going to second-guess Google's decision to terminate.
Well, they did call what Damore wrote "sexual harassment" and "discriminatory", and sexual harassment is illegal and violates EEO, so that is basically saying that what he wrote is unlawful:
"The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these cases. [His] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers."
I'm having trouble finding it on nlrb.gov's site or Google w/ `site:www.nrlb.gov`.
It looks like it may be this [0][1]. But, that case doesn't mention Damore as a participant, though it does list his lawyer: Dhillon Law Group, Inc.
[0] NRLB Case: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-205351
[1] Advice Memo (PDF): http://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391
But then this whole thing would be nothing, maybe a minor labor dispute. So this boils down to his bigoted views.
In California, it is illegal for an employer to discriminate against an employee on the basis of their political beliefs [1], so to that extent particular political ideologies (including conservatism) can be viewed as protected classes.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... and https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
The first is preventing rules and regulations that guide the political beliefs of employees.
The second is a law against threatening to fire an employees for their political beliefs.
Discrimination is something totally different.
Damore was fired for espousing gender discrimination; again, because gender discrimination is very illegal.
You're claiming to put something "in context," but rather than clarify you're obscuring. This type of fake-smart comment is what makes me hate hacker news.
This type of arrogant hostile condescension makes me unhappy with with Hacker News.
Not saying this is necessarily the same as "conservative viewpoints," but it could be interpreted that way.
The KKK or porn examples would be an exception because it would create a hostile work environment for some employees to even suggest that, not because it would only benefit certain employees.
If Damore had only been trying to organize action to get improved work conditions for conservative employees, that would be protected activity and the NRLB opinion says as much. Google was careful to make clear that they were only disciplining him for parts of his memo that were likely to create a hostile work environment for other employees, that is something that they are not only allowed, but possibly required, to discipline employees for.
I believe in it also, but shouldn't this idea be quantifiable in order to be a legit basis of a firing? I.E. where is the line between "promoting stereotypes" and "promoting science?"
So where this might become a material question is if you were an employer who was receptive to the "scientific" arguments for superior male aptitude, and you had employees that shared that view, and your employees organized to promote that view organically. Like, maybe you couldn't discipline them at the insistence of some other employee?
But in general it sounds like if the workplace issue you're organizing around is "does our employer go too far in trying to comply with EEO laws", the NLRB is not going to have your back.
But in general it sounds like if the workplace issue you're organizing around is "does our employer go too far in trying to comply with EEO laws", the NLRB is not going to have your back.
Well, for one thing, I think the issue James Damore was organizing around is, "does our employer effectively make it thoughtcrime to question how they comply with EEO laws on the basis of differing average preferences." The NLRB's answer is that, yes the employer can make it a thoughtcrime, the NLRB has your back on that, and furthermore, that a lower level NLRB functionary can adjudicate on matters of truth in science.
Basically, what the NLRB has done here is to "instantiate into law" through the back-door of regulations and regulatory bodies, ideologically driven junk science.
The issue is witch-hunts. You may well come to care if and when they decide to come for you. Given my conclusions that you are a rational person who values truth, that may well happen to you. Then again, most people are just fine with coercion and injustice, so long as it's happening to people who "deserve it," in the style of comic book stories. It may never happen to you, and you may well be fine with them. That is also quite normal.
Is hacker aptitude some kind of conserved quantity that is conserved over sexes based on some natural symmetry ?
Why not just say, absolutely pretended equivalence.
If there are very few women in computer science, you wouldn't assume it was due to some conspiracy or "systematic discrimination" without any proof. You wouldn't enact policies of reverse discrimination (affirmative action) to correct some supposed imbalance of the system.
You'd simply admit you don't know why, and search for proof of the reason.
Both "P" and "not P" can be null hypotheses, depending on the design of experiment.
The fact that we are all equal does not mean we are all equivalent. I suspect you may not be making this distinction.
> The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint
Can you explain where you got this idea from? Not this article, because it states several contradictory or non-commital things such as:
> Damore withdrew his complaint in January
And
> "a federal agency lawyer concluded."
And
> an associate general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board wrote in a six-page memo disclosed Thursday
Is this just an opinion, or an actual ruling? In other words, is this a PR exercise by the NRLB, or is it an official ruling in some way?
https://nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-203891 appears to be the case - AFAICT as the dates lineup with the withdrawl statement, and https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Anlrb.gov+james+dam... shows this as the only link. As a non-American, I'm not going to file a FOI request, so I have no idea what any of this is, or how to find the memo that Bloomberg quotes.
Can you (or anyone else) shed any actual, source not third party light on this?
Apparently, there's no private right to action under the NLRA. Enforcement is public, and goes through the NLRB. If the NLRB decides against pursuing a case, that's probably the end for you (maybe short of suing the NLRB itself).
1. You believe that Damore's lawyers withdrew the claim because the NLRB said they wouldn't pursue it. Is that a correct assessment? That's the timeline AFAICT anyway. Does that make the memo a public statement of what they informed Damore of? Is that common, for the NLRB - or similar institutions - to release a memo about a withdrawn action? I'm not American so this all seems very odd to me. I just can't imagine a government body commenting on a withdrawn complaint here.
2. You have not read the memo itself. Is that true? Do you know where it is or where I can read it? How would I even start?
I'm not being critical, I just have no idea how the US's state and federal laws combine, and it all seems very complicated, procedurally odd and very overlapp-y.
2. No.
This is what an Advice Memo is: "The NLRB analyses referred to are NLRB Advice Memos, which are prepared by the Office of the General Counsel (GC), a division within the NLRB, to respond to requests for advice from various NLRB Regions across the country about the proper response to some specific fact pattern under the Act. In answering these requests, the General Counsel considers the facts of the specific question posed and analyzes Board precedent relating to the situation.
The GC then reaches a conclusion whether the particular fact pattern violates the Act or not. If the fact pattern does not violate the Act, the Office of General Counsel indicates the unfair labor practice charge should be dismissed. If it finds a violation, it will direct the Region to issue a complaint if the matter is not settled in accordance with its analysis of the law.
All this analysis, and the conclusions, are incorporated into a document known as an Advice Memorandum. These Advice Memos are distributed for the information of all NLRB Regions so that they will all have the same guidance and can address similar questions in a coordinated and consistent manner throughout the United States. The Advice Memorandum does not have the same authoritative force as a published decision of the Board, but it does set out the agency's enforcement position on the questions covered and provides guidelines that will be followed by all Regions when faced with a similar situation.”
So what happened was Damore filed a complaint under the National Labor Relations Act with the National Labor Relations Board. The regional office turned it over to the central office for advice, given the novel issues. The central office decided to decline the case, viewing it as not a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. I don't know whether Damore could still privately sue Google for violating the National Labor Relations Act in court or appeal this decision somehow; perhaps he had some rights, since from the link it looks like he withdrew his case on January 23, a week after the date of the advice memo. He does, however, still have a pending lawsuit against Google, which at the very least, could allege violations of numerous other laws other than (and perhaps also including) the National Labor Relations Act (e.g., California state law).
Was he trying to do that, though? As I understand it, he was protesting policies that sought to actively promote diversity. EEO laws require no such active promotion, afaik. He fell all over himself to be clear that he was not saying that Google should prefer hiring men, or that they should restrict women to specific roles within the company. He was questioning Google's active efforts to specifically recruit women above the background level that would otherwise apply. Whether or not this is a good idea is certainly up for debate, but it does not, to my knowledge, violate EEO laws to merely not actively and specifically target women for recruitment.
> who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women
Curious, why do you believe in that? Have you evaluated the evidence and come to that conclusion, or is it a priori for you?
As was already stated in this thread, this is the null hypothesis. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397321
Damore certainly cited many studies, and while there's valid criticism of their validity, "they disagree with the null hypothesis, ergo they are false" is not right.
Nor is "I have not read them, therefore the null hypothesis is right".
He did no such thing. Please stop spreading misinformation.
He linked to blogs and magazine articles then people started calling his footnotes “research”.
The one legit study he linked came to the opposite conclusion of what he claimed.
I suggest you go read his links for yourself and consider the sources. It might be illuminating, unless you are already biased in favor of the argument he made.
But first a side-note: Stop changing the subject. I was saying the null hypothesis is irrelevant here. I'm saying don't discard new evidence because it goes against the null hypothesis. A few comments up (and the answer to "why") was said "[I] strongly believe [in the null hypothesis]", which to me is very strange. How can you "strongly believe" in a null hypothesis?
I didn't like his references (and stop attacking me, and implying my position), in that you can't just cherry-pick a study you like and call it fact (though doesn't make it wrong. Just unproven). Everyone does this. It doesn't make it right, but stones and glass houses.
To understand what you consider legit studies, I randomly clicked on three of his links. At least two of them must not qualify as legit study, so could you explain why you say two or three of these are "blogs and magazines"? I guess you qualify the journal "Science" as unscientific and merely a magazine? So that's one.
Mind you, it'd be a real coincidence if the one supposedly legit study he referenced just happened to be in this list of three:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/819
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...
Curious why you question his belief?
All of the half-way reputable studies I've ever heard of have either concluded that there is no difference in male/female intelligence or that there are small differences in certain silos, with men scoring slightly higher on average in visuospatial while women score slightly higher on average in verbal.
Even if you accept the latter as fact (which there is no clear cut evidence-based reason for doing so, if you look at the studies in aggregate) it says basically nothing about suitability to "our profession" as both of those skills are important.
Given the choice between someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding visuospatial skills and someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding verbal skills, I'd generally prefer the latter as a colleague.
My views are in part informed by this essay. It mostly deals with issues of interest, rather than ability, but the cumulative effect of interest divergence culminates in aptitude divergence.
That being said, i'm open to hearing contrary evidence. To the extent that i've read about it, there are non-trivial difference and they are large enough to at least partially explain some of the discrepancy in jobs like software engineering.
It is legal to research pornography, but try to view it at a lot of companies in the office.
Context is important. He sent it out at work, not to arxiv.org.
Consider the alternative: say his goal had actually been to learn what most scientists believe or to see how it applied to Google. That would be things like a representative literature survey, lots of questions about how you could measure effects, what the implications those effects would have, etc. Rather than just assuming current staffing was the optimal outcome, you’d ask how you’d even measure such a thing, etc.
Remember, before he joined Google he has experience working in a real research lab. There’s no way he doesn’t know what scientific discussion looks like – it just wasn’t as important as trying to portray his personal political beliefs as objective truth.
If he’d sent out a memo saying any management initiative was wrong and they were stupid he could be fired for it in the state of California. He just wouldn’t have been able to turn it into cash from right wing causes.
The second question is whether this is science being squashed as his more emotional supporters frequently claim. I don’t think there’s any reason to conclude that since this was a really lousy attempt at scientific analysis remiscent of the creationists who try to sound science-y but are ideologically prevented from actually practicing science.
Wrong. The memo is poorly worded, but it does make the leap from just preferences to abilities in this sentence, despite not having evidence for the latter:
>>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.
> ...also claimed higher variance, but not overall differences. In other words that there are more men on both sides of the extreme.
This is in reference to what the memo says about abilities. The memo does claim higher or lower overall averages, too, but those are in terms of preferences.
Let me lay this out point by point if I phrased this poorly before:
* The memo claims that women and men have different averages in preferences.
* That men and women have different distributions of abilities.
* The memo does not claim that there are different average of abilities.
Point #3 is what the parent comment claimed, among other things, and that is wrong.
>This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability.
Edit: Rather than reply, you now edited your comment to split hairs on distribution vs averages. That doesn't change the facts about Damore's argument about biological ability to be in tech is unfounded.
I have not once mentioned biology in this comment chain. I made my original comment to dispel the myth that Damore claimed that women have, on average, less intelligence than men.
Whether you agree or disagree with the other claims made about biology is orthogonal to this statement.
>This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability.
When his argument was about biological ability. Damore's paper is orthogonal from you're claiming it to be.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Damo...
It's splitting hairs to make it about distribution when there isn't sufficient evidence to support a distribution in the first place.
I have not personally looked at any of this data, nor vouch for it or Damore's or their conclusion. It could be wrong, either because the current best science is wrong or because the summary is unfair or inaccurate. My only point is that it appears to be a statement with some scientific support, not something that can easily be dismissed as false.
http://heterodoxacademy.org/the-greater-male-variability-hyp...
I am not good at being a nurse because I chose to become a software developer. I chose to become a software developer because I prefer working with computers over people. My preference in adolescence resulted in my being more capable as a software developer for a company like Google.
That this one statement keeps getting taken out of context and misinterpreted shows how flimsy the claims against the memo are.
Wrong again. When you look at the full context, Damore specifically says that it's not socially constructed like you're describing. Damore isn't arguing that women lack the ability for tech or leadership because they prefer to be nurses, his argument stems from biological differences:
>> On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
>> ● They’re universal across human cultures
>> ● They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
>> ● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
>> ● The underlying traits are highly heritable
>> ● They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective
>> 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.
The full context is that he's writing this memo in the first place to propose alternatives to a hiring policy. That is: the relevant group is the hiring pool for Google. By the time men and women reach the point where Google's hiring policy is relevant toward their outcomes, the distribution of their abilities is already quite different. That's not even really questionable: It's why there are so many fewer women in the hiring pool.
It's selective interpretation to read this outside the context of the hiring policy.
Nobody is saying this isn't in context to hiring policies - that's your straw man. Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies). The latter of which there is no evidence to support.
You're evaluating the statement that way. That's not a straw man--it's removal of original context.
> Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies).
Yet another example of the suspiciously common inability of opponents to comprehend the statement.
The statement makes no mention of biological abilities, only distribution of abilities in general (and preferences), caused possibly in part by biological factors.
And once again: The relevant group is the hiring pool for leadership / tech at Google, which undoubtedly has an unequal distribution of qualified men and women as a result of differing distributions of the abilities of men and women at that stage of their careers.
Here's Damore's statement again, with the context from the purpose of the document added by me:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women (by the time they can be affected by Google's hiring policies) 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.
Tah-dah! When it's not stripped of context, the meaning is more clear. I still don't suspect misinterpretations will stop, though.
However, the number of skills required for software development is quite large and any correlation is likely to be very small. Additionally, there is no a priori reason to assume that the average woman isn't better suited to it than the average man, since there are lots of other effects that could drown out an underlying difference in ability.
So Damore is technically correct, but that doesn't really matter in the end because he doesn't show that effect sizes are large enough to support his conclusions against the policies he opposes (whose evidence is also pretty weak).
Ow. I agree with you, but can you please not preface your comments with "wrong", "false", "no" etc? You're going on to argue (pretty convincingly) that the parent is wrong anyway, what's the point of cranking up the disagreement volume a notch, like that?
That's simply not true. The memo (as the other comment chain litigates) absolutely makes reference to both preference and ability.
> 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.
This statement references distributions, not averages. E.g men may be more prevalent at the top of the scale but also at the bottom. This is entirely in line with what I wrote about the memo referring to variance.
The claims about their average tolerance for high-status jobs is a direct statement about average ability for certain job roles. You can perhaps argue that it accurately reflects the psychological research (which is a different discussion), but it absolutely is directly a statement about ability.
He also specifically says women generally have “a harder time...leading”, which is a direct statement of reduced average ability in all roles involving leadership.
> Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
For your second paragraph, here is the full quote.
> This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
This is in the context of how women prefer to channel extraversion. Again, preferences make it harder for them to end up in leadership roles. And yet again, Damore offers a way to mitigate this and achieve greater numbers of women in leadership roles:
> Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do.
For both of your points, these aren't claims about ability but preferences from my reading. Even if you disagree with this interpretation, Damore still claims that these differences shouldn't exclude women from tech and advancing in tech careers and lists out ways to limit the impact these factors currently have.
Your statement was categorical. "This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability". Yet it was a statement about distributions of ability.
That's a statement that references ability.
You didn't say "the memo refers to variance of abilities". You stated that it did not reference ability.
That statement is simply not true.
It might help to pivot away from EEO law and to some other regulatory regime we work under. For instance, you could attempt to organize around reworking the way your company complies with the HITECH laws. What you'd be doing would certainly not be unlawful! Nevertheless, despite that fact and the fact that the NLRA generally protects employee organization, the fact that your employer has a legal obligation to comply with HITECH would mean that the NLRB gives them substantial extra deference in whether or not they can fire you for doing that.
On the other hand, if you were to organize around, I don't know, closed-door offices instead of open-offices, no such extra deference would apply.
(Re: my beliefs: I provided them as a cards-on-the-table disclaimer, not an invitation to litigate them; they're the least interesting part of this story).
> Damore's statements about immutable traits linked to sex — such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution — were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding his effort to cloak his comments with “scientific” references and analysis and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
I find this disturbing.
I don't know whether Damore's assertions are scientifically accurate, but the NLRB appears to be saying that it doesn't matter. Stating an unpleasant truth would constitute discrimination "notwithstanding scientific references and analysis".
There are many much-less-disputed things which are obviously factually true but which, nonetheless, could put you on the hook for harassment depending on how, why, and how often you say them.
For example, suppose I have a co-worker who is an ardent believer in the cause of the southern states during the US Civil War. It is factually and indisputably true that the southern states lost that war, and were subjected to a humiliating period of military occupation afterward. If I were to, say, constantly bring it up and rub it in my co-worker's face, my co-worker could certainly go to HR and claim I was committing harassment.
The NLRA will protect your right to improve workplace conditions. The NLRB will not enforce that right if what you're doing isn't really about workplace conditions, or is about a desire to change those conditions to something that might conflict with your employer's requirements under the law.
But when that discussion brings up unpleasant scientific findings, the NLRB and I diverge; IMO a scientific explanation should not render otherwise protected speech unprotected.
If you want to complain about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, that's a different discussion; it's not really fair to take the NLRB to task for that.
That the manner and context in which Damore referred to them is a violation of Google's reasonable anti-harassment policy does not mean that either that act, and even less referring to them more generally, is harassment.
Necessarily, any anti-harasssment policy that will successfully prevent harassment liability seeks to, through means up to and including termination, prevent liability by dealing with acts before they reach the level at which legal harassment—a violation of the law by the employer—occurs.
An anti-harassment policy that only addressed acts after the threshold for legal harassment was reached would be a very expensive failure.
I think labor law should be different, but it’s not.
Yes, they do; that right however does not extend to violating Google's anti-harassment policy (which id, itself, a key means by which Google avoids liability under anti-discrimination law.)
This is sensible; the alternative would be the NLRA forcing Google to engage in acts and/or omissions which would result in liability under the Civil Rights Act, which is clearly not a tenable state of affairs.
Because he wasn't actually saying anything particularly bad. Instead, he was terminated on the emotional reaction to what others imputed he was saying. This reveals a breathtaking level of authoritarian ideological adherence within Google.
Careful there. What you mean is he wasn't saying anything you personally consider particularly bad. This is not the same thing as "objectively not bad". This is not the same thing as "something no reasonable person could object to".
And jumping from your personal opinion that it wasn't bad straight to "a breathtaking level of authoritarian ideological adherence" is, well, quite a leap.
Finally:
he was terminated on the emotional reaction to what others imputed he was saying
The issue with the original "diversity memo" was that there was absolutely no way to read it with the principle of charity in mind and also end up with the interpretation of it his supporters wanted (in order to support the "he didn't say that" narrative). So much of the "he didn't really say that" boils down to ambiguity in the text, but if we assume he had some purpose in mind that he thought was important, and that he was making what he believed was a rational evidence-based argument, and then try to figure out "what important thing is he arguing in support of here", well, there aren't a lot of possible conclusions to end up at.
Anything that requires an imputational and emotional interpretation (which can't be supported by particular facts) to be "bad" is "objectively not bad."
if we assume he had some purpose in mind that he thought was important
Here, you're basically admitting that the reading required to support your position is an imputational and emotional interpretation which can't be supported by particular facts.
then try to figure out "what important thing is he arguing in support of here", well, there aren't a lot of possible conclusions to end up at.
There are lots of possible alternative conclusions. Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=16398682 (Overwhelming persistent effects of human cultural capital.)
It's entirely possible that a best-effort fair society with perfect equality of opportunity would still result in other than a 50-50 distribution in a given field for any number of complex, ever changing reasons, in much the same way that it would be impossible to have a vast liquid ocean with no waves. Or are you effectively making the questioning the validity of "equality of outcome" a thought-crime in and of itself? There are plenty of reasons to question "equality of outcome" without ever having to invoke the superiority of anyone.
We're at a point where we've got actual empirical data showing that in a bunch of other fields of human endeavor which have:
1. Seen a huge observed gender gap, and
2. Comforted themselves with "rational" and "objective" and "scientific" explanations to prove it wasn't their fault, and
3. Eventually been persuaded to try even simple measures to test whether bias on the part of people in that field played a part, it's been discovered that
4. Outcomes drastically changed once those simple measures were adopted, in a way which clearly and beyond reasonable doubt put the lie to the explanations claimed in (2).
To buy Damore's arguments we must either ignore this evidence, or somehow buy into a completely unsupported assumption that computer programming -- for reasons nobody knows -- is completely and utterly unique, and as a result that the solutions used in other fields are inapplicable and off-limits to programming. Even worse: we have to believe that about a field which previously did not have such a huge gap, and acquired it only relatively recently.
To anyone who does a bit of actual research on this stuff, Damore is practically a cliché. He's the person who ends up in the history book under "wow, people actually used to believe that stuff".
Meanwhile, you want to have your knee-jerk reflexes checked, judging by the kinds of catchphrases you immediately jump to when confronted with even mild disagreement.
Like the ones favoring women in medicine in some countries? Like nursing?
4. Outcomes drastically changed once those simple measures were adopted, in a way which clearly and beyond reasonable doubt put the lie to the explanations claimed in (2).
But only up to a point. Google and YouTube execs are on the record saying that they basically got to parity with the available candidate pool.
To buy Damore's arguments we must either ignore this evidence, or somehow buy into a completely unsupported assumption that computer programming -- for reasons nobody knows -- is completely and utterly unique
Not at all. We could just suppose there's something skewing the preferences of people in school.
Even worse: we have to believe that about a field which previously did not have such a huge gap, and acquired it only relatively recently.
Actually, for a time "programmer" was skewed towards women. That could also lend credence to the idea that something is skewing preferences.
To anyone who does a bit of actual research on this stuff, Damore is practically a cliché. He's the person who ends up in the history book under "wow, people actually used to believe that stuff".
No, the Big 5 results he cites are actually quite important in psychology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
So do something about it, if it bothers you. Each person is free to choose how to prioritize their time and efforts, and is not required to solve every other problem (or even every other similar problem) in every other field in every other country on earth as a prerequisite. But we both know that, and we both know that you're running off a script of sound bites.
Actually, for a time "programmer" was skewed towards women.
Yes, that's exactly my point. The types of "scientific" "biological" "truths" people like Damore tend to cite don't change in the time frame of that observed change. It's almost like there was some social factor involved. Perhaps some social factor having something to do with the large number of men who suddenly showed interest. Though of course we have literally zero cases in all of recorded human history of men rigging a system to favor themselves over women, so we don't have to worry that such a thing could have happened. We'd only worry if, say, we had many, many examples of it from many fields of endeavor in many societies across a huge percentage of recorded history.
Oh. Wait.
I've personally engaged in education programs for high school women in tech.
Though of course we have literally zero cases in all of recorded human history of men rigging a system to favor themselves over women...Oh. Wait.
But the typical intellectual dishonesty here comes in the form of citing this history, then asserting that the current day must be the same, with zero proof. That is exactly what you just did.
According to the Google and YouTube execs, there are factors in the job which may skew employment according to preference, and perhaps the job should be changed to take preferences into account. This is exactly what James Damore proposed in his memo, and furthermore what Google and Youtube execs said in public:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc
Furthermore, they also state that employment at Google is at parity with the STEM/tech education pipeline -- about 2 in 5 women. Where is your evidence of "rigging" given the existing anti-discrimination laws and Google's extraordinary efforts to work against that? Or are you just pointing to it having happened in the past, then point to a non 50/50 distribution as "proof." Sorry, but that's circular logic. Can you justify the 50/50 distribution with other than circular logic? Aren't you just taking that as an unexamined axiom?
You know, that can be applied to you as well.
> Meanwhile, you want to have your knee-jerk reflexes checked, judging by the kinds of catchphrases you immediately jump to when confronted with even mild disagreement.
Oh the irony. It's funny to see oneself in such mirror (I was using the "I will be proven right and I know it" shitargument too).
Remember, the presumption at law is that Google has the right to fire employees for virtually no reason (conservatives should find this congenial). Damore was attempting to avail himself of an exception to that rule.
Damore's claim is subtly different. He relies on the fact that you do, under the NLRA, have the right to organize to change workplace conditions. But your right to do that is enforceable only through the NLRB, is an exception to at-will employment, and is trumped by federal and state EEO laws. When employee organizing conflicts with employer legal compliance, the employer's low burden to justify a termination is even lower.
The Advice Memo seems to agree that discussion of Google's diversity program was protected speech, until it strayed into scientific findings that some people found offensive.
> expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs, which were likely protected
Damore's memo was critical feedback about Google's diversity policy. The inclusion of certain controversial scientific findings is perfectly reasonable in this context.
I'm saying the right to discuss workplace issues, granted by the NLRA, should include science-based discussion of these issues.
Edit because rate limited:
The problem is not what was said, necessarily, but the way in which it was said. Hence citing the Honda ruling.
This is at least my, not-a-lawyer interpretation. That is, just because you are saying something to discuss workplace issues does not give you the right to say literally anything. Sufficiently disruptive discussion of workplace issues is still disruptive enough to merit a response, not because of the content, but because it is disruptive.
Apparently the NLRB draws the line for sufficiently disruptive somewhere before "results in the demonstrated loss of multiple perspective candidates".
> the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.
Notice the reason the NLRB gave in this statement for why they are unprotected: not because they are unrelated to the discussion of workplace issues, but because they are offensive.
It matters little what you see in the memo. Google and the NLRB saw enough to terminate his employment, and to uphold that termination. This is generally how at-will employment works.
You don't care what the memo actually says? Then what's the basis of your opinions on this matter?
He said it doesn't matter how you interpret the memo.
Throughout this discussion I mostly see people stating their own opinions with nary a quote from the actual memo.
Damore's top line argument was that these diversity programs are causing reverse discrimination, workplace hostility, and monoculture. The rest of what he wrote was descriptive and prescriptive. And bear in mind, EEOC also has a mandate to protect employees who file their concerns over discrimination. I believe the active class action discrimination lawsuit against Google could be a stepping stone to break up this kind of EEOC precedent.
This is the point that I think most people aren't getting. It seems like people are starting from the position that one should be able to have free and open conversations in the workplace. That a company shouldn't be able to fire an employee for dissent.
But this is _absolutely_ not the case with at will employment. If you say just about _anything_ in the workplace (or not at the workplace!) that your employer doesn't like they can terminate you.
I think the quoted sentence is the key to understanding this all. Your 1A rights only protect you from the government. Your employer may not—and does not have to—tolerate a "marketplace of ideas"
According to the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Act grants workers the legal right to discuss work-related issues with each other.
https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/employee-rights
This comes from Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act: "Employees shall have the right to...engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."
In this specific case, the Advice Memo refers to protection for "expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs".
The lawyer who wrote this memo argued that Damore's statements would normally be deserving of protection, if they weren't so offensive.
They had a policy that pre-dated this incident such that those statements qualified. The NLRB didn't determine that the statements were offensive. They determined that Google was operating in a reasonable manner when Google decided that those statements were offensive.
In at least one statement which I've quoted here too many times already ("so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"), the lawyer who wrote this memo expressed their own opinion that these statements were too offensive to be protected.
> The Employer has a legitimate, lawful policy prohibiting race and sex discrimination and harassment in its workplace.
> An employer’s good-faith efforts to enforce its lawful anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policies must be afforded particular deference in light of the employer’s duty to comply with state and federal EEO laws
> Where an employee’s conduct significantly disrupts work processes, creates a hostile work environment, or constitutes racial or sexual discrimination or harassment, the Board has found it unprotected even if it involves concerted activities regarding working conditions
https://www.popehat.com/2018/02/20/lawsplainer-the-nlrb-damo...
Incorrect; the memo assumed (did not conclude) [0] that Damore’s memo was entirely within the protected purpose, and concluded that even given that assumption, the particular elements within it, for which Google claimed to have fired him, were within the bounds of what Google could fire him for, given their legitimate, pre-existing policy.
A legal decision memo (or a court decision) will often assume a point not because it finds it well supported, but because a dispositive answer to the legal question can be reached without resolving the point on which the assumption is made, and courts and lawyers often prefer to avoid resolving subissues that are unnecessary to resolve in order to resolve the actual question they are posed with.
So it did not argue that Damore’s memo would have been protected but for the identified problematic elements.
[0] key language: “Assuming, arguendo, that the Charging Party’s conduct was concerted and for mutual aid and protection, [...]” (p.3)
1) Conservatives are discriminated against at Google, which is a problem for working conditions
2) Google pushes an aggressive voluntary affirmative action policy which aims to hire women and underrepresented minorities at rates much higher than they appear in the relevant sector of the workforce, and the way this is pushed internally is a problem for working conditions
3) The reason women are underrepresented in the tech job market is biology
Notice that 3) has nothing to do with working conditions, it's just an elaboration on why 2) upsets Damore so much; it could have been left out and he would have been covered under the exemption, while still making his point about working conditions and hiring policies.
People within Google are totally free to disagree about whether a 50/50 gender ratio is an appropriate goal, and they are protected under this law as far as protesting those goals as they relate to working conditions. But the ruling says that the specific arguments you bring into play may still be in violation of company policy, and such arguments are not automatically protected by virtue of being connected to a working conditions complaint. Especially when they could be construed as hurting a company's ability to abide by laws regarding hostile work environments.
There's probably room for disagreement about the correct interpretation of the law, but I don't see it as a matter of removing the right to discuss freely, it's merely a tight technical interpretation of where the at-will exemption ends.
If he'd been arguing for better office furniture and Google claimed to fire him over violations of an anti-harassment policy, the NLRB would almost certainly not defer to Google. But he wasn't arguing for better office furniture; he was arguing about biological differences between men and women and how they might impact the distribution of male and female engineers at Google.
For just asking a question? If even entertaining a thought with regards to science, if it doesn't "seem nice" through some narrow ideological lens, has become a crime, then we're already at the level of Lysenkoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
he was arguing about biological differences between men and women and how they might impact the distribution of male and female engineers at Google.
And why in the world should that be a "thought crime?" There are biological differences that make the population of Asian NBA pros much smaller than otherwise, and the population of high level Kenyan marathon competitors higher than otherwise.
If my boss doesn't like the fact that I put horseradish on my nachos, they can fire me for that. It's only exceptional cases where I'm protected from arbitrary and nasty and capricious actions.
Also, put horseradish on your nachos, it's a good thing.
Ew, jordan! (jk. I love horseradish with almost anything with beef in it.)
Those are great examples because nobody is totally sure of those things either.
As an Asian man let me say this: Stop pandering! It's quite obvious that height is a huge advantage in the NBA. (Also note that biological differences are not necessarily genetic, because I have a guess that you are going to cite diet next.)
But the way this played out, the board ruled the other way, and I think this is a clear warning to future employees seeking protection under this rule: the NLRB will interpret things as tightly as possible, and be very deferential to employer's internal policies even if they hinder the ability to back up a labor conditions complaint with arguments.
Whether that's okay or not is a political fight, and I see how there's a slippery slope here that could theoretically be used to squash many legitimate labor complaints - if a company imposed rules against making people feel politically uncomfortable, would they be able to fire people for wanting to unionize and backing that up with political arguments that might offend capitalists? I'd be surprised if the board didn't act in that case.
But let's be honest. Damore was trying to score a backdoor win through a legal exception that pretty clearly was not in spirit carved out to protect people in situations like his. That's why I also expect him to fail in any CA civil suit, though I'm less certain about that one, political views are more protected in CA than elsewhere.
Just to be clear, I'm not personally in favor of Damore's firing over this memo, it sounds like Google tends to encourage vigorous internal debate about this sort of thing except when it goes public (as witnessed by the inaction until the memo was leaked and the outcry began). Despite his poor sense of what the response would be, I think he was engaging in good-faith argument, at first, at least, pre-Goolag and that nonsense. From what I hear, people on the left are pretty offensive and vitriolic on internal boards at Google without being disciplined [0], so I'd have loved to see management manage the situation and internally broker some peace between the offended parties rather than turn the thing into a classic alt-right recruiting talk-point by firing him. But I'm very much in favor of a company's right to fire anyone, for almost any reason, and I'm glad that was not interfered with here.
[0] Edit: from the memorandum, a Google employee was reprimanded for responding harshly to Damore over email: '“You’re a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. F[*] you.” The employee was issued a final warning for sending this email. '
In effect, the ruling ratifies a particular squishy, ideological interpretation of science.
Scientific debate doesn't take place in Google forums through Google memos, any more than it happens in HN comments, so what was Damore's point of providing references to back his position, other than a misguided attempt to appear "scientifick"?
The 55-country study he cited has effectively one of the highest P-values in social science of recent years. It's widely considered in psychology to be an important result. Denying this is basically parroting intellectual dishonesty on the level of Global Warming denialism. The Big-5 personality traits he cited are the strongest results in psychology outside of the effect of General Intelligence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
The NLRB is basically saying that it's now open season on anyone who cites scientific studies, based on whether anyone on the internet finds it offensive.
What's happening here isn't a shift. What you're demanding is a new special protection for "people who can defend their position scientifically".
Oh, but I do acknowledge this. I would like to call attention to it. I thank you for your support.
What's happening here isn't a shift.
In the old days, one could cite such studies. The reactions and the consequences are indeed a shift in society. An outrageously authoritarian shift.
What you're demanding is a new special protection for "people who can defend their position scientifically".
Funny, but the NLRB was once a new special protection. The witch-hunts back then had took a different direction. I would grant that your interpretation of what's been discussed and apparently needed as a special protection. It does seem to me that our current society apparently needs special protection for things that used to be ok and which are still vital to the workings of our democratic society. Things like:
Peacefully donating to political PACs.
Peacefully having a mainstream political opinion. (Like being a Republican or a Libertarian)
Civilly stating an opinion.
Peacefully gathering to express political views.
At-will employment is now being used as a political tool against the category of people who are "Classical Liberals" and everyone to the right of that. It is different yet very similar in many regards to at-will employment being used against labor organizers in decades past.
The law recognizes the rights of the owners and managers of companies to organize them out of like-minded people.
If that's problematic for you, you should lobby for employment laws to change. It's arguably not the NLRB's place to come up with new protections; they're an agency largely unaccountable to the voters.
I was once pushed out of a job for being perceived as "too leftist." In retrospect, perhaps I should have claimed harassment.
I don't think any but the most ideologically fervent would consider firing someone for simply being a Democrat or a Republican anything but a crappy thing to do. I understand that at-will employment is a beneficial freedom to employers in the same way that free speech and freedom of association are beneficial freedoms to individuals. However, at-will employment was once used to actively discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion, or place of national origin. Society came to recognize that as a problem, and society came around to change "the social compact." The exploitation of ideologues to use at-will employment to implement "thought-crime" is abhorrent, and by your own admission, has come to be a widespread societal phenomenon.
Of course it is not and I take umbrage at the offensive undertone of your comment ("parroting"? Really?). Psychology is not climate science, it's currently going through a widely publicised reproducibility crisis and in any case, the reliance on p-values has been criticised widely by experts in fields as varied as economics, medicine and of course the humanities. The big-5 model itself has been the subject of much criticism, from inside the field (and the wikipedia article you reference has a big section devoted to that criticism).
More improtantly however, Damore did a lot more than name-drop the big-5 in his memo. The memo is peppered with references to sources from varied fields, from psychology and sociology, to biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, economics, statistics and so on.
The problem of course is that Damore is not an expert in any of those fields- much less an expert in all of them. Which tells us that, most of the time, when he says that some paper he's referencing is backing his views, he simply hasn't got a clue what he's talking about and the paper may very well be claiming exactly the opposite than what Damore is saying.
Damore's memo is indulging in cargo-cult science. He references stuff he half-understands in the hopes to do what scientists do. Except he doesn't even understand what scientists do and why they reference others' work: which is to say, not to win a debate and show you're right on the internets, but to contribute new knowledge by building on the knowledge already contributed by others.
To have any respect for science and consider Damore's memo anything else than pseudo-scientific claptrap is a contradiction. To call that garbage "science" is offensive to the work of scientists. That is an even bigger reason to be angry at an idiot like that, without even going to what he was trying to say with his "sai-ent-tifickal" way.
So you're admitting that James Damore is referencing legitimate scientific sources. It's just that you're claiming the whole field isn't valid. Then you go on to make unsubstantiated claims that his interpretations are wrong, but you produce no specifics. That sounds a lot like what climate science deniers do.
Where am I claiming that "the whole field isn't valid"? I said there's a reproducibility crisis and that the reliance on p-values has been criticised in various fields.
I made no claim that his interpretations are "wrong". I said that his interpretations are most likely wrong because he's not a psychologist and he doesn't understand the field. That's what you expect from non-experts who pretend to know what they're talking about, to be talking nonsense.
>> That sounds a lot like what climate science deniers do.
You keep insulting me.
At least provide some citations or examples before you use such childish phrases as "sai-ent-tifickal". You sound really terrible when arguing like that.
No, it just says that you can't wave a “labor organizing” flag to immunize yourself for consequences of violation of your employers facially-reasonable anti-harassment policy, thereby avoiding a situation in which employers could be put in the position of having to choose between violating the NLRA and violating the Civil Rights Act.
https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/employee-rights
This comes from Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act: "Employees shall have the right to...engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."
In this specific case, the Advice Memo refers to protection for "expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs".
Calm down dude; we get it. You don't have to post the same comment over and over again to make your point.
You'll have a make more meaningful conversation if you stick to one thread and actually engage rather than just copy/paste your reply.
It's bad forum etiquette everywhere, not just on HN, and it ruins the conversation for everyone.
> When more than one person makes the same provably false claim
/shrug
Right or wrong regarding the content, you're not a one-person-army out there to single handedly defeat all the wrong-doers on HN.
If you're just here to tell people they're flat out wrong, rather than actually have a conversation, you're just spamming the thread.
And that a conversation inspired by false statements should be derailed before it strays even further into fantasyland.
I'm not telling you what to do or that what you're saying is wrong; I'm just telling you you're being rude by doing what you're doing in the way you're doing it.
If you don't care, that's up to you.
No, its saying that the specific manner in which Damore discussed the matter, in the context in which he did (including the specific provisions of Google's pre-existing anti-harassment policy), and the actual effects it had in the workplace, meant that even if the purpose of the speech was the kind protected under the NLRA, the actual actions were not.
> and effectively removing workers' legal right to engage in science-based discussion of whether a 50/50 gender ratio is the appropriate goal
While there is a protected right to labor organizing, it is not an unrestricted right to workplace debate over employer policy goals, even before the kind of conflict with unrelated (to labor organizing) policy at issue here. The NLRB memo did not address the question if whether Damore was otherwise within the bounds of protected labor organizing, it merely found that even assuming his speech met the purpose requirements for labor organizing, Google was within it's rights to fire him based on the specific grounds they cited.
> I find this disturbing.
I find this very disturbing as well. The only way that even the most ardent opponents of Damore's memo can come to a "discriminatory" and "harassment" interpretation, is to disregard a literal, face-value reading of the memo and impute motivations to him. So basically, any employee commentary on an employer's policies with regards to the EEO's goals can be held to be "discriminatory" and "harassment" because it "sounds bad" and "sounds like" it's against EEO's goals, even if that can't be demonstrated on a factual basis.
You will fall in line, and you don't even dare sound like you're secretly against us. How is that not "thought-crime?"
There's a case history in the Advice Memo. They didn't make this up just for Google.
Those precedents exist to prevent employees from organizing active resistance to the NLRB's goals. If you read Damore's memo at face value, he's proposing modifying the way in which Google pursues those goals, taking differences in preferences into account. Strangely enough, Google and YouTube executives have spoken in public and have basically taken James Damore's memo's position and advocated the same kind of action he proposes in the memo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc
Given the broad power possessed by the NLRB, how can this situation not result in a moral hazard?
It's Google, it seems to me, that has the broad power --- and that's a situation conservatives brought about.
It seems like HR and "diversity officers" have effectively become the "political officers" of the 21st century left of collectivist grievance politics. Employers are required to have certain policies, and the NLRB can conveniently "defer" to them when they are effectively supporting the NLRB's power. The problem is that many of the nouns involved in this kind of regulation are fairly nebulous. This situation shows that such accusations can be made on the basis of "feels" and it doesn't even matter if it comes down to factual readings of communication or interpretations of science.
Effectively, an "everyone is exactly equal" ideological nonsense science has now been instantiated into de-facto law in the US through regulatory action, and the NLRB has furthermore supported the notion that you can be fired for disagreeing with it.
there are no anti discrimination policies required by the NRLB. you're probably thinking of the EEOC.
> the NLRB can conveniently "defer" to them when they are effectively supporting the NLRB's power
what power are you talking about?
That's contradicted by the reported behaviour of HR in cases of sexual harassment of women engineers by their male colleagues, as for example in the case of Susan Fowler, the Uber engineer who left the company because of harassment and a discriminatory culture. I quote from the relevant post on her website:
When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to.
One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option".
The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.
Less than a week after this absurd meeting, my manager scheduled a 1:1 with me, and told me we needed to have a difficult conversation. He told me I was on very thin ice for reporting his manager to HR. California is an at-will employment state, he said, which means we can fire you if you ever do this again.
etc etc.
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
There is indeed a case history, and it is very informative with regards to, as you put it, the Board's deference to employers. The Advice memo states "Where an employee's conduct significantly disrupts work processes, creates a hostile work environment, or constitutes racial or sexual discrimination or harassment, the Board has found it unprotected even if it involves concerted activities regarding working conditions. For example, in /Avondale Industries/, the Board held that the employer lawfully discharged a union activist for insubordination based on her unfounded assertion that her foreman was a Klansman; the employer was justifiably concerned about the disruption her remark would cause in the workplace among her fellow African-American employees."
Said case acknowledges that "Foreman Toledo has numerous tattoos on his body, including a swastika on his forearm"! Nonetheless, the Board found in that case that it was the employee's remark that would cause disruption in the workplace, apparently because she accused her foreman of being a Klansman (which she claims he told a group of employees) instead of a Nazi.
You don't even know whether I think his termination was reasonable. All you know is that I believe --- and so does the NLRB in this instance --- he did not enjoy special protections against unreasonable termination.
What I find especially funny about this is that Damore is a conservative, lobbying for more protections for conservatives in the workplace. But employment at will isn't just a conservative value --- it's a signpost conservative value, one of the basic principles on which we organize our market economy. It is, in conservative thought circles, one of the pillars on which American entrepreneurship rests, and a reason that the US excels over Europe in commercial dynamism.
Damore is in this instance a conservative the same way the nihilists in The Big Lebowski were nihilistic. But he gave up his toe! He expected a million dollars!
What went on with James Damore has nothing to do with the "good workings" of the employment marketplace. Rather, it's the abuse of at-will employment by groups to push political agendas through coercion.
Damore is in this instance a conservative the same way the nihilists in The Big Lebowski were nihilistic.
Before the precipitating events, James Damore counted himself a "Classical Liberal." From what I can tell, he may have leaned Libertarian. Honestly, if you were in his shoes, would you think you were treated fairly? I think your answer would be that you wouldn't have been in his shoes. You would have advised James Damore to keep his head down and his mouth shut. The necessity of such a stance is a sign that there's some form of at least mild oppression.
Given a chance, would you stick to your nihilist guns and turn down a billion dollars?
If you can't do your job, you don't get to keep it.
Never mind funny movie nihilism, a few more iterations in this thread and you'll type yourself into espousing what are starting to sound like some of the core tenets of Marxism. And they say internet forum discussions never changed anyone's position!
Given that there's nothing criminal in any of the allegations, I don't see how _crime_ is even applicable in your label.
Maybe a better question might be how is that not "thought-firing?"
Your questions and concerns would be alarming and frightening to me if Damore had received a criminal indictment. He didn't, so I'm much less concerned about the case.
That's the old canard about how, "it isn't the government." Google isn't the government, but they have incredibly broad power over modern media. Speech isn't free if it becomes open season on you by powerful entities for exercising it. The fact that Google and YouTube are such extreme ideological echo chambers calls to question their stewardship of so much power in our society.
They were acting in their capacity as an employer. Their power over society as an employer is much more limited and doesn't concern me.
If you want to have a conversation over whether twitter and Google as companies have enough power that their actions should be judged in a 1A context that's fine. We can have that conversation. But it's not the one that's being had in this thread or this discussion.
Now, as I said before, if you want to have a discussion about whether Twitter and Google and other modern media companies should have some 1A responsibilities in their role as gatekeepers to online speech, that's a discussion that's entirely separate† from Twitter and Google's responsibilities to their employees.
†I would still argue that, despite their relative power over online discussions, Twitter and Google as private entities are not bound by the first amendment in any capacity—nor should they be.
Privates entities aren't required to provide you a soapbox.
I was clearly referring to the greater issue with regards to Google's general power in our culture and what the attitude within Google which was revealed in this event might mean. Not only did you state that you did not want to have that discussion, but then you just tried to shove words in my mouth as if I were trying to have your different discussion and advocating an unsupportable point.
Privates entities aren't required to provide you a soapbox.
Private entities shouldn't be allowed to knock down everyone else's soapbox, which is precisely what Google's market power allows them to more or less do.
Ridiculous nonsense.
Google and YouTube happily allow conservative, alt-right, fringe-right, pretty much any content on their platform. Fox News, Breitbart, Alex Jones, Milo etc all have channels on YouTube.
And there is zero evidence that Google is deliberately prioritising "left wing" content over other types.
thought firings are legitimate in the united states. under at will employment, you can be fired for almost anything (except a few specific things).
if you like cats better than dogs, you can be fired for that in the united states.
Motivation isn't what defines harassment; effect on others is what is relevant to harassment; not only is imputing a motive not necessary to finding harassment in the act of presenting the memo as he did, it isn't relevant to that conclusion.
The regulatory definition is at 29 CFR § 1604.11(a), reading, in relevant part: “(a) Harassment on the basis of sex is a violation of section 703 of title VII. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when [...] such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.” (Note that while the first sentence refers to harassment on the basis of sex, the second only directly refers to sexual harassment; the same principles, though, are consistently applied to sex/gender-based harassment—and to harassment based on any other characteristic protected against discrimination by Title VII.)
> Otherwise, I can claim that socks and sandals are offending me, and it becomes your problem to modify your attire, not my problem to tolerate it.
That's not the case because the standard applied for job as tile environment harassment is a hybrid objective/subjective standard in which it must be shown both that the victim was actually offended and that a reasonable person in their position would be offended.
So this is why hysterical ideologues have latched onto "harassment." It basically short-circuits due process and the necessity of proof. It also scores huge emotional points. It's the perfect vehicle for moral panics and witch-hunts and mob behaviors. Is it any wonder, then, that it is now exploited for political gain?
No, it doesn't. Like many torts (and a few crimes) the things that have to be proven for harassment may not (there are several different patterns that qualify as harassment) include any particular mental state on the part of the alleged harrasser, but it still requires probing the elements of the offense and isn't any differently situated than other civil wrongs when it comes to due process.
Another reason: because the effect you have on other people is hugely relevant in how people come together as a culture or society (or don’t!), and trying to ignore it leads to pathological behavior.
Well, to begin with because nobody said it's a crime, rather a valid reason for his employment to fire him.
Second, "thought-crime" refers to the rules of a society with a certain type of government (an imaginary one, in Orwell's book). Google is not a society, it's a private company and you can't really think of its internal rules as defining crime, or being laws etc.
You know full well that it has come to mean a certain form of deliberately suppressing dissent through coercive means.
Google is not a society, it's a private company and you can't really think of its internal rules as defining crime, or being laws etc.
But our society is a society. Apparently, Google is full of ideologues who I wouldn't expect to have any qualms about unnerving forms of social engineering society, to make it fit their particular political agenda.
I sense the mob puts a noise layer because the mob has an opinion of what to do in that case that it doesnt want to accept.
They're already hedged against that. They would claim that only means that the software engineering process / profession was designed to cater to masculine traits, and as a result, is sexist. It's yet another tool of the patriarchy.
That software engineering has worked out as it has so far isn't indicative of success because we don't have the alternative profession to compare it to. One that puts more value in diversity, empathy, avoiding conflict, and working cooperatively. If only we valued those things more, men wouldn't have such a leg up.
That's the fun part of these views: they can't ever be proven wrong. There's always another level of underlying oppression for any perceivable sleight.
Ya, I understand that. I was objecting to the notion that his protests would have violated EEO law were they realized. That seems to me to be an uncareful reading of his opinions on the part of the NLRA board.
Rather, what they found was that Damore's efforts intersected with Google's anti-harassment policies. EEO law aside, NLRB gives deference to anti-harassment policies --- presumably for the same reason they'd give deference to ISO 27001 procedures done for regulatory reasons. Google gets to decide what the rules are for that specific set of issues. All Google has to show is that they have anti-harassment policies that Damore ran aground of. The NLRB generally isn't going to dig into the policies; that's what "deference" means.
It's important that people not come away from this with the idea that the NLRB is telling Damore what is and isn't OK for him to say in the workplace. Absent the organizing protections the NLRA provides, almost nothing Damore says in the workplace has any legal protection. It's not NLRB who fired Damore; it's Google. Reversing that decision is an extraordinary move; not doing the extraordinary is what NLRB decided.
Exactly. Google had the right to fire him. Which is why he should have published his memo anonymously. Unless, like Snowden, he felt that authentication was important, and was willing to face the consequences.
As far as I know, this memo was published within a space where controversial topics are debated, and was made public by someone else. The person that leaked the memo did actual measurable damage to Google's reputation and PR efforts: were efforts expended to find and fire that person?
Lets not kid ourselves: damore was fired because of public outrage, not because of google policies, or the law, or "because no team would take him".
Silicon Valley's achievement in the last 10 years is to make sure ambiguity is profitable. Resolution of anything or even a path to resolution just produces less clicks, talking heads and outrage.
The proof is in the pudding. Who wants to bet 2-5 years from now the status quo wouldn't have changed? Replace the issue with gun control, climate change or universal health it hardly matters.
If you guys want to see change the noise levels have to reduce.
This was where Damore's got his words twisted in his mouth: He never claimed that!
The problematic claims he did make are that women - on average - "have a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" and are more prone to "neuroticism". Nowhere in the memo does he touch upon women's fitness for SWE jobs -- even though everybody seems to think so.
Whether he promoted stereotypes about women is another story (although most of his claims seem to have some backup by actual science) but the whole thing would have never blown so badly out of proportion if it wasn't for people who circulated a malicious and wrong summary of this memo, either intentionally or by being hanger-ons.
It's not the same thing as being crazy or a neurotic in the Freudian sense (which is not a personality trait but a condition or syndrome, more or less vaguely defined).
It is not problematic to use the terminology of the field that you are citing. The problematic part is misrepresenting those words as judgements. That would be like firing our programmer for lazy-loading images because we can't tolerate laziness at our firm.
Do you also believe in the absolute innate equivalence in motivation for our profession between men and women, so that in a perfectly fair society, we would end up with a 50/50 ratio?
Would this also be the case with other professions, such as nursing, psychologists, or social workers?
> [...] that men are better suited to software development at Google than women
When you use generic "men" and "women", you imply he talked about a categorical difference. Damore explicitly talked about population distributions, even illustrated with a Bell curve. He said for example "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."
More importantly, he never said men are "better suited" to software development. You mention aptitude, when Damore focussed on preference and interest, based on a well-established literature of personality differences between men and women.
Improve the working conditions for whom though? IANAL, but I would think that it'd have to be an improvement in the working conditions for everyone, or at least not have a negative impact on other, non-managerial groups.
For example say engineering gets tired of the sales department's constant phone conversations and boisterous behavior. They organize a group that seeks to eliminate the sales department altogether, after all, the engineers are building a self-service SaaS product that sells itself.
Would the engineers have legal recourse if they were fired for seeking a change that would harm some other group?
Technically the NLRB didn't act on Damore's charge because he withdrew it. The Advice Memo was requested by and directed to a Regional Director at the NLRB. If the charge had not been withdrawn the Regional Director likely would have refused to issue a complaint, i.e. dismissed the charge. That decision could have been appealed to the General Counsel, a Presidential appointee. The person that wrote the memo, the associate General Counsel for the Division of Advice, reports directly to the General Counsel. If the General Counsel upheld the decision to dismiss the charge, that decision would not be appealable to any court. Nor can the relevant provisions of the NLRA be enforced directly by private lawsuit.
Whether you find my stand irrelevant or not just because you don't agree with it, is telling and symptomatic for this discussion.
Why isn't my stand relevant, what is it you know for a fact that is pseudoscientific and even if it was the case, are you going to fire people for believing in God and being against gay marriage because it's anti-scientific.
Sounds like an anti-ellectual position to me.
One of the cited studies from the Damore memo was done across 55 countries, and effectively has a P value which is eyebrow-raisingly high. (They used another stats test.) It's definitely an important result, and is acknowledged as such by a big swathe of Psychology academia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
Neither of those things are the case. There are subsections of the memo that are both objectionable and unscientific. That he has some things that are science-y does not make the entire document wholly unobjectionable.
This is a civil matter so its on the balance of probabilities this isn't a criminal court.
How is that better?
Almost immediately my attorneys launched a two-pronged approach. They filed additional complaints to the lawsuit and they had me file a complaint with the NLRB. Prior to this, I had never even heard of the NLRB and when I read their website I still thought it was a protection for unionized employees. This is far from the truth. My NLRB complaint consisted of two complaints, one for wrongful termination and the second was centered around the employer trying to stop my organizing the class action by terminating my employment (I was the only member of the class that was terminated at this point). At this point, I was also separated as a plaintiff from the "class" and had my own lawsuit against the employer that encompassed the wrongful termination complaint.
The NLRB almost immediately assigned an investigator (a staff attorney) to explore my complaint. This lasted a couple months with several meetings between myself, my attorneys, and the NLRB interviewing the employer and other current employees.
One thing I learned is that there is nothing an employer hates more than a federal agency digging around their business. In the end, the NLRB found both my complaints valid. They offered a settlement to the employer that involved monitoring and random complaince checks for a period of time.
At the same time, my lawsuit continued through the courts. What did help my case was the NLRB findings. It was hard for the employer to deny complaints when they had already settled complaints with the NLRB. In the end, we ended up settling the entire case.
After the case was settled the employer ended up terminating most, if not all, of the employees that were involved for various reasons (mostly false allegations).
Overall, the NLRB does provide a level of protection for the common employee and working conditions not just for unionized employees that I, and I am sure many others, are completely unaware of.
1) Damore never argued men were better suited to software engineering than women.
2) Damore never argued for google to violate EEO laws, and in fact it’s the opposite.
It’s very sad to me that there is such widespread misinterpretation of Damore’s nuance in his memo. In every possible factual way it’s a pro-diversity memo, but because it cites research on the average personality differences amongst men and women (which are 100% true), he gets crucified as a bigot and an anti-diversity zealot.
Furthermore, when it comes to matters such as these, “belief” should not play a substantial role. We’ve already proven that men and women don’t differ much on intelligence. No need to believe one way or another.
While this may not have been his intent, this ruling appears to imply that the EEOC thinks that the content of his words do amount to that.
You can disagree, but my expectation is, being that they are EEOC lawyers and you are not, their understanding of what does or does not violate EEO law is better than yours.
Damore lost the PR battle long ago. PR justice, while disheartening, isn’t anything new. Challengers to popular ideology are never right at first, but he’ll be right eventually. One day it’ll be more faux pas to assume there are zero average personality differences between the sexes.
[0]: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/348246-poll-google-was-...
If I say that women are on average shorter than men, is that a harmful stereotype when it comes to mixed gender basketball leagues?
If I say that women are more caring on average than men, is that a harmful stereotype only if it is untrue, or is it harmful to state it even if it is true?
I fully respect Google's right for at-will termination, just trying to figure out whether Damore sinned by going against "world-as-is" or "world-as-ought-to-be".
I took the effort and found both the full text of this new National Labor Relations Board judgement [0, PDF], which includes:
"… statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism … were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment…"
and Damore's original memo, which cites a peer-reviewed published source [1]:
"research in large samples has shown that levels of N (neuroticism) are higher in women than men. This is a robust finding that is consistent across cultures. This is especially the case during the reproductive years, but is also visible in children and elderly."
Does such research really constitute harassment in the US? If so, what are the broader implications for science?
Other rebuttals I could find were similarly vague in distinguishing between facts ("is") and desires ("ought to be"). Has Damore's memo been rebutted at the "is-level"? Is he wrong in facts, or merely controversial in his proposed policies?
[0] https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391 (PDF)
It’s fine to disagree with what he said, but it’s not fine to mischaracterize what he said.
This sounds almost sarcastic. I get that hyperbole is a rhetoric device. I agree to a certain extent, too, while I understand that positive discrimination is discriminating never the less. But: The absolute "innate" equivalence between any two persons is not comparable.
Prejudice is not allowed, sure, but it goes both ways. You can't just take any 50% of the population and claim they must be as good as the other half, just as you can't take any half and claim they must be inferior. Because that is subjective -- concerning subjects -- whereas you want to be objective -- judging actions by their objectives.
I know I should really not be focusing on that one silly little detail out of your comment (which I agree with in general) but can you please explain that "Wa-Waa"? Do you mean it as in the "wa-waa-waa-waaaa" sound from old movies, like in the video below?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xt1kUK71lc
And sorry for derailing the conversation.
Wrong. Damore was pro diversity.
What he said was Google didn't achieve the wanted diversity, because the methodology is wrong.
Then he started retweeting Breitbart articles and selling "Goolag" t-shirts and threw his credibility out the window, and solving the problem of "how do we bring people on-board with the diversity thing without scaring them off" is again put off to another day.
It's an impressive feat of mental gymnastics to put people like Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, and Steven Pinker into the category of "Alt-Right." (The first two being an openly gay man in a gay marriage, and a Lebanese jew.) There is no logic there. Basically, if you're not a true believer who has drunk the Kool-Aid, you must be one of the lurking enemy harboring evil thoughts. Sorry, but there are a lot of people who are happy to live and let live, but who have different ways of interpreting the world.
I listened to most of his interviews tho, and he didn't sound alt-right to me at all. He sounded pretty Libertarian/Classical Liberal (he describes himself as a Classical Liberal)
I try to avoid Molyneux as much as possible. Keep in mind that the term "alt-right" is overloaded terminology. Roaming Millenial has a video where she outlines 4 broad categories of "alt-right." Not all of them are White Supremacist. Molyneux, I would just categorize as a very cultish Libertarian. Molyneaux should be rejected because of observations of his actual morality, with regards to questions of free inquiry. You might know additional bad things about him. However, it's "insipid" (your word) to judge James Damore's ideas based on association.
It's also insipid to suggest that being gay or Jewish precludes being alt-right
Just as insipid to put Gad Saad, Dave Rubin, and Steven Pinker into that category, based on what they say and the positions they take. The fact that they are gay or Jewish should at least get you to question the narratives pushed by media and take into account their actual positions. Hint: The narratives with regards to those 3 are false, and are unprincipled attempts to silence through association, probably because the critiques and information they supply pretty much demolish those narratives.
What would that make Milo Yiannopoulos?
Milo is, as far as I can tell, genuinely is anti Alt-Right, where that term encompasses the more radical 3/4ths of Roaming Millenial's categorization. He may well line up politically with some segment of the online community which rejects identity politics, but which is still far right. He also displays a problematic morality as evidenced by some of his actions. In my estimation, he's half activist and half opportunist.
Milo was one of the most hated people by the alt-right, his husband is black, how much more do you need for him to most probably no being alt-right?.
I refuse to believe that anyone who sincerely and honestly spent any time looking into the actual opinions of Milo, Ben Shapiro, Molyneux etc and not just cherry-picked soundbites would make such claims about them. Milo is extreme in his provocations but he is hardly anything close to alt-right.
I certainly don't agree with everything these guys have to say but I would urge you to actually listen to what they are trying to say before you judge them.
To the downvoters. At least provide me with a reason for the downvote. What did I say that's so wrong?
He's an active and vocal critic of the Alt-Right. He devoted an entire chapter of his book to criticism of the Alt-Right. Just what views of his would you cite as "Alt-Right?" Can you back those up with quotes? As far as I can tell, he's an amoral opportunist who will stoop to saying vile things, but he's not Alt-Right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blJfibQnTgU
He was employed by Breitbart.
He left.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart...
Listen to an interview with him and here he present his opinions. He is provocative but mostly just an annoying showman. His harshest stance is on islam which given he is gay seems fairly understandable.
Joe Rogan has a good interview with him (which is the one that got him fired from Breibart.)
I hope you realize how important it is to be precise here. The man lost his job for providing feedback as encouraged by HR after he did a diversity course.
Just making claims that isn't backed up about by what he is actually saying isn't very helpful.
we are supposed to understand the differences among four or five distinct fringe right-wing ideologies
No, you're supposed to be informed, and you're not supposed to impute views on others they don't actually have, just because you think you can get away with it. You know, intellectual honesty?
refrain from general remarks based on the behaviors of one group or another.
Yes, please don't tar people through stereotypes or anything which is not factually or rationally founded. Furthermore, judge people on the merit of what they do and say as individuals. Don't lump people into groups because you are incensed and you feel like it. That sort of behavior is precisely the moral downfall of the Alt-Right.
> He left
He resigned under pressure when controversy erupted over his past comments that were viewed as supporting, or at least minimizing the significance of, pedophilia.
He didn't leave because he suddenly realized, after years of association, that Breitbart was an alt-right outlet, so the fact that he left is not really germane to what his voluntary association with Breitbart says about his ideology.
He is a conservative who knows how to provoke that's about it.
I am aware of his provocations and yes he can be extreme but calling him alt-right while he is at the same time one of the most hated on the alt-right.
Breitbart was a more of an alt-media rather than alt-right. He didn't care about peoples political views he was after the existing media.
Re: Ben Shapiro -- As far as I can tell, he's a religious conservative, with a certain cosmopolitan flavor of rationalist deism, which completely falls in line with his particular religious beliefs. He's also one of the most effective and vocal critics of the Alt-Right. He's actively regarded as an enemy by most of the Alt-Right. Anyone who tries and tell you that Ben Shapiro is Alt-Right is an unprincipled ideologue who doesn't care about facts, only political power.
https://twitter.com/albedoa/status/964709008559964161
That's how little it takes.
It's really absurd.
We have taken the art of discourse and replaced it with barbs designed wholly to get likes, or whatever the hell Twitter calls them now. This does not help anyone.
Maybe I shouldn't have replied but he was basically trying to start a mob against me. Not that I care but just wanted for the record that his claim was wrong and didn't want to engage in any civil manor when not spoken to that way either.
Granted, it's a horrible experience.
This is precisely how they operate. They are trying to use a tactic of persuasion by repetition simultaneously with a tactic of tarring by association. Far left ideologues are currently engaging in this behavior towards DC Comics artist Ethan Van Sciver, claiming he's an actual Nazi based on his drawing the Green Lantern villain Sinestro with a Hitler mustache and titling it "My Struggle" -- ten years ago. It is conscious and deliberate. And it has been going on that way since 2012 or so.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/trump-alt-ri...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/...
Hell, I hopped over to Twitter to defend ThomPete against a very tasteless tweet. I dreamed that maybe, just maybe I could be involved in a conversation that revolved around mutual respect and well worded arguments. Instead, there was ThomPete questioning his critic's literacy???
This shit has to stop. When I was younger, we used to be able to have conversations like:
Me - I believe ________.
You - I disagree because ________, __________, and __________.
Me - Good points, but what about _______?
Today, conversations like that just don't exist. I'm sick and tired of this shit and frankly, I want to disengage.
But seriously, we need genuine discourse. We have to leave the hurtful barbs at the schoolyard and actually speak to each other like respectful adults. Fuck all of this division. It's leading us all down a horrible path.
It's precisely this sort of apathy which far-left ideologues are using. Given that you are an advocate of good old fashioned rational dialogue, it might not be too long before they come after you next and try to lump you into the "Alt-Right." They're already doing that to people who are basically just Republicans, like Ben Shapiro.
I think tech workers are easy targets. For instance, we've all heard about the need for diversity in tech, but never hear about accredited investors being < 6 % female and < 1 % black.
>Your post advanced and relied on offensive gender stereotypes to suggest that women cannot be successful in the same kinds of jobs at Google as men. I want to make clear that our decision is based solely on the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men. It is not based in any way on the portions of your post that discuss Google's programs or trainings, or how Google can improve its inclusion of differing political views. Those are important points. I also want to be clear that this is not about you expressing yourself on political issues or having political views that are different than others at the company. Having a different political view is absolutely fine. Advancing gender stereotypes is not.
Well, if I find out anyone holds nazi ideologies I'm happy to socially "destroy" them over those ideas. I agree that the government shouldn't punish them for those ideas, but I think individual citizens and entities have every right to disassociate and socially punish someone for those ideas.
Now, I'm not saying that Damore's ideas are that extreme. However, it puts an upper bound for me on how much I can agree with your statement. There are ideas that I'm fine imposing social punishments on people for believing.
I agree that Damore probably shouldn't be "destroyed" for his ideas (for whatever a definition of "destroyed" is that obviously isn't literal destruction), but I don't see why being fired is problematic for the way he shared those ideas in the workplace.
Edit: This post previously had a typo that stated: "I agree that Damore probably should be 'destroyed' for his ideas". That was not the original intent, and I've corrected "should" to read "shouldn't"
You stamp this out instead by finding out how the people ended up with those views to begin with, by being able to engage with those who view the world different from you, and by not fueling their hate.
Does this work for ever person - no, but it should be at least attempted.
(fyi - this is more a general comment about social media slayings that are way too common, I'm not being sympathetic to anyone who considers themselves a nazi).
My general views on this are derived largely from Popper and the paradox of tolerance (though, to be honest, I've more read about his writing that his work itself; it's next on my reading list). I don't think, as a society, we should tolerate intolerant behavior.
Which means, again as a society†, I think we should aggressively refuse and reject those with nazi ideologies. As an extension of that, I think we should mildly reject and refuse those with mildly intolerant ideologies. In my utopia, those social consequences would be proportional to the degree of intolerance, and I think you're right and fair to note that social shaming can quickly out-escalate the level of intolerance.
†not as a government; all consequences and punishments I'm speaking of should be social consequences and punishments. I'm fairly absolutist when it comes to 1A protections from the government
I'm the OP whose comment started this mini-firestorm of a discussion and I think you and I are probably very closely aligned. I'll try to state plainly how I feel about the whole situation.
I'll start with a quote by Albert Maysles, "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." I can definitely see how a percentage of his memo can be interpreted as offensive. I don't know all the internal information about how everyone was behaving, but I'd like to think that if it were my company I would have treated this as a teachable moment and had a frank discussion with him in HR. That said, I fully support Google's right to fire him even if I take the most generous interpretations of the memo, because frankly I'm a huge supporter of at-will employment.
The problem that I have is the way the national media and general public responded to this situation. Damore is a nobody with no power who might have some incorrect ideas about diversity policy. I should have never heard of him. And I definitely should have never heard of him under national front page headlines with titles about an "anti-diversity manifesto." This is a meek and mild super-nerd, not David Duke. Thrusting him into the national spotlight in this way was clearly going to destroy his career and was completely unnecessary.
Which means, again as a society†, I think we should aggressively refuse and reject those with nazi ideologies. As an extension of that, I think we should mildly reject and refuse those with mildly intolerant ideologies. In my utopia, those social consequences would be proportional to the degree of intolerance, and I think you're right and fair to note that social shaming can quickly out-escalate the level of intolerance.
†not as a government; all consequences and punishments I'm speaking of should be social consequences and punishments. I'm fairly absolutist when it comes to 1A protections from the government
In this case how would you socially destroy them beyond pointing out to those around them what they have been hiding?
If I knew someone was a nazi, I would inform those around them. If their employer—for example—refused to terminate their employment, I would move "up the chain", and attempt to apply social consequences to that employer. How that works quickly becomes context dependent, but it expresses in things like boycotts, and other refusals to engage economically with those groups.
Why are you writing this in the passive, as if this is an unfortunate thing that happened to him? He did all of that to himself. That memo created a hostile workplace and Google had no choice but to fire him. The outcome here isn't terrible, it's exactly what should have happened.
If his memo was railing against, say, the Irish, would you still think he wasn't harassing any of his Irish colleagues?
> any female
Now I understand. Go back to redpill please.
If an entreprise I work in would start things such as saying "there is not enough Irish in the entreprise", have a skewed hiring process towards Irish, imposes me lessons about how to behave around Irish, and forbid the use of French even when only French speakers are around, yes I would totally support someone (of every nationality) asking the hierarchy what is going on. Or I may even do it myself.
The only case it would be acceptable is of course a company which makes money based in Irish culture and language, which then require these specific people to be hired. But on the women side of the things, as I consider them totally equals to men and thus apt to do the same technical jobs as men granted we speak of the same education level, I don’t see why they should be favored over men. And some women in my lab totally think that way too. One actually told me she hates this type of policies because it kinda lowered her work to get her job (not that’s easy either to succeed as a man).
I think it's probably for the better myself.
Do you also strongly disagree with the concept of at-will employment?
If not, how do you reconcile the concept of at-will employment with this statement?
Do you not live on the same planet as the rest of us ?
Because it is common, legal, socially popular and frankly the status quo for companies to fire you based on what you say during work time. After all companies are paying you during that time to represent them and their values.
Society actually expects people to be fired based on what they say during work.
And what misrepresentation? You're deluding yourself. The memo as written is what created the hostile work environment, not any "misrepresentation".
Few people apparently read the memo.
I'm frankly ashamed at the behavior of my classmates, who were so enthusiastically throwing him under the bus, without really knowing anything about him. I found it very odd that people who had no basis of judging his software engineering skills had very strong opinions about them.
I'm reminded of a documentary film about North Korea, where during one segment of a meeting, people went up to the front of the room and took turns condemning the United States, and were cheered the more fanatical they sounded. There is indeed "thought-crime" in the United States, and this category is at times conveniently expanded to to encompass any questioning of the new orthodoxy at all, with no basis but irrational, emotional ones.
My impression is that he circulated his “feedback” among employees. I would be surprised if that was requested by Google.
That's how it started.
Yes. Starting with the first is a thing that actually happened, and the second is not, so it's not worth talking about.
Claims of anti-white-male discrimination in tech are man-bites-dog stories, and naturally get more attention for that reason, plus, Damore immediately sought out media with political biases to maximally promote that kind of story. It becoming national front page news and getting the degree of attention it did in part just novelty, and in very large part the foreseeable result of how Damore soguht to promote his story.
> This was a public assassination
No, it wasn't. It was public, but there was no assassination.
Was this before or after he'd already made national headlines for having written an "anti-diversity manifesto?"
It sure looked like an intellectually dishonest, ideologically fervent character assassination to me.
This willingness to "un-person" someone for reasons of ideological fervor -- this is precisely why I, as a liberal, feel so alienated from so much of the far-left politics going around nowadays. I've personally been a target of such things. (I can't discuss it, but I can say that it was not gender based.)
It's such attitudes and the unreasonable fury behind them which most worries me.
Team coherence and psychological safety are important, just as important as engineering skill. This is especially true at a large company.
You have a right to free speech, not to alienate your coworkers.
Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
He said Google lowers the false negative rate for women.
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
P.S. snarky commentary such as 'read the memo yourself', implying I'm lying about having read it, doesn't contribute to civil discussion.
If you're adjusting a dial, yes. But hiring is complex, and having more time to evaluate candidates means you can do a better job. Spending more effort is a simple way to improve false negatives and false positives. It's entirely plausible that a company might have extra time budgeted for double-checking resumes from certain groups.
"You have a right to free speech, not to alienate your coworkers."
Damore believed Google lowered the bar, hence the statements I've made explaining how he offended his coworkers.
It is reasonable to believe Google _hasn't_ lowered the bar, and if you did, you would be offended by a long document warning about gender-biased consequences of lowering the bar.
I'm not sure how productive this thread is. I'm very surprised by your repeated assertions that there's direct textual evidence I'm mistaken, yet you're willing to accuse me of bad faith repeatedly, instead of just correcting me.
I agree with you that it's reasonable to believe that Google _hasn't_ lowered the bar, but I don't see what difference that makes. There is a very applicable quote here by Albert Maysles, "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." With that in mind, I would like to plainly state my position here. I personally don't find Damore's memo to be unsettling, even though I disagree with some of it. If it were my company, I might have stopped at a firm one-on-one in HR with him. But I don't have all the details available internally and it's not my company. I fully support Google's right to fire him over the memo.
The problem I have is that a nobody with no power was publicly destroyed for cheap political points by the national media and general public. None of us here should even be having this discussion because a random nobody at Google with some incorrect ideas about diversity should never make national headlines with phrases like, "anti-diversity manifesto." This is a random socially awkward super-nerd, not David Duke.
With regard to national news, I believe you are correct that the leak is what got it into the national news, not the firing. But that doesn't change the equation. The 4th estate is powerful and I believe it grossly misused its power here.
That's why I'm very curious exactly how this got distributed early on. Did someone take private feedback and socialize it? Or was feedback always a public bulletin board, where there's some shared responsibility on both readers and writers to think about the context? Or did Damore socialize it independently to prove support for his ideas?
If feedback was private, I think HR could take a firm line about what policies and principles Damore needs to adopt (at least at the workplace) to participate in his employment community, without helping his name get published with this memo (and possibly even without firing him). But the moment it got published changed the stakes for everyone involved, and not just due to PR. It's fair to ask: "can I require my female and minority employees to work with someone who has asserted that biological differences make them less likely to succeed?"
As far as the media goes, they've done what they're paid to do and socialize the most extreme opinions (most rejecting but some supporting Damore). I think that sucks for society but is a much bigger problem than this case.
- In the "personality differences" section, Damore repeats broad stereotypes about behavior that might make women less interested or less effective in tech jobs. He admits these are small effects and shouldn't be used to judge individuals, but goes on to propose policy changes that would impact individuals based on the stereotypes. Institutionalizing assumptions about womens' interests and capabilities is exactly what labor laws are designed to avoid.
- His section about discriminatory practices specifically suggests that there has been a lower bar for "diversity candidates", implying some of his more diverse co-workers shouldn't be there.
2. Yes, his section about discriminatory practices does accuse Google of being guilty of the bigotry of lowered expectations. But that doesn't make Damore or the memo bigoted. Context is important here, he just came out of diversity training classes and was asked his opinion. This memo is in direct response to presumably having been trained to hire in a discriminatory way. It's possible Damore misinterpreted his training, but that's different than making him a bigot.
And further, even if you take the most egregious interpretation of these writings, take everything out of context, and try to paint it in the worst light possible, the reaction is still unreasonable. I'm not talking about him getting fired. That's fine, Google can fire him for wearing the wrong tie as far as I'm concerned, so they can surely fire him for potentially questionable opinions. The position in my original post is about the national media and general public. Fire him sure, but is this really so bad that the entire nation needed to be brought in to witness his public flogging? This is a socially awkward nobody with no power who might have some bad ideas about diversity policy, not David Duke on some white nationalist crusade.
Imagine you have a skill-based RPG, where you gain skill in some task only by doing it and men and women are completely identical in every single way. Now imagine that more women enjoy alchemy, but more men prefer to spend their time mining. In this game, because of how skill gain works, if you look for really talented alchemists, most of your candidates will be women, even though the sexes are every bit as good as each other.
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
Then when looking in to it, I saw a lot of the examples given from the medical industry as GP alludes to, where this is a real big problem (e.g. if your test is 99.999% accurate, but has a 0.001% false positive rate, then if your disease actually only affects 1/1000000 people then the overwhelming majority of people who your test select are actually healthy).
And then I went back and actually read the relevant sections on the stats textbooks for my courses and learned that
(a) it was actually in there, and (b) evidently my stats courses were way, way too easy to pass
As for the reply, I think I figured out why it was downvoted. It was a double-post, and the intended GGP was here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16398560
Where it makes much more sense.
There was a heavy bias to down voting all of my comments for the first 4-6 hours, which evened out to the opposite over time. I usually see this pattern in gender-related threads
Should anyone alleging that kind of discrimination be fired? Because they tend not to be.
Its a federal workplace law. A company will correctly fire you if you cause women to feel harassed or discriminated. Peoples understanding of whats allowable needs to catch up with the implications of the laws.
If you think that this does not happen, then how do companies boost the numbers of non-traditional candidates?
Google, as smart as they are, should be able to easily and conclusively prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this does not happen. Yet they resort to silencing.
You’re suggesting that they should prove a negative. The burden of proof is on the party that accuses them of a given issue.
But if we're talking about consequences of his actions, what about all the women whose careers he was advocating for destroying? Who, had he continued to work at Google, would have felt entirely unwelcome, untrusted, and unrespected? What is the impact on their careers when they face constant questioning of their very legitimacy merely because of their sex?
Would you kindly provide a source for this? Preferably from the memo itself?
But either way, those who are fully in the alt-left camp at Google seem to consider themselves completely free to make anyone who disagrees with them uncomfortable and to go far beyond that: to force them to undergo indoctrination "training", or to be fired outright to make examples of them to others who might be tempted to openly question leftist dogma that may or may not actually be correct.
At Google, those on the far left don't seem to feel the need for "careful deception" when it comes to expressing their opinions of/to coworkers they disagree with. They don't act as though they are required to make those with different opinions "feel safe". They have every reason for confidence, because "safety" just means "privilege": We get to blame and criticize you, but you aren't allowed to respond, because we (not you) are entitled to "safety".
Its not like the alt left yet to preach about communism or unions or taxation with the same privileged safety. Subjects like this get a lot of reasonable discussion from both sides at left leaning companies.
But when it comes to things like diversity? And you are a company full of the most intelligent people in the world? Yeah, sorry if you haven't realized that "unconscious bias" is a real thing, you don't deserve a safe space to question it, you are being wilfully ignorant.
Except that's not how it works the other direction. You mentioned communism. The left is indisputably on the wrong side of history here and hasn't figured it out yet. And yet somehow the right is still willing to engage in reasonable discussion.
A person could take a generous reading of Damore's memo and find plenty of common ground. It doesn't matter if he's right about the differences between genders being biological vs environmental. Survey after survey suggests that part of the reason why women avoid/leave tech is long hours and inflexible schedules. Since men are more willing to accept long hours and inflexible schedules (again, could be socially constructed) then Google is currently set up to maximally benefit men (patriarchy). To help with this situation Damore suggests some new policies like creating more part time positions and offering more telecommute opportunities.
But instead of trying to find common ground and move forward with some policies which might create an environment maximally beneficial to everyone, the ENTIRE NATION needed to stop what we were doing so this socially awkward nobody with no power could be publicly flogged over some potentially incorrect ideas about diversity policy.
This is a joke right? Proposing universal health care, paid maternity leave, or raising the minimum wage leads to screams of "SOCIALISM!" and any explicit support of socialism leads to screams about the millions of people killed by Stalin.
There is no reasonable discourse about the idea of weak-link based cultures (rather than strong-link), or government-mandated egalitarianism.
How would you imagine those folks educate themselves? Easily, by relying on the abundant resources available to them. The internet, books, youtube, etc. There's a ton of material out there, if you actually care, if you think it's important to educate yourself the resources are available. He did not do that, because he wasn't seeking to inform himself, he was seeking to advance an agenda, to encourage others to adopt a prejudice that he held.
Also, I'm getting really sick and tired of these comments that bemoan the fates that have befallen these individuals who have substantially brought it upon themselves and give short shrift to the impact they've had on others. Damore was "merely asking questions" but the questions he was asking were things like "do women deserve to be the equals of men in this field?" and so forth. As both google management and the judge here have correctly pointed out, communicating in that way is incredibly damaging. It's unprofessional, it's discriminatory on its face, and it has no place in a modern work environment. The man is a grown-up, he should be smart enough to know how to broach a difficult subject of conversation if he is seeking to learn more about it or to explore controversial topics. Similarly, you can't just blunder into a discussion about race relations in the 21st century by leading off with questions like "are people of color equal to whites?" or "was slavery really wrong?" Because, again, those are on their face discriminatory, exclusionary, and harmful.
And to claim that Damore was in any way trying to advance the cause of diversity is just plain counter-factual. It is clear, especially after the end of his google employment, that he has a much different agenda.
He didn't ask whether women deserved to be equals and just the fact that you think that shows just how ignorant many commentators are in this case.
If you actually are interested in hearing his version of the story, not just your own wrongly informed and biased one here is a good interview to provide you with some of the proper contexts. Then tell me what exactly it is that he has done wrong.
Doubly so for Google.
Not because “how can you find the time” is an excuse, but because it’s a symptom of the problem. We have an industry that enables people with no sense of perspective. It’s not just the outliers that need to ‘wake uo’. It’s on all of us.
This sounds like a really lazy way fo reasoning.
To use a technical analogy: it’s like a C++ programmer writing a rant about how JS dynamic typing must be for people too dumb to learn C++, and the ending it with “but I’d love to ‘learn’ more about JS!” Nobody is going to assume good faith.
So can you point me to exactly where he claims that?
But put that aside and just try to engage with the simultaneously naive and arrogant assumption that the people Google hires --- people, we assume, like Damore --- must somehow represent the top of that curve. Because what they do is just so demanding.
I work in this field, at a pretty deeply technical level, and when I hear other people in it make arguments premised on the notion that what we do demands the pinnacle of human cognitive ability, I just want to hide under a rock from embarrassment.
Damore's memo doesn't mention intelligence or IQ at all [1], not even in the abstract or as distributions or as averages.
--
Using the version of the memo cited on the wikipedia page https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
Why should this be representative here? Shouldn't the leaker be punished for the fallout of distributing the draft, if the final version was more nuanced?
"[...] the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"
I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?
The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.
This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.
He says there are IQ differences between people. Who are these "people" if not men and women? He either means men are smarter or he just randomly went on a tangent.
Let me ask you, when he says there are IQ differences between people, which groups of people do you think he means?
He is referencing the people who claim there is no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs.
If you want to understand what he is talking about here is an example
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...
For someone to say that people who are already in a career, that is, already selected for their ability, are less suited because of their sex is kind of absurd.
That tidbit is a paranthetical in a sentence about the psychology of left vs right. His thrust is an illustration of how ideology and science are conflated.
The full sentence, which you clipped is: Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change), the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ8 and sex differences).
That is, that the left likes to pretend there are no IQ differences (between any two groups), nor that there are any psychology differences between the sexes [because it undermines their ideology, just as global warming undermines conservative ideology].
Though this may seem ambiguous, it's clear if you consider his footnote. [8]
This memo was written inside of Google, yet you seem to judge it as if it was written to the outside world. Why would you do that?
Even if he was misguided (as far as I know he was a top performer), then by what standard do you mean that your interpretation as an outsider is more relevant than the intent of the memo (which was feedback as encouraged by HR)?
Why should I read it in the light that you want me to look at it in (he is arrogant and think he is the pinnacle of human cognitive ability) rather than the one he intended which was to raise his concern with their hiring process?
The claim is that there are more extreme outliers for men, both at the top and at the bottom. So there are more very stupid men. This is borne out by the research, and by the prevalence of Darwin Awards winners who are male. I don't think this makes men inherently superior, overall. I think it makes men more prone to specialization at the expense of other areas of attention, like social graces. My "lived experience" would seem to bear this out. Nerdy guys are more obnoxious in certain ways than the general populace, and currently express this in way which would tend to affect the preferences of women.
I work in this field, at a pretty deeply technical level, and when I hear other people in it make arguments premised on the notion that what we do demands the pinnacle of human cognitive ability, I just want to hide under a rock from embarrassment.
We've talked about this before, and I did and would still agree that the Bay Area/Silicon Valley's view of itself is overblown. Taking such a view actually deflates the notion of male superiority instead of inflating it.
Re: the online challenge which your company had online for recruitment purposes -- was it gender neutral in its presentation and availability, and what was the gender distribution of the successful takers? What was the gender distribution of the hired population?
We tried to do a company premised on scaling it up, so that we could place enough candidates to service a truly large funnel. I looked forward to seeing what that would do for our parity numbers. But we did that startup wrong, and so I haven't found out how it will work out yet.
Doesn't a situation where the candidate pipeline is so skewed call to question the desirability of "equality of outcomes?" It would also make me question ideological doubling-down, and mob psychology behaviors like ridiculing managers who hadn't met quotas yet. Such behaviors in such a context, like that of the Google which James Damore described, strike me as every but as illogical and mean-spirited as the parody motivational sign, "the beating will continue until morale improves."
Google has enacted diversity policies which are directed towards the front end of the pipeline -- like directly recruiting at Howard University -- and those are supposed to be backed up by hard numbers showing results.
All the biggest tech companies go out of their way to encourage women to the point where they favor women rather than men.
What industry does better when you look at it on a whole?
No one is claiming it's perfect but it's hardly filled with clowns IMO.
And yes, our entire profession is clownish. We produce shitty, unreliable software using ad-hoc methods no two teams agree about, our management processes are folkloric, our hiring procedures random. At the very peak of our profession, on teams building the most important and widely used software, we are at best working around those problems.
If you compare working hours, salaries, opportunity, benefits, freedom, vacation, maternity leave etc. I have a hard time seeing law or accounting being better and even with medicine I would claim that tech is still better for women on every step.
Whether your company doesn't live up to this is another question but most other places I have been or worked with in the tech industry are extremely open to both women and minorities.
In other words, it's exactly the kind of milieu which runs off of ideology, and is ripe for ideological hysteria. I mean, what in the heck do we think language flamewars are?
This is fallacious reasoning. The claim that the IQ of men has higher variance implies (given a Gaussian distribution) that there is some IQ threshold beyond which there are many more men having an IQ greater than the threshold than there are women. It doesn't imply anything about whether this threshold is above or below the average IQ of Google employees. In fact, if indeed the claim is correct, the threshold may well be not very much higher than the average IQ of the general population.
By way of calculation, apparently 30k software engineers work for Google[1] so there are probably around 15k in the USA. There are 600k software engineers in the USA[2]. I estimate that Google employs about 10% of the engineers that could pass an interview with them if they tried, so the Google-level cohort in the USA is about 150k or 25% of all engineers.
The top 25% of engineers is 0.7 standard deviations above the mean of a normal distribution. Assuming equal means, female engineers would have to have a variance in "software engineering quotient"[3] 45% that of the male engineer variance.
So it seems that if men and women have the same mean propensity to be good software engineers (not just IQ, or even IQ at all, but general propensity) but the variance of the female propensity is 45% of that of the male, then that would entirely explain a 20%/80% ratio at Google.
(Caveat: I've calculated the SWEQ level based on male engineers only but since there is such a small proportion of female engineers I don't think this skews the calculation very much.)
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
[3] IQ per se is probably not the relevant factor. I don't know if a single number representing "SWE quotient" is even plausible ...
I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?
The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.
This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.
He isn't talking about who is better just that there are differences.
What is it you don't get? He is referencing the people (mostly feminists on the left) who claim there are no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs.
If you want to understand what he is talking about here is an example https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...
If you write something that people interpret as sexist due to your poor language and then spend no effort to correct that error.... that's still bad.
1. If there are indeed biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits, should it be firable to say so?
2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?
I won't challenge anyone who answers. Thank you.
You need to unpack this into a few different things:
1) Are there cognitive differences between the sexes? Probably true--but we don't have a great idea of what they are.
2) Do those cognitive differences explain different aptitudes for different intellectual pursuits? No evidence for this in the context of computer programming. Which is why Damore's memo was so intellectually weak. The reasoning was basically "studies show women are people oriented" --> ??? --> "men are biologically predisposed to prefer programming."
3) Is it okay to fire people for saying things that are true? Businesses aren't free speech zones. Actions that jeopardize team cohesion, recruiting goals, company image, etc., are and should be fireable offenses. If someone at Google prepared and circulate a memo on how advertising is evil and destroying America, they should be fired, truth of the matter aside.
4) Everyone is entitled to an opinion, to speak on their own behalf, on their own time. People don't have to associate with you if they don't like your opinion. If you make a lot of money and send your kids to private school, you don't tell a room full of democrats "who cares about public education, let's cut the top tax rate." And if you do and people get salty, you don't say "but don't I have a right to speak on behalf of my own interests?"
This thread is awful enough without people stooping to personal attack. We ban accounts that do this. Moreover you've violate the site guidelines quite a bit and we've had to warn you before.
We won't ban you this time, but please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on if you want to keep commenting here.
First, I'll note that "should it be firable" in the question is a little bit ambiguous. I'm interpreting it as "should a company be allowed to fire an employee for this", and not as "should a company fire an employee over this".
If you believe in at-will employment, then yes. Truth does not protect you from being fired.
I'm not a huge fan of at-will employment in general, but I think even in this context the 1A freedom of association makes it problematic to prevent companies from firing people for their speech. Even truthful speech.
As an individual has the right to speak, without interference from government actors, the employer has the broad right to choose who they associate with. Restricting that right is problematic.
> 2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?
Of course they should be allowed to voice opposition. The government should not interfere with their speech in any way. Further, the government should not discriminate against those individuals based on that speech.
However, as they are allowed to voice their opposition their may be social consequences for doing so. Speech often carries social consequences—some I agree with and some I don't. For me, how appropriate or proportional those social consequences are depend very significantly on the content and tone of the particular voiced opposition and the social response. That makes it somewhat harder to respond to a general question.
You are free to challenge my responses. I'm happy to discuss these ideas.
Some similarly constructed questions I would return:
1. If there are not biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits—but a coworker asserts that such differences exist, that your sex is the one with less aptitude—could you see how upset employees and applicants of that sex?
2. If women have traditionally been discriminated against in this industry, and a co-worker voices support for this ongoing discrimination in a way that makes them uncomfortable, should they be allowed to complain about that co-worker? Should their complaints be taken seriously?
I similarly won't challenge you if you answer.
No, but you can start conversations and learn by asking questions. What silences conversations and prevents learning is a menacing attitude towards to having conversations and asking questions.
He was attacking core assumptions about what a fair society should look like.
Aren't the assumptions the very things which should be questioned? If your axioms are flawed, then the systems built upon them are invalidated. Why should there be equality of outcomes? Should Asians have representation in the NBA proportional to their population percentage? Why is it that Jewish people have been radically more successful than the general population at tailoring across literally thousands of years of history, in so many different cultures and contexts? Why is there a Scandinavian Gender Equality paradox?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
(Watch that video and try and tell me that the "equalists" don't come across as unreasonable, closed minded, and ideologically driven?)
A broad reading of history tells us that cultural human capital is tremendously powerful. It also gives one hope, as the historical record also indicates that cultural human capital is also transferable. The transformation of the Irish diaspora from their utter destitution to their descendant's current place in 21st century society should tell you that. (Some historians would place the average displaced Irish peasant's wealth at something like 1/2 to 1/4th that of the contemporaneous average US slave's.) Such a reading of history also demolishes the ideology of the worst segments of the Alt-Right. (As well as demolishing that of the identity politics US far-left.)
Let's call such a world view, "Cultural Primacy." Given that cultural human capital has such deep-rooted and powerful effects, what conclusions could we draw about Google's policies? It could well be that cultural human capital would have strong and persistent effects on the preferences of groups, so it would be unreasonable to expect immediate 50/50 outcomes. In fact, it would be expected for such changes to be generational, perhaps taking 2 or 3 generations. Such a world view would also emphasize the educational pipeline, and the way the subcultures of professions and fields are perceived by under-represented groups. This also happens to be in line with James Damore's suggestions from the memo. It's also entirely in line with what Google and YouTube execs have said in public:
This wasn't some intellectual debate.
It was precisely that.
By all accounts he was given feedback on his ideas before the final memo went out.
By his own account.
In the very text he says that opposition to these ideas demonstrates bias and he therefore dismisses the very idea of being wrong.
Quote, please.
This wasn't some intellectual debate.
No, the reaction to the memo turned out to be screeching and namecalling.
Here's a feminist interviewing James Damore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SFLoKa8FdA
My guess is that both sides look at the worst of the other to justify themselves.
[citation needed]
Among the "pseudoscience" in the memo is one of the most important results in psychology of recent years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
The study cited as "The Scandinavian Paradox" was across 55 countries and is one of the statistically strongest results in the social sciences, flat-out.
He went much further, though, basically asserting that women engineers didn't belong at Google, and that in fact the job of software engineer is (and should be) designed to exclude women's typical strengths and preferences (as if general traits of the biological sexes have anything to do with individuals' aptitude and preferences). By so doing, he created a hostile workplace for women at Google. If that type of talk is tolerated within the company, what woman would feel comfortable working in a technical role?
Women on average show a higher interest in people
and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented
with pair programming and more collaboration.
Unfortunately, there may be 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).
Women on average are more cooperative
[...but] Competitiveness and self reliance can be
valuable traits and we shouldn't necessarily
disadvantage those that have themIn fact, his point is that technology is not even for most men which he has made clear in other interviews.
Please, establish it for us. Point us to studies (and counter-studies) which state this fact of yours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
"The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
Reading his memo charitably, I think he’s assuming that cooperativeness contraindicates for programming preference, so at least he has a complete chain of reasoning, even if that assumption is wrong:
Women -> cooperative; cooperative -/-> programming; women -/-> programming.
Point to exact quotes, not your own interpretation of what he writes.
That makes it easier to discuss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfI4BEONsng
I would also note, that Google often seems to fall down in terms of taking into account how changes in software affect the people who are their users.
Here [1], by the way, is an interesting overview of diversity programs. It mentions that voluntary diversity training (contrasted with mandatory training) is among the more effective tools for this. IIRC, it was Damore's attendance of such that got him all riled up.
Edit: here's the link:
What in that memo makes you feel that you can claim he didn't start with a shred of humulity? Can you point to any specifics?
I take it you either didn't read the memo, or read the version of the memo with all the references removed (Gizmodo, Buzzfeed, and surely others)
It wasn't merely that he spoke out. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. Saying "women, on average, have more neuroticism" is not how you start a dialog. It's how you start an argument.
Let's not debate whether it was a factual statement, but suffice it to say that "what I said was factual so there's nothing wrong with it!" isn't a defense. There are a million statements that are factual that you don't write down and distribute throughout the whole company.
Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is to build internet services and make money. If I were Google's management, I'd feel justified in firing him for having the poor judgment to approach things in a way that embroiled the whole company in a fight. The lost productivity alone from the distraction must have been costly to the company.
It's possible he was just trying to help, but you don't hire/employ people for good intentions; you do it so they'll be a functioning gear in a bigger machine. If they can't do that, they aren't fulfilling their purpose at the company.
With that established, if we go to Wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism#Age,_sex_and_geogr...
"A 2013 review found that groups associated with higher levels of neuroticism are young adults who are at high risk for mood disorders and women.[22]
For sex, the same review found that "research in large samples has shown that levels of N (neuroticism) are higher in women than men. This is a robust finding that is consistent across cultures. This is especially the case during the reproductive years, but is also visible in children and elderly." It furthermore said that EEG responses showed clear differences between the sexes in individuals with high N levels, but no functional MRI studies have yet been performed to investigate the differences in sex regarding N. However, there is a reason to suspect physiological differences to play a role because of previous studies that showed for example, a correlation between the size of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and N in female teenagers, so "the issue of sex differences in N and the implications for understanding N’s neurobiological basis deserve more detailed and systematic investigation."[22] A 2010 review found personality differences between genders to be between "small and moderate," the largest of those differences being in the traits of agreeableness and neuroticism.[37] Many personality traits were found to have had larger personality differences between men and women in developed countries compared to less developed countries, and differences in three traits—extraversion, neuroticism, and people-versus-thing orientation—showed differences that remained consistent across different levels of economic development, which is also consistent with the "possible influence of biologic factors."[37] Three cross-cultural studies have revealed higher levels of female neuroticism across almost all nations.[37]"
The abstracts of both of the cited studies are visible, though the full articles seem to be behind paywalls.
He kind of did - in fact when he used the word 'Neuroticism' he linked to the exact article you linked to above (the main article, not the sub section on age sex and geographic differences).
Unfortunately Buzzfeed (edit: got this wrong, it was actually Gizmodo) decided to strip all the links (and a few charts) out of the version of the document they published, and so many people didn't realise that was what he was talking about.
This is all PR bullshit. Is this what we've become?? If you can't have a reasonable, adult, calm discussion or debate on a topic then all hope is lost, almost everything else is moot at that point because the entire bedrock of modern society is crumbling. He presented a reasonable argument, and did it the right way (IMO). He wasn't spewing hate speech or name-calling or anything of the sort. He laid out his argument, cited sources from reputable studies in a professional manner, and asked for input/rebuttal. Only because he's asking questions some people may not be comfortable with did this go down the way it did. This is very, very sad, if we continue down this road it is not going to end well. for anybody.
What does that have to do with anything? It does not support (let alone prove) the idea that they are less capable engineers because of this. Where is the science linking this to ability? I might as well state "men, on average, are more violent", or have narrower hips - this is provably true, but it would equally uncorrelated to suitability to the life of a software engineer.
While appearing to be very scientific, the memo offers no science to backup the underlying assumption with that line of thought("The reason there is a gender gap is because women can't deal with the high-stress environments of tech/leadership"). This is a massive leap from neuroticism. If anyone has the science to back that assumption, I'll be happy to read it.
(... And, yeah, I feel kind of pedantic here, but on this particular topic the people who don't think about it in terms of probability distributions are doomed to talk nonsense, and getting this right actually matters. So.)
edit: Rayiner's comment[1] explains the lack of scientific rigor way better than I did
So you agree with what James Damore was saying then.
Do you speak truth to power, or do you speak irrelevance to power?
And men, on average, have a lower emotional quotient (EQ) than women and in the case of software engineers it is significantly lower.
So given that software engineering is a social activity i.e. it involves team work with a wide variety of other people. Perhaps then we should look to hire more women since men are biologically unqualified to do the job.
Or you know this line of reasoning is asinine.
But we're actually describing the candidate pool for these positions. Having a high EQ is rarely a motivating factor for going into software engineering at Stanford etc. It's people who come out of those programs and just so happens to have the right mix of EQ, drive, talent, and so on that apply to these jobs, and if the applicants are skewed male, the new hires will be as well.
Here; I took a real statistic, made it a generality and pretended that it applied to engineering.
Just because you cherry pick facts to support an argument does not mean that you are 'speaking the truth' as you wrote.
Moreover suggesting that a portion of your coworkers do not have its place here is crossing a very big line.
Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is getting the data right - and if you can't even speak of the data, then how are you going to get it right?
What does that have to do with his credibility or his arguments? His arguments stand on its own merits. Externalities has no bearing on argument. If he said 1+1=2 and then retweeted a breitbart article, does that mean 1+1 no longer equal 2?
Examples:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/14/haidt-google-memo-c...
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why...
So? Are you saying you disagree? Then state your case.
> his active association with them makes the claim that the memo was a good-faith attempt to improve diversity rather hard to swallow.
Why does it make it hard to swallow? What does damore stating a fact that women being more predisposed to more social careers rather than engineering have anything to do with his stance on diversity? Are you saying that men should be forced out of engineering and women should be forced into it?
So should we take over norway, get rid of women's rights and force the norwegian women to go into engineering?
> http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/14/haidt-google-memo-c....
That link is about an NYU professor who says data and analysis backs up damore's claim.
> http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why....
A lot of good points there.
This memo only helps this narrative of 'being predisposed' and that is the issue we are trying to get at.
From your last article: "Ladies, apparently, find the aggressively competitive nature of these subjects too “uninviting,” so they drop out." So many assumptions in those articles that I had to stop reading. Please look up logical fallacies.
I'm not on the bandwagon of "guilt by association"; Damore's claims are ridiculous on their face.
Damore cherry-picked Wikipedia articles to claim women are biologically inferior with the intent of causing an uproar, that's not at all "well-meaning".
Buried deep, deep down, he had somewhat of a point, but it wasn't at all the point he was trying to argue for.
I also take umbrage with his civil suit against Google because it amounts to no more than a document meant to doxx google employees by revealing their names and political positions ranging from benign to the more 'punch nazis' level of discourse. There was selective censorship applied such that people he agreed with were protected, while people he disagreed with were brought out in front of the crowd. I have seen pictures floating around designed to make it easy to effectively target said employees facebook, twitter etc accounts.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Damore is more of the same. Take, for example, his invocation of studies showing that women are more prone to be "neurotic." Aside from the fact that "neurotic" covers an immense range of personality traits--Damore leaves it as an exercise for the reader why that would be a bad thing. Among other things, "neurotic" encompasses "obsessive compulsive" or "anxious." Why isn't that a good trait in a programmer--someone who needs to be constantly on the lookout for the errant buffer overflow? He also invokes the idea that women are less able to handle "stressful" situations. Which explains why nurses--who are literally dealing with life and death every day--are mostly women? It's not that there isn't evidence of differences in personality traits between men and women, it's that all the inferences after "infant boys prefer trucks" is complete handwaving.
Back in the day, people would, with the pretense of science, invoke differences in cranial measurements to explain the economic plight of African Americans. Damore's is just the latest in a long line of pseudo-scientific gibberish. And it blows my mind that so many in the tech community are falling for it. You actually have to be bad at logical reasoning to find Damore's points compelling.
Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or are males simply genetically more predisposed to rape relative to females?
If males are genetically more likely to rape, should we lock them all up at birth? I guess not?
https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc...
With the biological explanation, we have evidence of certain gender differences, and we have evidence of disparities in representation, but we have no theory of how the two are causally linked. That’s the hallmark of pseudo-science. Say we know that women are more cooperative than men. What does that mean for programming? Is programming inherently less cooperative than fields like accounting where there are more women than men? What is the sensitivity of programming choice to differences in “cooperativeness?” The biggest confounder is that while we have scientfic studies associating genders with traits, we have nothing linking traits with professions. That’s where Damore’s memo goes off the rails into handwaving and begging the question: he repeatedly assumes that because men are over represented in programming, that programming is necessarily characterized by male traits. (E.g. thing oriented versus people oriented: why does Goldman Sachs have more women creating abstract financial instruments than many tech companies have creating social apps?)
Certainly, it is quite difficult to predict what psychological profile will succeed in a particular profession. But observing that males tend to succeed in programming is not begging the question whether males have relative genetic predisposition to programming (especially at the top 0.1% google level) but rather serves as evidence for the proposition.
When we observe for instance that Asians are overrepresented as programmers, we don't use that to infer that non-Asians are discriminated against, but rather that for whatever reason Asians seem to possess some trait profile, possibly genetic, possibly not, advantageous for programming work.
I'm not claiming that women were never discriminated against, just that it does not appear to be the best explanation for the observed large trends in gender ratios. For instance it doesn't explain male/female behavior differences in other arenas like criminality while genetic differences does.
This is super clearly not what GP was talking about. Removing implicit and explicit barriers to participation is not affirmative action. You are asserting the opposite of history here.
>Certainly, it is quite difficult to predict what psychological profile will succeed in a particular profession. But observing that males tend to succeed in programming is not begging the question whether males have relative genetic predisposition to programming (especially at the top 0.1% google level) but rather serves as evidence for the proposition.
It in no way serves as evidence for that proposition. By logic, quite the opposite is happening: you are proposing that as an explanation for the observation. There is no inherent connection between them.
>When we observe for instance that Asians are overrepresented as programmers, we don't use that to infer that non-Asians are discriminated against, but rather that for whatever reason Asians seem to possess some trait profile, possibly genetic, possibly not, advantageous for programming work.
Such a "trait profile" could include things like contemporary trends in national cultures, economic development policies, attitudes toward education, random vagaries of history and much much more. Anecdotally, I don't think I've ever heard someone, with a straight face, include genetics in such a discussion. But just as broad a spectrum of influences could be at play with the current gender balance of a given profession. And that's exactly the point: we don't have the clean data to make ANY strong claims about how much of the status quo was shaped by genetics.
>I'm not claiming that women were never discriminated against, just that it does not appear to be the best explanation for the observed large trends in gender ratios. For instance it doesn't explain male/female behavior differences in other arenas like criminality while genetic differences does.
It doesn't have to be the "best" or only explanation. But if there's good reason to believe that it's a factor, it should be taken into consideration and attempts should be made to solve it just like any other problem.
You ignored the “self perpetuating” part. The even gender ratio stayed stable long after those measures were removed.
> But observing that males tend to succeed in programming is not begging the question whether males have relative genetic predisposition to programming (especially at the top 0.1% google level) but rather serves as evidence for the proposition.
What? No. That’s textbook begging the question. You’re trying to explain the overrepresetnstion of men in programming, by pointing to that overrepresentation as evidence of predisposition. Textbook begging the question.
There are more male programmers than female NOW* but that wasn't the case 50 years ago.
Systematic discrimination has been proven as fact, with palpable examples (I shouldnt have to google this for you).
The 'genetic differences' that this memo quoted have been proven wrong by science... making it psuedo-science.
I don't have stats on sexual assault handy. But I can tell you that, yes, our society does, in fact, teach children (and adults) that rape is something only boys do. This is a fact.
Note that he isn't saying that women do have these traits; they are saying that on average, they are more likely to. In this example, O'Connor would just be one of the ones to not have them.
Alternatively, that the nature of software work changed.
It seems to me like the nature of the work hasn't even dramatically changed in the first place.
In fact, it was almost embarrassing for a man if he knew how to type since that was women's work.
So I'm sure that played a role once keyboard came into the picture.
Before that, when it was mostly punchcards, women were manual "computers" that did the calculations. So it seems reasonable that computers were considered women's work and thus that drive the trend.
Whether women were more or less suited to the job wouldn't seem to be relevant at the time.
I would say "more or less preferred" is a more relevant and less acerbic metric to consider.
I think James Damore's main thesis (or one of his main theses) was that men had more of a natural and biologically driven preference to work with things/machines. So if women were placed in these positions, it detracts from the narrative that "something mysterious happened in the 80s that caused women to flee the computer industry".
That wasn't the reality of it, of course. Those women were doing massive amounts of the work around the logic of the systems.
But there was a hierarchy, and everyone knew it. Wasn't until the 70s and 80s that things turned into a man's world. Once people figured out that there were hard problems to solve and plenty of opportunities to yell, "Yeah! We Really Fucked that problem in the ass!" Yeah, right about that time, the women started leaving.
My mom's roommate didn't quit NASA until she retired quite nicely in 1995. And by that time it was a very different place.
You can laugh and mock someone who started with punch cards all you want, and maybe even think she's a dinosaur who didn't keep up. But this woman taught me assembly, C, Lisp, C++, SQL, and Python. Not too shabby for a punchcard programmer from the 50s. I'd say she kept up just fine.
But boy, did she want out of that environment. She was not a happy camper by the time the 90s rolled around.
The thing you aren't getting is that it's the people on the ground who did a lot of the work to make programming languages not suck.
When ceos started realizing the potential social and economic power of the magic typing box it was no longer socially taboo for men to operate them. Of course, no self respecting business elite man would use one, only dirty hippie social rejects.
That's what makes the whole thing extra sad. For the longest time silicon valley types had to deal with being social outcasts in the business world. Rather than learn from that to be more inclusive they just took up the mantle of the business elite they replaced and perpetuated the same system of prejudice. In fact now that I think about it part of excluding women from the profession might have been an attempt at self preservation. Early tech people knew they were already looked down upon, if they didn't amp up the sexism to make it clear they were real men they would look even weaker to their east coast elite superiors.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. It doesn't matter how well they "performed". What matters is: would they have chosen that profession if they weren't placed there? Could it be that men preferred computer-related careers more than women did? If so, then the fact that many women were placed in those careers initially is completely irrelevant to the question of why there aren't a lot of women in those careers now.
>that these differences may [emphasis added] explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership
And he says one of the differences is a higher drive for status. That is one way it could change without the 80's thing being counter-evidence, if the status of practitioners and/or leadership in the field changed for some reason (maybe Bill Gates becoming the richest man in the world).
I'm not saying that I agree with him, or that the status drive difference is true, or that it would actually be an explanation for the difference from the 80s to now (Bill Gates might have lowered the status of the field for being socially awkward). I'm only saying that your counter argument may not work because he couched his statement in "may" and he talks about meta-level factors around the field.
But isn’t the opposite true as well? I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the IT department was at the bottom of the organisational pecking order, sometimes literally at the bottom in a dingy, windowless basement, and jokes about nerds and geeks and personal hygiene and poor fashion choices and so on were totally mainstream and acceptable. In those days, no-one said it was problematic that these losers and social lepers tended to skew male.
Obviously, everyone should be free to do any work that they want to and show an aptitude for. But you posit a one-way traffic that just isn't true.
Effect: wages rise
Effects of that effect: men choose the job, and respect increases
This article has an alternative explanation as for why:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Without implying there was any biological change at all - rather that other fields that were shut off to women (medicine, law etc) become more open.
It's a long read, but provides some interesting food for thought.
For example the following claim made by the author:
>Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming!
Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him seriously.
[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
How about some references for your second paragraph. I've seen statistics floating around proving you wrong...
There was only a short exception around the PC boom and the dotcom boom, when the proportion of women choosing to study it actually increased, and then fell down again once the boom was gone. This is similar to what the Scandinavian countries found in trying to encourage women to go into engineering: when they stop the campaigns, women's participation drops back to baseline.
But rather than look at the complete picture, only the gender ratio graph is ever shown, because that's the one that confirms the preconception that women are being victimized. This "drop", by the way, only exists at the bachelor level, and vanishes at the masters and PhD level, which suggests there is nothing driving committed and talented women out of the field at all.
But even if you didn't think all of the above is valid, it is preposterous to posit that the biological differences argument implies women must've somehow changed in the mid 80s. There is a much simpler explanation: computer science itself changed, and how it relates to industry. With the birth of PCs and especially SaaS, the amount of hard CS skills required to make computers do useful things dropped pretty much to zero. Only people with a particular theorical and abstract interest need to go into it. At the same time, software development pioneered many of the async and remote working styles that are common place in open source, and which allow for individualistic collaboration rather than the always-on social setting that women prefer. You see this in engineering too. Women gravitate towards engineering subjects that feature more team work, field work and lab work, and which involve working with people. The increased appeal of the field for men could be due to the fact that a segment of people previously tortured by social styles could now excel in a more solitary setting.
None of this is a taboo when it is used to imply that women's communication and empathy skills are innately superior, a common refrain in diversity circles. But try to make the same argument about men and their abstraction skills, at a population level, and suddenly you're blaspheming against the church of intersectionality.
The double standards and shoddy science are obvious, and the NLRB should be ashamed for rendering a judgment that declares reality to be sexist because some people's feelings were hurt. The only person who got actually victimized was Damore himself, for the crime of taking diversity advocates at their word, and actually offering them the feedback they claim to want, but clearly are incapable of processing.
Women weren't becoming less represented in CS over time, because they were never welcomed in graduate programs in the first place
http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/05/08/gender-gap-in-...
The point of discussion is whether there has been a drastic reduction in female participation in CS since the early 80s. This is a point that is commonly brought up, based on the graph of the gender _ratio_ of degrees conferred (which is dominated by bachelor's degrees).
As this ratio has dropped only because the absolute male numbers have increased, it is unfair to attribute that to a reduction in female participation.
I never said anything about equal gender balance, in fact, I strongly believe anyone who aims for a 50/50 gender ratio in STEM has embarked on a quest for a holy grail that can never be found, for the same reason social workers and nursing will never be 50/50 gender balanced. The only way to get close is to actively discriminate against the people most interested in it, and this is both stupid and immoral.
By the way, during those crucial 80s and 90s, computer tech was strongly associated with geeks and nerds, and the popular image was that of socially inept rejects. But now all that has been retconned as women being discriminated against, because the hard work of those nerds has turned it into a lucrative and prestiguous discipline. The idea that women weren't welcomed is preposterous, those men and the communities they built have always been infatuated with any woman who considered them worthy of respect, and a minority of women have always been part of it too.
Or that computer science, and programming, started to change around 1984, which is not at all implausible.
Also, in the article you linked there is a good observation:
> The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.
Which coincides with the time in which programming became a hobby you take up in childhood because you enjoy doing it, rather than a profession like any other. In other words, this could hint to a self-selection into a computer science career based on pure enjoyment of the activity as a child.
(The article instead suggests computers were marketed mainly as toys for boys- which is also not implausible, but doesn't explain why tech companies would have willingly cut themselves off half of the possible revenues of their product- I bet a 100% increase in sales would beat any prejudice).
There are many comments that classify his memo as anti-diversity (it is pro diversity), and there are many that seem to suggest that the memo claimed women are less suited for these jobs, which again is patently false to anyone who gives it a reasonable and full read.
The injustice here is that this employee was taken to a workshop/seminar, was asked for feedback, which he submitted, and was ignored. His firing only came when his memo was leaked to the public and it became the subject of a media witch hunt.
Had the memo not been public, he would still be working there. This was not a planned firing and there was nothing normal about it. The CEO cancelled his vacation to return to HQ and address the situation caused by the media outcry.
This is a cancerous cultural problem that manifests the worst forms of censorious and authoritarian practices of dictatorial regimes of the past. Diversity at this cost is not worth it. Nothing is worth this kind of environment that is openly hostile and punitive to "wrongthink".
People of various backgrounds are not tokens to be planted into various positions to fulfill some fetish or misguided sense of justice. Under-representation by a specific group or sub group is not sufficient evidence of discrimination or a conspiracy. Deeming programs and opportunities unavailable to people because they don't have the correct biological trait is disgusting, and the ends do not justify the means. To argue that favoring someone because they belong to a special genetic group is rooted in the very "essentialist" thinking that is claimed to be chastised.
There is a better solution to these issues, and at this rate it will never be found. Ironic that some of the world's most innovative people who have no problem bouncing from one design pattern to another, are perfectly content with an approach to a point that criticism of it will get you fired.
Perhaps you men "snark-hunt".
Men were not the target of witch hunts because they were the "incorrect" sex.
Today, in cases where merit seemingly takes a backseat to diversity, men are the "incorrect" sex for some opportunities, like say if you want to speak at a node.js conference, or attend some special mentoring workshop. The opposite is not true, if you are not a man, there are no instances that I am aware of where you are openly denied or discouraged from pursuing an opportunity for that reason alone.
Of course, this is expected since the first ones to complain about growing equality are the ones who prospered disproportionately under inequality.
To constantly read about cases where biology determines whether or not people are eligible for a particular opportunity, i.e. imposing inequality of opportunity in order to arrive at equality of outcome, is violating the very principles one claims to be opposed to. The excuse for this kind of implementation is that it is justified, in order to fix historical inequality. The people who are being discriminated against had no say in historical inequality. They were born into this kind of a society by accident of birth. If a young boy in Saudi Arabia goes to get a driving license and is told that he is no longer eligible because they have decided to randomly reject 4/5 male applicants to correct for historical injustice, he is being penalized for something he had nothing to do with. When a young boy is rejected for a job he is qualified for, citing the fact that he is the wrong sex, he is being penalized for something he had nothing to do with. Nobody should be at a disadvantage imposed on them by others using biology as a reason to do so. This is immoral, and no outcome is worth this kind of violation of principle.
I am from India, and I know bias when I see it. Classism and racism is systemic in India and whether you want to believe me or not, a person from a religion or upper caste will prefer a person from the same group. I am not going to claim that this exact same thing happens in the US, but I will not believe that it doesn't happen at all.
The thing is that the memo even mentions the problems with inherent bias, and then mentions that we need to have "open" dialogue.
The open dialogue is hard to happen when one group has been suppressed for generations.
What are you going to tell them? - Ok, we are sorry for what we have done, now we are going to be equal and you can compete for the same things? One group is dirt poor and disadvantaged, and the other has always enjoyed enough wealth to get proper education. How is that level playing field?
Minorities need to be given a hand up, at least for a generation to really make a level playing field.
As for your examples, yes, it's unfair, but that's what the under privileged group got told for generations. I guess life really is unfair.
The criteria for being institutionally favoured must not be rooted in biology, because it generalizes against people who do not have the requisite biological trait. This is the very same evil you are seeking to correct. You cannot use the same evil against a different group to "equalise" the wrongs committed before.
Two 15 year olds, one the son of a brahmin shopkeeper, the other, the son of a lower caste politician each score 89% in their class 10 examination. The politician's son has lived in the lap of luxury, elite coaching classes, servants, chauffer driven car, quiet studying environment. The shopkeeper's daughter shares a room with two siblings, spends 3 days a week doing a shift at the store, studies alone in an area with frequent power cuts.
By your system of favoring minorities, the politician's son is favoured over her, because he comes from a background of historical oppression. These cases are deemed "rare enough" to be considered acceptable sacrifices for the great cause of social justice.
Why must a biological standard be applied? Is this the best we can do ?
What are you going to tell the shopkeeper's daughter? Ok, we are sorry but after enough generations we will reverse this and your grandchildren will have justice?
You also cannot legislate away social ills and negative perceptions of one community by another. You certainly won't improve such divisions by favoring one community over another at an institutional level.
The shopkeeper's daughter tells her kids that she could have been an engineer at one of the city's best colleges, but she was not the correct caste for her grades to be deemed sufficient. Do you think this helps these divisions?
In a hypothetical engineering classroom, 25% of the class is at a different academic level to the rest of the class. How does this impact the relationships between students? How does this impact the way teachers teach these classes? Are these going to fix the divisions between castes?
These are poor solutions. These solutions must not go uncriticized. No solution should go uncriticized. We should always want to do better. Criticism of a solution does not imply a lack of empathy for the problem or those disaffected by it. Criticism of a solution to discrimination does not imply a favorable attitude to discrimination. These are cheap, ad hominem and intellectually dishonest ways of silencing people who do so, rather than engaging them, as was done with Mr. Damore.
In isolation, yes, you are very right. But history is anything but that, and there is always a context and reason for why things are the way they are.
I am from India, and I know bias when I see it. Classism and racism is systemic in India and whether you want to believe me or not, a person from a religion or upper caste will prefer a person from the same group. I am not going to claim that this exact same thing happens in the US, but I will not believe that it doesn't happen at all.
The thing is that the memo even mentions the problems with inherent bias, and then mentions that we need to have "open" dialogue.
The open dialogue is hard to happen when one group has been supressed for generations.
What are you going to tell them? - Ok, we are sorry for what we have done, now we are going to be equal and you can compete for the same things? One group is dirt poor and disatvantaged, and the other has always enjoyed enough wealth to get proper education. How is that level playing field?
Minorities need to be given a hand up, at least for a generation to really make a level playing field.
Okay, setting aside the ethical and moral implications. The effects that you are trying to fix are impossible to unravel from everything else. No one is even attempting to unravel it, and are simply using race, wealth and gender. No one bothers to think something as simple as "oh - you're a poor white male whose family has been living in a trailer park for generations without education - let's try give you a leg-up" over any random black-female.
That is the fundamental problem and we're all beating around the bush. You can not fix cosmic injustice. It's done, and short of time-travel or planetary-sized super-computers, we can not untangle the mess of consequences it has caused. Anything less is just playing lip-service while neglecting the truly-needy.
Damore's California lawsuit, which per the first page of the complaint, lists the below causes of action under various California laws, is unaffected.
CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT:
1. Violation of Cal. Labor Code § 1101
2. Violation of Cal. Labor Code § 1102
3. Workplace Discrimination on the basis of Gender and/or Race in Violation of FEHA
4.Workplace Harassment in Violation of FEHA
5.Retaliation in Violation of FEHA
6.Retaliation in Violation of Public Policy
7.Retaliation in Violation of Cal. Lab. Code § 1102.5
8.Failure To Prevent Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation
9.Unfair Business Practices, Bus. & Prof. Code Section 17200 et seq
10.Declaratory Relief
All the other observed comments about liberal/conservative/libertarian views are frankly not very interesting. The bottom line to me is that he didn't have a strong enough claim to unfair dismissal.
Court did its job. Move on.
Only in the way that union organizers and whistle blowers are stupid.
He's stupid. Something like liberal/conservative is totally unrelated, indeed.
They say that "discriminatory statements are not protected". Is "discriminatory statement" a matter of law or a matter of fact? Naively I'd expect a jury to decide if a statement is discriminatory.
And yes, I've read it. Just because he wrote some sentences that claimed he's in favor of diversity doesn't magically change the content of the rest of the memo.
If he was truly arguing in good faith, he should've stuck to actual, demonstrable examples of issues or problems caused by the existing diversity practices. There was no need to go on long rambling tangents about population statistics that even he acknowledges aren't really relevant to the topic:
> "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."
You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc
There was no need to go on long rambling tangents about population statistics that even he acknowledges aren't really relevant to the topic
It's certainly relevant. The "jury is still out" in terms of biology and gender preferences and how those are modulated by culture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
(Seriously, watch that, and tell me which side is intellectually open and honest, and which side comes across as ideologues.)
> "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."
You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.
"Seems to be implying." You are essentially admitting to an ideologically skewed, imputational reading.
So I really don't expect such discussions to be high quality. I think it has merit that it can happen at all, but my feeling is that much of the discussion swirling around the Damore memo is training wheels level discussion.
"Men’s higher drive for status
"We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
"Status is the primary metric that men are judged on4, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths."
I pity those poor men, forced into high-paying, high-status, but unsatisfying jobs like programming, management, coal mining, and garbage collection.
That's the point.
It's a proxy for the nature / nurture debate.
I put my vote token in the nature side. Women can do what ever men can and persisting the ideas that they can't sucks.
That is my opinion and I am unwilling to change it.
Members seems to be expressing views that are intrinsic to their identities. To that end, no one has an open mind on the subject.
Even I genuinely don't have an open mind on the subject!
These discussions and disagreements will only serve to cement the existing views of members.
Just talking about some things is enough to imply unintended conclusions. That's how it works in the real world no matter how hard you want to play Mr. Logic. To believe otherwise is extremely naive and puts you in serious danger, as Damore found out.
Opinions based around differences in human biology have a really bad historical track record. Groups and institutions have built up a natural vomit reflex for when they show up. Many might argue that this is a suppression of the truth but they also have to appreciate that that suppression might be in service of a greater good.
It took us a lot of years to get to the point where we could go furniture shopping and communicate constructively in order to agree on a purchase instead of fighting about who would win this one. We often were focused on entirely different attributes in our decision making process. For example, attractiveness of a bookshelf might be my focus. Sturdiness might be his.
Once we got past knee jerk rejection of each other's first pick, it was entirely possible to find a bookshelf that satisfied both his criteria and mine. But that required us to be able to communicate effectively, something we didn't have mastered when we got married at age 19.
When you do surveys, you find that the majority of people are both antiabortion and pro choice at the same time. Most people feel that abortion should be a last resort, not standard birth control. But they also feel a woman should have control over her body and her life and should not need to prove she was raped to choose to terminate a pregnancy.
Pollsters with a political agenda know this. They can survey the same people about the same issue and come up with data to support either antiabortion laws or pro choice laws depending on how they ask the questions.
Most people are not monoliths and not rabidly polarized along X social fault lines. The inability to safely talk to "the other side" means people can't learn to speak in a more nuanced way and can't build bridges.
I'm not 19 anymore. I see no reason to pick bookshelf A while hubby picks bookshelf B and we fight about who gets what they want. I am much more interested these days in finding out why he likes B, talking about why I like A and then looking for a third option that is satisfactory to both of us.
Society benefits when people can find a safe sandbox to begin that communication process. It does not have to be a case of which side wins and which side loses.
https://medium.com/@ioverthoughtthis/how-to-have-an-effectiv...
> Society benefits when people can find a safe sandbox to begin that communication process.
Totally agree. I would love some feedback from you given your stance on discussion!
I would add that a debate does not need to be a battle. I am usually not looking to argue and win. I am usually looking to converse.
Also, minds and feelings change slowly. Expecting them to change this hour because you used pretty words and had great technique is unrealistic. My goal is to be heard, to be allowed to speak my mind. People can contemplate my words at leisure and draw conclusions later. I don't need acknowledgement that I "won" this round right this minute.
In my experience most arguments of political nature have nothing to do with finding the right answer. These arguments are social posturing. It's not about me being right it's about you not being right. Some of the worst argumentative know-it-alls I ever met were only that way almost as a form of preemptive strike. They were terrified that someone might socially dominate them so they had to dominate the other person first.
For that reason I'm deeply skeptical that Damore was trying to have a conversation in good faith. It seems much more likely to me that he saw a social justice culture that claimed to have a monopoly on what is right and that really got on his nerves. I bet Damore would have been an outspoken social justice advocate if his workshop came to him and asked "hey, do you think these gender initiatives are good?" Instead I bet he got something more along the lines of "this is why you think wrong."
Don't get me wrong, I wish most people weren't assholes just as much as you do but it's a race to the bottom. If one person values "being right" they will take your good faith argument and eat you alive in public with no mercy.
Of course, that's against the HN guidelines, but it's not exactly hard to follow the letter of the guidelines while breaking the spirit of them.
She is a brilliant software engineer who switched out of CS into another major, despite having top grades.
I finally caved and asked her to read the original memo.
Whilst she found the memo interesting, she mentioned this is the view of a single person and found it ridiculous that it caused such an outcry.
She is all for diversity in tech (and for all industries for that matter) and pointed out that the hypersensitivity nature of CS causes much harm than good.
While we are busy doing roundabout discussions regarding a memo, personal data of millions of people are being leaked, privacy and security of people are in jeopardy because we fail to make high quality software.
It truly sadden both of us that the brilliant minds in our Industry are focused on what should/should not be written in a personal memo, than actually pushing the boundaries of software.
When a thought provoking community such as HN calls for arms every time this topic comes up and turns into a battlefield, I do wonder whether we have already lost the fight for TRUE diversity.
you can also find the full damore memo online.
I checked Damore's Twitter account, and he has not yet made a statement on this, perhaps wisely following his lawyer's advice.
from the NLRB Memo: "[Damore's] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers."
Interesting. The Board completely dismissed the scientific arguments, even going so far as to put quotes around "scientific". They didn't accept that he was making scientific statements at all! It's not clear whether they understood that Damore used "neuroticism" as a specific and uncontroversial psychological term, and not in the folk meaning of "crazy". I'm going to suppose no, since their qualifiers "heightened neuroticism" and "more prone to neuroticism" don't come from Damore's memo, and imply the "crazy" connotation.
There are others that made me frown way more.
The neuroticism quote is not beyond reproach though.
The big five model has been heavily critiqued, it is not exactly an ironclad scientific caution for Damore's argument.
> Women are more prone to “neuroticism,” resulting in women experiencing higher anxiety and exhibiting lower tolerance for stress, which “may contribute to . . . the lower number of women in high stress jobs”;
> Men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women, such that there are more men at both the top and bottom of the distribution. Thus, posited, the Employer’s preference to hire from the “top of the curve” may result in a candidate pool with fewer females than those of “less-selective” tech companies.
These are completely qualified folks, for the job of junior engineer. We purposely, from the category of all qualified junior applicants, hired those that also were from less represented groups.
Is this perceived (by “you”, I suppose) as “acceptable”?
I can't believe you were downvoted for expressing that merit rather than race and gender should be use for hiring decisions.
This is the new world we unfortunately live in. Words and their meanings are transformed to fit within the ideology ("it isn't discrimination if it favors women over men, or minorities over whites...")...
IANAL, but from my understanding making hiring decisions based on race, gender or religion is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But I really don't know what I am talking about and would be interested in hearing a lawyer's opinion.
I have first hand experience with this. As a normal working-class white guy with poor parents and no connections (I worked my way through school), I had a hard time even landing an interview at first. As a social experiment, I changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, kept everything else on my resume the same, and reapplied to all the jobs that didn't want me previously. Every single company that rejected Joe was overjoyed when Joanna applied. In every case I got a email within the week wanting to meet and interview me. It was kind of eye-opening. I didn't follow through as "Joanna" because the sexist hiring policies were enough to put me off working at these companies entirely. I eventually found an employer that wasn't sexist and have been happy with them so far...
There were other legitimate points in his claim that should be addressed too. You simply can't discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. And if people are outright saying that, that's a problem.
Is he a jackass? Yes. Did he do something obnoxious with that memo? Yes. Fire him for that. Which they did. Totally fine with that.
But if the real culture at google is as described, that's something that needs to come to light in discovery. I would have preferred for this to move forward so we can see some light on things.
The problem here isn't with Damore's "theory." It's whether or not there is a pervasive, race-based bias.
My suspicion is that there isn't really anything in practice. Yeah, maybe some dude does some virtue signalling every once in a while. But in reality, I can't actually believe a competent HR team would let that happen on a systematic level.
The chances are he would've been shown to be wrong. So it's too bad this didn't go past this stage.
The difference between being cast out and being celebrated is that the latter keeps their opinions to themselves. This guy self-immolated for foolishness.
> The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these cases. statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
The "these cases" reference is talking about a KKK member and someone who "made debasing and sexually abusive remarks to a female employee who had crossed a picket line months earlier". I don't see how Damore's memo is at all relatable to these.
And more importantly, the content they found to be discriminatory were the studies on differences in IQ and psycological traits by gender? How can presenting science be discriminatory?
If you disagree with some study, you explain why the methodology it used is bad or find other studies that try to explain it. You don't just claim that it's findings are discriminatory. That makes it impossible to discover why it's wrong (if it is).
[0] (PDF) http://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391
The important thing to remember is that in most of the US, there's a presumption that employers can fire you for any reason. Employment is at-will. Damore was appealing to a specific exception to that rule.
The question should have been "What is Damore advocating?".
And if they read the entire document then it would be clear that Damore was suggesting methods to bring Google's gender balance to 50/50 by making Google (and tech in general) more attractive to women by altering the software engineering culture to leverage inherent strengths that women (on average) possess.
They read the whole memo (and indeed summarize a lot of it, not just the prejudicial bits).
> ~ statements about immutable traits linked to sex — such as women's heightened neuroticism and men's prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution — were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding~ effort to cloak~ comments with "scientific" references and analysis, and notwtihstanding "not all women" disclaimers.
"Effort to cloak" and quotation marks around "scientific" are giving something away about the author.
> Moreover, the Charging Party reasonably should have known that the memorandum would likely be disseminated further, even beyond the workplace.
Damore "reasonably should have known" someone else was going to violate workplace confidentiality and code of conduct by leaking the document to the media? This seems like a failure of the employer not the employee.
> Once the memorandum was shared publicly, at least two female engineering candidates withdrew from consideration and explicitly named the memo as their reason for doing so.
This is the evidentiary component of the argument - which pivots on the not-so-reasonable "reasonably should have known" assertion.
>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.
Why is it so unbelievable that there are more men at the other end with extremely high ability? Just the fact that we have two different chromosomes X and Y is enough to increase our genetic variance (because if a gene on the X is faulty or extreme, we have no backup).
Observational correlation does not mean causation. It's analogous to how a racist would argue that because there are more african american men in U.S. prisons, they are there because they are biologically inferior - when in reality, socioeconomic factors are demonstrably one of the largest causes and there aren't links to genetics.
This is the argument that Damore was making, that there are less women in engineering and leadership positions not because of social constructs, but because of biological factors. The evidence he provided did not demonstrate ability differences. Sure, differences in preferences, yes, but those could be caused by the social constructs he was arguing against, and he didn't want to admit that.
Edit: Forgive me if I'm wrong, but aren't you also the HN user that tried to argue for taking away reproductive rights from poor people?
I agree that the burden of proof has not been met. From the studies cited on this Wikipedia page[0] it appears some studies have found this effect but it's not an accepted conclusion.
> Forgive me if I'm wrong, but aren't you also the HN user that tried to argue for taking away reproductive rights from poor people?
Link? I don't recall posting that and I do not support reproductive coercion of any kind. Although I do believe that poor people having children are setting themselves and their children up for suffering and maybe I said they shouldn't do so?
People should get fired for not doing their jobs -- not for writing what they think. And I also want to say that before you blame "the Left" for Google's behavior... Had he been fired in "Socialist Europe," the firing would have been declared against the law and Google would have had to pay a hefty fine.
I can add why I'm so sure he wouldn't have been fired. In most (many?) European countries, you can be fired for only(!) two reasons; misconduct and labor shortage. Misconduct must be specifically related to your job performance. Like, a train conductor that always oversleeps or a cock who can't boil eggs. Something quite a bit more obvious than claiming gender differences between men and women. Labor shortage is if there is not enough work to do and then the company can let go of the surplus personnel.
The walkthrough of the US laws, that tptacek provides, shows that they are completely different and much less employee friendly.
Do you think it's possible for his stating of his opinion to have side effects like creating a toxic work environment, which would be the antithesis of doing his job well?
> Because companies have a duty to comply with equal employment laws and an interest in promoting diversity, “employers must be permitted to ‘nip in the bud’ the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a ‘hostile workplace,’ rather than waiting until an actionable hostile workplace has been created before taking action," Sophir wrote.
If that is the case, the employees who create and talk about these blacklists - which appear to be well-documented according to HR - may be creating an ongoing hostile work environment long before this memo existed, which demonstrates Damore's point.
>... email read, in relevant part: “You’re a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. F[*] you.” The employee was issued a final warning for sending this email.
http://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391 (pdf)
Not to excuse anything that's actually toxic, mind, but I think it's more subtle than that. Why is Google so inept at social media? Why are they so often blindsided by attention from regulators and tax authorities? Why Google Glass and the glassholes? Because in the pursuit of this harmony they have a limited kind of diversity based on race and gender, but they're all 20-something graduates of the same handful of universities - there's no diversity whatsoever on age or class axes. So things that are completely obvious to outsiders, they are organisationally incapable of understanding. Trapped in a local minima and unable to climb out.
http://fortune.com/best-companies/google/ Google: #1 on 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017 | Fortune
Best place to work if you fit the culture. Toxic environment if you don't.
This page isn’t working
fortune.com redirected you too many times.
Try clearing your cookies.
"No results found"
This year is 2018, and Salesforce is #1. I don't see Google.
The fact that Google has not addressed this is a more damning condemnation of their culture than anything else.
I also believe all the google employees that physically threatened damore should receive jail time, and those that verbally did so to get the can.
People don't just get fired for not doing their jobs. If I bully a co-worker or start stating at work that I think someone is less capable for any reason linked to their biology, religion, sexuality or age I will be putting my job at risk. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's worked in a professional environment for any amount of time (or heck, even a fresh graduate who bothered to read the company handbook!).
That's an extremely strong claim that does not match my experience and will highly depend on the company, which country in Europe, etc. For instance I've seen explicitly sexist things happening in French companies, and have had many more related to me by friends and family. My mother works for a large European oil company, and has witnessed execs telling women in meetings to shut up and go back to being secretaries. None of these examples resulted in firing.
And honestly, while Europe is indeed socialist in many ways policy wise, in many places it is far from as progressive as the coastal US. I'd much rather be LGBTQ in San Francisco or New York than Paris or Barcelona. Hell, I have several European female coworkers who have explicitly told me that they do not intend on ever working there ever again because the culture is significantly more sexist than SF/LA/Seattle/NYC.
But again, Europe is big. Paris or Madrid are much more hostile than Berlin or Stockholm in these ways.
He didn't really say women were less capable, though (biologically or otherwise).
He said that there are differences not related to capability, and that the current environment in tech is such that the work environment is more acceptable to people on the "male" side of those differences, which makes capable women less likely to go into or stay in tech. To increase diversity he suggested that we need to make the tech environment more friendly to women.
For example, he said that men on average are more competitive, and women more cooperative, and that women tend to value work-life balance more then men, and men tend to value status more. There's a fair bit of scientific literature supporting those claims. (To what extent these differences are biological rather than learned is less clear--but does it actually matter?)
Currently tech tends to favor competitive status seekers who will make their career the focus of their life (especially for management and leadership positions). Cooperative people who want a good work-life balance get left behind. He suggested Google move toward more pair programming and other cooperative ways of doing things, and make it so that it is easier for employees to balance their outside life with work. That should get more women coming into tech and increase the retention rate.
It is worth reading the actual memo if you have not. A very large amount of the discussion of it has been based on what people imagined it said, not what it actually said.
Did you read the memo?
>>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.
He's saying that going full steam ahead trying anything and everything to get to 50/50 may be impossible without lowering the bar for women which is bad for everyone.
Even so, Damore did not specifically say that about "non-coworker women", he said it about women.
A) For every woman in the general population who is qualified and wants to work at Google, there are two men (for whatever reasons)
B) the observed ratio at Google is two men per woman
Then, together, A and B are consistent with a belief that the women that currently work at Google are just as qualified and interested as the men.
Someone ELSE then disseminated it more widely (Internally and externally).
[1] I cannot find any citations on this right now though, google-fu appears to be failing me.
“People should get fired for not doing their jobs”
When you’re hired to write code all day and instead are writing a long sexist rambling memo at work during work hours and posting it to a work forum, you’re not doing your job.
Even if the employer could show that the manifesto caused a toxic work environment (hard), and that that was also Demore's intent (even harder), the employer would also need to show that they had tried to resolve the situation with other means. For example, by asking Demore not to publish similar manifestos in the future. Had he then refused to comply, their case would have been stronger.
Not even the examples I gave -- a cock not able to boil eggs, a train conductor always oversleeping or an active member of a Nazi party -- are completely clear cut in all countries. And Damore's manifesto is very, very far from it.
The exact steps, the time taken and the phrasing of the arguments would have been different, but the substance (he got fired for the memo) would have been the same.
"Similarly, ‘conduct of the employee’ means that dismissals based on sickness absence, underperformance, etc, will usually be considered reasonably justified. In most cases, however, it will be a requirement that one or more written warnings have been given before the dismissal to allow the employee to remedy the situation and thus avoid dismissal."
Google didn't issue one or more written warnings. The dismissal would therefore have been judged unjustified.
Moreover, what Damore got fired for would be very likely qualified as a gross misconduct here. He was advocating stuff that would go straight against the anti-discrimination laws which are standard Europa-wide. It could be perhaps qualified even as incitement to hate or discrimination against certain groups of population which is actually a crime - typically used to prosecute racism, antisemitism, hate speech against LGBT groups, etc. but not only.
Hate speech laws are MUCH stricter in Europe than in the US, lots of the stuff that is fair game in the US is routinely prosecuted here. And committing a crime (you don't even need to be convicted yet, being indicted is often sufficient) is a valid reason for termination pretty much anywhere in Europe.
"Employment at will does not exist in France. So, you may only dismiss an employee for specific reasons. The specific reasons must be recognized by French Law or French case law.
Employment at will does not exist in France. So, you may only dismiss an employee for specific reasons. The specific reasons must be recognized by French Law or French case law.
If the dismissal is challenged by an employee, the company will have to prove that dismissal was based on "genuine and substantive grounds".
Also, employers need to be careful about applicable dismissal procedures."
See also the sections POSSIBLE GROUNDS FOR DISMISSAL and DISMISSAL BASED ON PERSONAL REASONS. Of course, it is still possible for companies to get rid of unwanted employees, they just have to be smart about it. Common methods include assigning only menial tasks to employees or setting up inconvenient work schedules so that they leave voluntarily. Or reorganizing departments so that they become redundant. But outright firing people for no justification is not possible.
Committing, or being indicted of, committing crime is generally not enough for terminating an employee either. For example, speeding is a crime but not grounds for dismissal.
Given how significantly many people have misunderstood Damore's claims, this seems to open up a hole for companies to mischaracterize someone as a racist/sexist/etc and then fire them over it.
Like, sure, a manager could wake up and just fire you because they were grumpy. But if it is discovered that there was internal communications about their political opinions leading up to it, then there would be a case.
If the NRLA believes only parts of Damore's memo were working towards improving working conditions and other parts were working to discriminate against women, which part is which.
To someone that agrees with Damore, it looks like everyone mischaracterized his effort to improve working conditions as sexism. Then Google was able to use that as cover to fire him for protected organizing.
But, I haven't read exactly what the NRLA found to be discriminatory. This would help anyone that is legitimately trying to improve working conditions and trying not to promote discrimination.
No, it doesn't.
Because the interpretation of the firing company doesn't determine the legality. Whether, on the evidence, a firing is solely due to actually legally unprotected statements (not statements that the employer chooses to misconstrue as unprotected) is.
People really did exaggerate how bad the memo really was. That said, it definitely has portions that brought up stereotypes without citing direct evidence, like how men have a higher drive to achieve status. Google considered these statements "discriminatory," which sounded reasonable enough to the NLRB. It doesn't matter whether these statements were actually discriminatory because they clearly fall outside the bounds of protected speech.
Do you know of any?
>And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using language, no more. There were no considerations of findings in neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, observations of behavior of people or animals in real situations – none of this was used at the research stage leading to the development of the Big Five. In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/
The big five can still be used for self-reported correlational analysis, but Damore used it in an argument against social constructs, when the method itself can be heavily biased by the social constructs he's arguing against.
Though it is probably true that the lawyers in the case didn't read the citations. It wasn't their job to determine whether Damore's statements were scientifically accurate, and they stated that his statements were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, regardless of the scientific references and analysis.
Are all of these issues in academia settled which you refer to? Or is it that, maybe, Damore accepted side Bs views, whereas you accept side As views, but this isn't settle in academia?
Could you point out, perhaps, the most offensive, non-supported statement that Damore had in his memo?
https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
Every time the memo is brought up I see this same shit, and feel someone needs to call it out. I don’t care what side you are on; how we are going about this conversation is clearly not working. I wish I had a solution for this. I don’t. But understanding that there is a problem may be a good first step.
We must be better than this
You are ready to assign equal blame, when there are unequal incentives.
This Advice Memo establishes the precedent that discussing biological differences between men and women constitutes sexual harassment, even if those differences are supported by scientific research.