Google fires diversity critic

[Saucexorzski]

Right and Left.

I do think the right is, currently, more in the "wrong" on many issues. But the left also has their stupid ideas that they try to get across into society. The biggest "dumb" idea is that ideology has no bearing on how a person perceives the world, or acts in society.

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I hope you are joking. :P

I wish I was, since his stuff is great.

[Dextroden]

I hope you are joking. :P

Seriously. Just go back and watch Blazing Saddles. Imagine how fast it would be shut off.

[Deleted]

I do think the right is, currently, more in the "wrong" on many issues. But the left also has their stupid ideas that they try to get across into society. The biggest "dumb" idea is that ideology has no bearing on how a person perceives the world, or acts in society.

I think there is no left in america currently. There is just center and right. People seem to forget that views arent binary.

[Dextroden]

I think there is no left in america currently. There is just center and right. People seem to forget that views arent binary.

I've got a bridge to sell you if you actually believe what you typed.

[Tennis]

I get attacked when I saw men and women are different yet all of a sudden we have so many defending this guy. Strange.

Also, he obviously should have known that this is where the tech industry is heading. Very suspect how he is now being featured on alt right shows.

[McTroll]

I get attacked when I saw men and women are different yet all of a sudden we have so many defending this guy. Strange.

Also, he obviously should have known that this is where the tech industry is heading. Very suspect how he is now being featured on alt right shows.

Sense is strange to the senseless.

[Dextroden]

I read Catcher in the Rye in High School, an interesting book... And I did watch Blazing Saddles maybe a year ago... still thought it was funny... but I just like Mel Brooks movies in general. Spaceballs, and "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" are probably my two favorites.

Spaceballs is a wonderful movie. But Mel Brooks also has a sense of humor that modern people concerned about offending people wouldn't care for.

[Deleted]

I dont know anyone who is offended about Mel Brooks movies.

[turboether]

I find your take on the situation somewhat ironic, given that you're lobbing accusations of [people who disagree with you] being misinformed. Speaking as an actual Google employee, I can unofficially -- but wholeheartedly -- reject the notion that public opinion is what drove the outcome here.

A few other points:

1. The doc was much less than a month old when it leaked
2. The internal ire far preceded and exceeded the public ire
3. No engineer is good enough that they should remain employed unconditionally
4. Level 5 (AKA "senior") SWEs are the average here. A well-performing L5 SWE who makes bad non-engineering decisions is gonna get canned
5. It is the general consensus that much of the doc's conclusions are ill-formed and unfounded

A lot of the contents of the doc, even if disagreeable to some, are perfectly fine and in no way would constitute a violation of the code of conduct; other parts crossed the line, and that's really the beginning and the end of the issue.

I would like to believe Google took his memo very seriously in the month before it was leaked (rewatching some interviews I was admittedly off-base when I said a few), but forgive me for being sceptical. It is certainly possible Google's internal feedback systems are inefficient and their Diversity and Governance division sits on its hands and twiddles its thumbs about these serious line-crossing allegations that quotas are discriminatory and the culture climate being hostile to different opinions are willing to sit on a document for about a month and then almost instantly act only when it is circulated outside of the system.

Perhaps I was not clear what I meant when I said 'public.' The dissent within the company is a given, in fact the loudest did so publicly on twitter, after the memo made public circulation where it was presented piecemeal and purposely obfuscated by the media, which is what I meant by misinformed. You can see in this thread all the knee-jerk responses from people who clearly did not read the memo, I will not insult your intelligence and imply you are not aware this kind of response is harmful to discussion and gives a company very little room for compromise. If the memo remained internal, he may have still been eventually fired (Google apparently works very slowly when it comes to dealing with scary line-crossing attitudes), but I very much doubt it would have happened in such a public manner and that their hand was forced due to the outrage outside the usual disciplinary systems that Google invariably have. 'Someone said something contentious, it went public, they lost their job almost immediately' has happened so many times in recent history that such a similar case being too much different seems far less plausible.

Point 3 and 4 I have no reason to challenge. This is just business.

As for point 5, we will just have to agree to disagree. Nature vs nurture is a complex issue, but I will say selectively hand-waving biological, psychological and genetic sciences off-hand does not inspire much confidence in me, and to dare to be tongue-in-cheek, the general consensus within Google accounts for little.

[Molis]

Spaceballs is a wonderful movie. But Mel Brooks also has a sense of humor that modern people concerned about offending people wouldn't care for.

How many assholes we got on this forum, anyhow?

[Deleted]

Saying that Mel Brooks is racist would be as if you would pretend Sledge Hammer is pro NRA.

[Afrospinach]

How many assholes we got on this forum, anyhow?

Some guy once told me something about opinions and assholes, so I am going to have to say: a lot

[jibberbox85]

Wait a minute, you are ACTUALLY thinking that TWO charts, unsourced ones moreover, are ''proofs'' ? (What you seems to call ''quotes'' include maybe 2-3 genuine references and, I'm not joking, a Wikipedia article, a blog post, articles from newspapers and so forth)

One thing is for sure is that his memo if far more thoughtful, and well placed than your rant on his sources.

[Mafic]

People don't respond well when truth is presented. Historians will look back at these times as very strange indeed.

[jibberbox85]

Of the few female software engineers I've know all of them are very capable. Now there isn't as many, but that has more to do with the mentality of women in the science fields then them being bad engineers.

The study was more in lines with a population group method, and not the individual. Also, you mentioned the keywords yourself, by saying "Of the few females"


I posted this back in the thread, but take a look at how auto-insurance companies look at population study themselves.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



"Gender is one of many factors your insurer takes into account when calculating your premium. But why is it a factor? In addition to the fact that women tend to drive less than men, accident and DUI statistics consistently reflect that male drivers, on the whole, take more driving risks than their female counterparts. And insurance companies price policies, in part, by predicting risk.

There are 3 main categories that suggest women are safer drivers than men: accidents, speeding, and DUI convictions."



However, they also make this statement showing how individualism can also be a factor

men, take heart: gender isn’t a primary rating factor
If you're a guy, all this really means is that a female clone of yourself would likely pay less for auto insurance. Your personal driving record and claims history play a much bigger role, which means a safe-driving gentleman can expect to pay less than an accident-prone gentlewoman.



Edit Source link for what I posted

https://www.esurance.com/info/car/wh...-car-insurance



Just like the auto insurance company stated that men in general (Due to population) tend to have a bad driving history compared to women overall, however, there are still those individual men that will have a better record.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, these are quotes from some notable Women around the country with their thoughts on the memo



Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to City Journal, told The Daily Signal in an email that conclusions reached by the fired Google employee, James Damore, were fair.

“Google’s intolerance for scientific research bodes poorly for America’s long-term competitiveness,” Mac Donald said, adding:

Damore’s memo was a reasoned, careful analysis of the emerging knowledge of gender differences, as well as a thoughtful call for a reassessment of Google’s monolithic political culture. And yet like Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers, he has lost his job because he dared to challenge the dominant narrative about absolute gender equality in every cognitive competence and emotional orientation.





Carrie Lukas, president of the Independent Women’s Forum, said in a statement sent to The Daily Signal that Google was wrong to fire Damore.

“This is another sad example of how afraid too many people—and companies, organizations, and even colleges—have become of actual discussion of ideas,” Lukas said. “This employee offered a thoughtful and entirely defensible perspective on a topic that needs honest debate, and was sadly punished for it.”




Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where she studies the politics of gender and feminism, told The Daily Signal in an email that Damore’s firing is political:

Google has excommunicated James Damore for crimes against the Pink Police State. Damore’s memo was awkward—but civil and mostly reasonable. Women who disagreed were free to shoot back a reply—or better yet, challenge him to a code-off. Instead, moral panic ensued.



Damore, 28, had worked for Google since 2013 after receiving his doctorate in systems biology from Harvard.

In his memo, Damore said fewer women than men may work in technology because of different interests:

Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men, also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing. These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing.




Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview that she expects Damore’s case to go to court.



“I am surprised that Google fired him … because I believe it is illegal,” Nance said, adding:

The Supreme Court under Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois in 1990 specifically said that viewpoint discrimination is illegal for employment purposes. And the other thing is I don’t think they are doing women any favors.




There's some more , but will let you guys check out the rest


Source link

http://dailysignal.com/2017/08/08/fe...r-differences/

[Celista]

You can safely assume that anyone saying he thinks women are lesser read a tweet from someone else who didn't read the paper at this point.

Again, I can only assume you didn't read it, but only what the media's spin on it was. I think if you read it you'd probably agree with 80% of it.

I read it. I have addressed his points in several posts in this thread. He makes some lip service about being a progressive liberal, then talks about "left" and "right" politics, which is unrelated to organizational culture--anyone who took a basic organizational behavior class would know this. This is a very important point as it sets up the rest of the memo as something to be filtered through a political lens. This is very stupid for a lot of reasons, most notably because politics are very polarizing at the moment. Especially if he is correct and Google hires a lot of political liberals (again, political culture does not translate to organizational culture. Got to hammer that in). Might as well walk into a group of fundamentalist Christians and spit on a bible.

He then transitions into a discussion of the gender gap, which again is not an issue that should be considered "left" or "right". There's not even a cursory discussion of bias as it may relate to the gap. There are several studies that indicate that the gap can not be wholly explained away by non-bias reasons so already at this point in the document he's implied two things: 1. He says he leans left but the tone of the documents says he actually lean right, which most liberals immediately pick up on (and right-wing readers dismiss as it assimilates into their worldview), and 2. he thinks that there is no bias in hiring.

At this point he goes into a "discussion" where he makes a bunch of claims about the differences between men and women as fact. Again, if you're on the right you think nothing of this because the right takes these differences as true, most conservatives think men and women are in fact very different and most of these differences are due to biology. This is very antagonistic to liberal POV, many of whom feel that biological differences are relatively minor and most differences exist due to gender socialization which begins at an early age ("girls are told to like the color pink because it's girly" etc). This is in fact a very inflammatory position to take. The author admits as much further in the memo.

Then the memo makes some breadcrumb arguments about how many differences may be small between the genders, talks about ways Google is addressing the issue, and then devolves into the typical "diversity programs are harmful" diatribe. At this point in the article it is important to point out he posts NO academic sources here and argues from a purely emotional standpoint. It is clear that this is the real reason why he wrote this article. By the way, I actually completed an I/O psychology master's thesis on diversity programs, and had to write a whole literature review on whether or not diversity programs benefited organizations as a whole. The literature is almost overwhelming as to the actual benefit it provides for organizations, whether as it relates to creativity and innovation in the workplace or from a purely financial perspective. There are some drawbacks to diversity (example: higher chance of interpersonal conflict among some teams, but not all of them, and tends to dissipate after group cohesion is formed), but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. If you are interested in actual reading on this topic you can read this article, this article and this article.

The memo is not some stroke of genius. He starts off by saying "Here, guys! I'm just like you!" then devolves into the typical "diversity programs are discriminatory to white males" and "you guys need to be nicer to us conservative white guys" that basically every schlub on the right has been parroting for the last few years. He even manages to work in a mention of IQ differences among minorities in the memo as being a no-no topic among liberals (there is a reason for this, and it is mostly due to the fact that IQ is about 50/50 heritability and environment, the latter part of that statement being quite relevant for marginalized groups with low access to quality healthcare, nutrition, and educational opportunities). It's a "woe is me, I'm a white male being marginalized" manifesto, without even a margin of understanding as to why these diversity programs are necessary for women and minorities to break through the glass ceiling in the first place. It's mind-blowingly ignorant to ignore previous and current lack of representation of women and minorities in the workplace. 6.5% of fortune 500 CEOs are women. We have *one* male African American fortune 500 CEO. Even if the author of the memo is 100% correct, these non-bias reasons for lack of leadership representation do not NEARLY fully account for the disparity in representation that exists to this very day. There's no way that it even comes close.

In sum, you do not have a problem with the memo because you focus on the things you think liberals would like to hear/agree with, and have little understanding as to why they don't.

[sarahtasher]

The study was more in lines with a population group method, and not the individual. Also, you mentioned the keywords yourself, by saying "Of the few females"


I posted this back in the thread, but take a look at how auto-insurance companies look at population study themselves.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




"Gender is one of many factors your insurer takes into account when calculating your premium. But why is it a factor? In addition to the fact that women tend to drive less than men, accident and DUI statistics consistently reflect that male drivers, on the whole, take more driving risks than their female counterparts. And insurance companies price policies, in part, by predicting risk.

There are 3 main categories that suggest women are safer drivers than men: accidents, speeding, and DUI convictions."



However, they also make this statement showing how individualism can also be a factor

men, take heart: gender isn’t a primary rating factor
If you're a guy, all this really means is that a female clone of yourself would likely pay less for auto insurance. Your personal driving record and claims history play a much bigger role, which means a safe-driving gentleman can expect to pay less than an accident-prone gentlewoman.



Edit Source link for what I posted

https://www.esurance.com/info/car/wh...-car-insurance



Just like the auto insurance company stated that men in general (Due to population) tend to have a bad driving history compared to women overall, however, there are still those individual men that will have a better record.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, these are quotes from some notable Women around the country with their thoughts on the memo



Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to City Journal, told The Daily Signal in an email that conclusions reached by the fired Google employee, James Damore, were fair.

“Google’s intolerance for scientific research bodes poorly for America’s long-term competitiveness,” Mac Donald said, adding:

Damore’s memo was a reasoned, careful analysis of the emerging knowledge of gender differences, as well as a thoughtful call for a reassessment of Google’s monolithic political culture. And yet like Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers, he has lost his job because he dared to challenge the dominant narrative about absolute gender equality in every cognitive competence and emotional orientation.





Carrie Lukas, president of the Independent Women’s Forum, said in a statement sent to The Daily Signal that Google was wrong to fire Damore.

“This is another sad example of how afraid too many people—and companies, organizations, and even colleges—have become of actual discussion of ideas,” Lukas said. “This employee offered a thoughtful and entirely defensible perspective on a topic that needs honest debate, and was sadly punished for it.”




Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where she studies the politics of gender and feminism, told The Daily Signal in an email that Damore’s firing is political:

Google has excommunicated James Damore for crimes against the Pink Police State. Damore’s memo was awkward—but civil and mostly reasonable. Women who disagreed were free to shoot back a reply—or better yet, challenge him to a code-off. Instead, moral panic ensued.



Damore, 28, had worked for Google since 2013 after receiving his doctorate in systems biology from Harvard.

In his memo, Damore said fewer women than men may work in technology because of different interests:

Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men, also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing. These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing.




Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview that she expects Damore’s case to go to court.



“I am surprised that Google fired him … because I believe it is illegal,” Nance said, adding:

The Supreme Court under Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois in 1990 specifically said that viewpoint discrimination is illegal for employment purposes. And the other thing is I don’t think they are doing women any favors.




There's some more , but will let you guys check out the rest


Source link

http://dailysignal.com/2017/08/08/fe...r-differences/

Ah yes, Christina Sommers, the only ''wumin'' ever quoted and qualified as scholar by the usual suspects, because she hates ''feminism''

Then again, the usual suspects construct ''feminist'' as ''anything that my masters tell me to hate''-mostly, any role given to women beyond ''making mah sandmiches'' 'breeding mah pure white babies'' and ''having sex with mah'' .

Alt-right agitprop hero Vox Day calls teaching girls to read feminism, since that might tell them dangerous SJW-LIBURAL-JEW lies, such that their owner can't pitch acid in their faces if they don't obey him like a dog.

[BuckSparkles]

I just find it hysterical that a bunch of people who lack a job, let alone an advanced STEM degree are attacking this man's intelligence. You can tell very few have read it, and even fewer are capable of disproving his claims. Far easier to yell "mysoginist" and pat one's self on the back.

Need to earn the virtue signalling points somehow.

[Glorious Leader]

Yet, is it how it should work? I mean, I've only read page 1, and I'm sure Endus has posted at length in here, but if I have to worry about the consequences of what I say, then I don't feel as if i have the freedom to say it. It's the symantics of the word usage that I strongly disagree with. It's interpreted as "the government gives you the freedom to say it" yet when you get fired for saying it, that's not freedom at all. I have the freedom to murder 400 people. I'm pretty sure i'll get punished for it. Oh, unless the goverment gave me the freedom/right to do it as a uniformed member of the military and I'm a Drone operator, right?

My assessment is that no, we do not have the freedom of speech here in america or really anywhere in the world.

Its really quite frustrating to see arguments like this brought forth in this fashion. Yes of course quality of choice matters. If the consequence of opening your mouth is a bullet to your skull then of course the quality of choice offered to you is so poor its safe to say you didnt really have a choice. So fucking what? Their are so many aspects of life that are subject to such poor quality of choice but nobody seems to get on that. Id love to tell my boss to fuck off but the consequence of that choice is poverty, destitution, starvation and misery. Im sure their are many many people who work jobs they hate and would love to quit but for the fact thats a poor quality of choice as well.

[Aurrora]

If I call a coworker ugly it might be true but it's still not appropriate workplace conduct.

The problem this employee encountered was that he tried to cite studies on the general public and apply them to the employees at Google. People don't like being judged by factors outside their control such as gender, race or sexual orientation. Google has a code of conduct which reflects that belief and the employee violated it.

He made no claims about people already employed at Google. The studies were based on the entire range of the female population and suggestions were made on how to change culture at Google to lead to more women hires from this population. Why would anyone suggests ways that Google can change to hire women that are already working for them?