Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

An interesting anecdote regarding gender bias and tech.<p>In the very early stage of my company, we wanted to outsource some UX work. After an exhausting review of applicants on one of the freelance sites out there, we finally settled on a Pakistani woman who had the best balance of portfolio vs cost.<p>At the initial Skype call, there was no video. And it turned out to be a guy speaking in a very high voice. We didn&#x27;t really care and just went along with it (after a call or two he dropped his octave significantly, but everything continued with the original female name). But it was curious that this enterprising individual decided that the best way to stand out from the countless other developers with similar demographics he was competing against was to pretend to be a woman.<p>I do suspect that the presumed bias that women aren&#x27;t actually as skilled and got where they are because of gender preference, while an uncomfortable bias for women, does make it so that a woman with equal skill to a male candidate is perceived as a greater rarity&#x2F;find because &quot;oh wow, this one is legit.&quot; (Not saying women are actually less likely to be legit, just saying the perception that is true can work to board in the opposite direction). I&#x27;d be extremely curious to see the classic &quot;attach picture to resume&#x2F;work sample&quot; experiment done for tech with actual hiring managers. I&#x27;d be very surprised if the work with the female photo has a lower net score than the male photo across the experimental groups.

Great perspective. As a Northern European having dealt with American company ownership I don&#x27;t think the main problem in Google&#x27;s case was political correctness but rather a general American problem with how free speech is defined in the US. Freedom in America is always about government NOT doing something, while in Europe government is defined as a protector of these freedoms. This shows up clearly with respect to stating an opinion at a US company. There is no protection of free speech on private property in the US. I first encountered this when out company got bought by an American one and they i sisted that religion and politics should not be discussed at work. It surprised them that such a demand was illegal in Norway. Private property does not trumph everything else as it often seems to do in the US.<p>While americans are free to utter quite inflamatory speech in the public, I find that American culture seems to discourage any sort of controversial topic in polite company.<p>That applies to conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Discussing religion among conservatives in the US seems taboo. While liberals are not very open to having PC opinions challenged.

IMO the best comment from there:<p>Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict.<p>Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line.<p>Of course they&#x27;ll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family.<p>But they won&#x27;t change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.<p>Yes, they&#x27;ll stop expressing their opinion in public. But they&#x27;ll express their opinion, with a vengeance, in the only place where one can do so in secrecy without fear of witch-hunting mobs: the voting booth.<p>Yes, that explains Trump.

&gt; And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out.<p>Perhaps because it&#x27;s not a necessary trade off of diversity policies per se, only a trade-off of the one specific type of diversity policy with which the author happens to be familiar.<p>For an historical example that does not feature such a trade-off:<p>1. I put up a curtain between the judges and the musician auditioning for the orchestra.<p>2. I hire whoever the judges say sounded the best.<p>3. The number of women in orchestras grows.<p>In no case where this diversity policy is used does the policy cause a less skilled player get chosen because that player was female.

This article also has a few problems<p>&gt; I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.<p>Claim bearers are burdened with proof. Otherwise I can say &#x27;I claim it is not so and if you believe otherwise you provide evidence to the contrary&#x27; and we would be a bunch of children shouting nonsense<p>&gt; I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.<p>He didn&#x27;t say that<p>&gt; The biggest problem with Damore’s memo however is that he doesn’t understand what makes a company successful. If a significant fraction of employees think that diversity is important, then it is important. No further justification is needed for this.<p>No, what makes a company successful is the positive impact it has on employees, customers, the communities it operates in and shareholders<p>&gt; Biases and unequal opportunities are real. (If you doubt that, you are a problem and should do some reading.)<p>Why assume your readers can only reach conclusions if they are dumb ? Why not point out the specific readings that you have done ?<p>&gt; And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data<p>Value judgements should also be subject to logical deductions

Disagreeing with Damore’s arguments is perfectly ok.<p>Not liking the style of his memo is perfectly ok.<p>Calling Damore young and clueless is useless ad hominem. Chances are he is smarter than you and me and the memo is actually well sourced.<p>Calling him a WHITE MAN is an essentialism that reveals the author&#x27;s bias.

Let me present a walmart associate opinion on the person that was fired.<p>Tldr - sometimes really smart people do the dumbest things. Where was his common sense?<p>For the average associate i know the overarching Question would be did he not know he could be fired?<p>&quot;I would have loved to go to college. I couldn&#x27;t afford it. Id love to have a job at Google. He probably makes over one hundred thousand dollars. All those years spent in college to get a good job and to then lose it. Didn&#x27;t he think saying something bad about your employer can get you fired? I cant go on Facebook and write sh#! about walmart and not expect to get fired or at least reprimanded. I just dont understand how people who are supposed to be so smart can be so dumb.&quot;<p>-- I am fortunate to have straddled upper and lower classes in my life. I learn new things working with adults who have never known a family member who attended college. Managers who never flew in a plane. The ground level view of living where you work to get by. The joy of life (imo, more joy with less wealth)<p>I have no outrage personally.

I do not agree with a lot of points of that diversity memo but that means that it&#x27;s a topic that needs to be discussed instead of being censored and the author fired.<p>Discussion is how people change their opinion. It&#x27;s by being free to discuss and say what you think that you can exchange ideas with other people you disagree with and maybe change your mind once you understand their view point.<p>If you close discussion, then those opinions will be more radicalized and will tend to be discussed in echo chambers where people are not afraid of being shamed by their writings.<p>As Voltaire once said[1] &quot;I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it &quot; and I think, forgetting this, is what leads to Trump and to an increase of misogyny.<p>[1] It&#x27;s actually apocryphal, he never actually wrote or said that but it does illustrate his philosophy so wouldn&#x27;t have been out of character for him.

Really great post, and I had what I thought were some great observations about the article I wanted to share. But then in the article&#x27;s comments I read this by Outer M.:<p>&quot;By the way, in science and technology, conservatism is a minority ideology (he says so himself in his letter). How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren&#x27;t apt for science and technology? That if he doesn&#x27;t feel welcome he should find a different profession? It&#x27;s ironic he complains about it even though, in a way, he understands the struggle.&quot;<p>After I read that, I went back and re-read the memo, but I swapped all gender references for politics, and vice-versa, and it was <i>awesome</i>.<p>At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and political orientation, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Gender is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean male, we should critically examine these prejudices.<p>...<p>Possible non-bias causes of the political gap in tech<p>...<p>In highly progressive environments, women are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different genders to be able to express themselves.<p>Alienating women is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because women tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers being fired in 2006 showed that there could be no rational discussion of this topic. Sad to see it unchanged in 2017.<p>Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true, 1&#x2F;3 of Googlers agree with the memo. Only 1&#x2F;3 &quot;strongly disagree&quot;, and the people who wanted him fired should be a further fraction of that 1&#x2F;3.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basicgestalt.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;06&#x2F;press-f-for-james-damore-the-only-set-of-balls-left-at-google&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basicgestalt.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;06&#x2F;press-f-for-ja...</a><p>EDIT: fixed link to alternative site.

This is an excellent discussion.<p>I especially love this comment:<p>&gt; I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.<p>Because arguably that&#x27;s where gender differences highlighted in Damore&#x27;s memo point :)<p>I&#x27;m reminded of Richard Morgan&#x27;s <i>Black Man</i> aka <i>13</i>. He argues that men basically don&#x27;t play well in groups ;)

&gt; That leaked internal memo from James Damore at Google? The one that says one shouldn’t expect employees in all professions to reflect the demographics of the whole population?<p>I don&#x27;t see how this is an unreasonable argument to make. There is a dearth of male kindergarten teachers, for instance. This doesn&#x27;t mean the school is being &quot;sexist&quot;. It might just mean that certain genders tend to be attracted to certain types of professions.

I like the discussion. I think the point about software being significantly &quot;people centric&quot; is a bit off base and betrays the authors lack of experience in the field. Working with people is certainly part of the job and in some roles maybe a large portion of the work. Being a good communicator is an important part of being a good developer, but it doesn&#x27;t make you a good developer. Being a talented and experienced programmer is the foundation on which the rest is built.

&quot;one also doesn’t solve a problem by yelling “harassment” each time someone asks to discuss whether a diversity effort is indeed effective.&quot;<p>Google simply didn&#x27;t, and neither did Google employees. The letter from CEO Sundar Pichai makes this clear:<p>&quot;many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t understand why there is so much discussion around whether or not what the fired employee said was scientifically true or not.<p>&quot;Blacks on average are more [insert negative here]&quot;<p>&quot;Jews on average are more [insert negative here]&quot;<p>&quot;Men on average are more [insert negative here]&quot;<p>How would I get away with any of the above statements in widely published memo at any big company, regardless of basis in fact?<p>It&#x27;s a PR disaster that costs the company money to manage, and it also violates Google&#x27;s code of conduct by having made a significant portion of employees feel harassed or intimidated.<p>Here is an excerpt from the Google employee code of conduct which expects:<p>&quot;each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.&quot;<p>The fired employee didn&#x27;t do that, and that&#x27;s why he was fired.<p>I suspect the reason so many people have trouble with the firing, and the responsibility stated in employee CoC is that it puts a lot of power in other people&#x27;s hands. You can no longer sit behind your screen and insist that it&#x27;s a scientific fact and therefor you are right. Respecting the CoC requires empathy, people skills, listening, perhaps sometimes even submissiveness - all things that &quot;technical people on average are bad at.&quot;

People are making way too big a deal of genetic predisposition. Yes, there are genetic predispositions, like how musical talent may run through some families, but what matters way more is how we are brought up, and how we choose to act. If someone is a musical virtuoso, they became that way not because of the talent they were born with, but because of the encouragement of their parents and environment and long hours of practice they chose to put in.<p>Young minds are impressionable, and if you tell a young person they&#x27;re probably less capable of something, they probably will be. Even as the stereotypical nerdy white male programmer I can see how people look differently at a young girl who is interested in computers. It is considered odd, if not improper. Boys never have to contend with this bias (although they have similar yet opposite biases in different fields, like child care). Inevitably this societal pressure will cause fewer girls to go into programming, and in turn fewer women to end up at google. That&#x27;s not a consequence of some genetic predisposition, it is a consequence of being brought up in a world where not everyone is treated equally.<p>How do you flip that around? You stop thinking in terms of averages and you start thinking in terms of individual opportunity. We treat every child as deserving of the same chances as any other child, and we stop trying to steer them into directions based on their birth. That requires a modal shift in thinking where gender is just not a factor anymore, for any profession or any talent.<p>The diversity memo&#x27;s failing is not the statistics it cites, it is that it furthers the notion that diversity is a set of statistics to control for. True diversity is about ignoring statistics and instead giving every single person the same chances, regardless of where they came from. I want my daughter to have the same chance of becoming a programmer as my son, and my son to have the same chance of becoming a kindergarten teacher as my daughter, and for no one to tell them either choice is odd or improper.

Quite refreshing to hear a European voice in this debate (not suggesting that she represents all Europeans -- but it definitely strikes a chord with me).<p>She&#x27;s wrong about one thing though:<p><i>Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, ... , he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own.</i><p>No, he was fired because Google is already neck-deep into being investigated by the DoL for gender pay discrimination [1] and they have a class action lawsuit coming up about the same issue [2]. He was fired for the same reason that they recently <i>hired</i> a chief diversity officer [3].<p>Believe me, at that point they would do almost anything to avoid those cases turning south (and what that would mean for the corporate public image), and giving voice to someone who has even the slightest doubt about diversity in the workplace is a big fat political No-Go.<p>James Damore made the mistake of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, that&#x27;s all.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;apr&#x2F;07&#x2F;google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;apr&#x2F;07&#x2F;google-pa...</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;aug&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-women-discrimination-class-action-lawsuit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;aug&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-wo...</a><p>[3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;google-hires-intels-former-head-of-diversity-as-vp-of-diversity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;google-hires-intels-former...</a>

I am sorry if I come across as a liberal who gets offended, but I completely support the decision of Google to fire him. In fact, I think that Google had no other choice than to fire him, and that&#x27;s mostly because the engineer shot himself in the foot.<p>Memos are not meant to express debatable personal arguments, memos are meant to express a company position. By widely spreading a personal view, the author impersonated the company in a way that the company does not endorse. As a culture manager, you just cannot let this kind of things happen.<p>Regarding the content of the &quot;manifesto&quot;, the author should have known better. Even if it was genuinely true that women&#x27;s biology explains the gender gap in technology, it is not provable - as in, there is simply no way to quantify the effect, if any. And using unprovable causes to justify a societal bias is not acceptable. The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.<p>The debate regarding whether it is good or not to intervene at company level to try and change an industry culture is a perfectly healthy debate. Widely sharing one&#x27;s view which uses unprovable arguments and that will offense some people is simply a dumb thing to do.

I agree that the left and the rights reaction over the memo has been overblown. However I am unsure whether or not you think the Googler&#x27;s opinion is novel. You state both, &quot;that Damore’s skepticism about current practices is widespread&quot; and &quot;imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own&quot;. As someone who works in the tech industry let me tell you his beliefs were not novel. Its a commonly held belief in the tech industry. I have heard countless renditions of the same argument with vary degrees of sexism.<p>I&#x27;m not sure whether or not he deserved to get fired. Sundar&#x27;s response was well written and is worth reading Damore, however childish his written seems, is not young and has worked at Google for four years. He&#x27;s by no means a junior engineer. At the very least the lack of understand of software development speaks for something.<p>&quot;And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out.&quot;<p>This is not how &quot;affirmative action&quot; works. &quot;Affirmative action&quot; states that if you have two &quot;equally&quot; qualified candidates you favor the least represented in your society or company. Thus there should be no added risk.

The main problem is that stupidity is mainstream. The guy was fired not because of what he wrote, but because the stupid people criticized google and google can&#x27;t afford to fight against the stupid people. This is a fight one can&#x27;t win alone. Google&#x27;s goal is to make money, not to make people less stupid.<p>Now regarding the firering, the lesson to learn is not that one should stop saying that the king is naked when it is. One should use anonymizer because the stupid people are still dominating the population.<p>The focus of making money of capitalizm is nurturing stupidity in the population because it makes business so simpler. (e.g. junk food consuming) Things need to change.

I&#x27;ll repeat this again here: it&#x27;s very likely he wasn&#x27;t fired for trying to have a discussion. It is more likely he was fired because he did so by propagating gender stereotypes and doubling-down on those stereotypes (his suggestions for how to improve diversity essentially were just context-specific extensions of these stereotypes), which both almost certainly reduced his credibility as a coworker to the point that he could not be effectively managed or productive when assigned to work with others. The author glides right past the point in her article when she notes his improper application of findings about averages.<p>It&#x27;s possible to have a discussion about these issues today. It&#x27;s not rational to give special preference and excessive leeway to discussion that isn&#x27;t actually fact based (and is in many ways based on nothing related to facts).

looking at the men:women (8:2) ratio in software science at my university in NL, I can perfectly understand where the inbalance in ratio in the workforce comes from. Maybe we should focus on that first? Trying to get a different ratio at the workforce in all companies will effectively mean you will have less qualified women. Assuming a CS university degree is an important qualification.

This whole episode leaves me a bit perplexed because in tech we keep missing the mark when it comes to diversity.<p>I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.<p>To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says &quot;everyone&quot;. To me it&#x27;s a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.<p>As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I&#x27;ve been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).<p>I want more women in engineering precisely because they&#x27;re not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.<p>So, I&#x27;m just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;leapit" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;leapit</a>

&gt; To begin with, even I know most of Google’s work is people-centric. It’s either serving people directly, or analyzing people-data, or imagining the people-future. If you want to spend your life with things and ideas rather than people, then go into engineering or physics, but not into software-development.<p>That&#x27;s silly. Every job involves people, at some level, otherwise you wouldn&#x27;t get paid. By this logic, a lighthouse keeping is a people-centric job, because you maintain a light that other people will look at.<p>&gt; That coding actually requires “female” skills was spelled out clearly by Yonatan Zunger, a former Google employee. But since I care more about physics than software-development, let me leave this aside.<p>I believe this is the one that points out that managers deal with people, not software (so why not just get MBAs?). I&#x27;d counter that <i>liking</i> people doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re good with them, there&#x27;s even research that introverts make better CEOs.<p>Similarly, being predisposed to like programming (or any other task) doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re naturally good at it (though putting in the hours will help a lot).

I hate to just turn a blind eye to the issue but, man, I&#x27;m glad I work at a place where only getting shit done, done right, and done on time matters. My team is about 60% men 40% women and pretty much evenly distributed across Asian, Russian, White American, and Central American races. No one cares in the least about diversity, only the project(s) matter. I feel very fortunate.

As an aside, I noticed that many of the negative or outraged comments about Damore&#x27;s memo stem from some inability to grasp the difference between the statements:<p>&quot;Men are more skilled&quot;<p>and<p>&quot;More men are skilled&quot;

In the last month I have hired 4 people in specialist technical roles. I reviewed 15 CVs. All were from men. No women applied.<p>There is clearly something filtering women out. There is something deep in the supply chain of labor (by which I mean education) which results in women being siphoned off long before they hit my company&#x27;s diversity and inclusion policies. I believe these policies are reasonably effective at tackling unconscious bias, but they are unable to affect the underlying talent pool.<p>My personal theory is that specialisms are risky (good pay if you can find employment, no pay if not), and men are more likely to take risks than women. There is research to support the latter point. Casual googling digs up this for example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;profile&#x2F;James_Byrnes2&#x2F;publication&#x2F;232541633_Gender_Differences_in_Risk_Taking_A_Meta-Analysis&#x2F;links&#x2F;00b49514c47ab0f093000000.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;profile&#x2F;James_Byrnes2&#x2F;publicati...</a>

Oh man, voices of reason sound nice. What happened to reason instead of hollow emotion? I am right, you are wrong, and you shouldn&#x27;t be listened to, because you are a nazi, and nazis are bad, and you deserve bad things happening to you.

As a black male, I guess I just comprehend that I dont have the right to spout off my opinions at work, at least not if I want to keep my job. If I start rocking BLM merch around the office, I might not have a job. Feel free to finish telling me how unfair it is that he can&#x27;t express his opinions, while we ignore the fact that he likely insulted a great deal of his colleagues while doing so. But they don&#x27;t matter, right? Whats most important is James getting his opinions across. He is free to write what he wants, and they are free to can him.

This is a thought provoking response, but I think she&#x27;s wrong to say the firing was not justified. Simple fact is that if you whip up a shitstorm of this caliber, you will not be long for your role.<p>But more importantly, if you&#x27;re going to walk the path of claiming that some of your coworkers are biologically unsuited for their roles, you&#x27;d best be sure your research and reasoning are ironclad. There&#x27;s no &quot;just starting a discussion&quot; on such a topic.

I don&#x27;t have much to add to this discussion, except that this is why I never respond to workplace surveys unless I&#x27;m required to, and even then, I say what I think upper management wants to hear.<p>If I&#x27;m unhappy or unsatisfied with something that I&#x27;m not in an immediate position to change, I&#x27;ll get a job elsewhere. I want to control if and when that happens, which means no whining or complaining, even if I&#x27;m asked to. It&#x27;s not worth the risk.

&quot;Worse, one of the biggest obstacles that minorities face is a chicken-and-egg problem that time alone doesn’t cure. People avoid professions in which there are few people like them. This is a hurdle which affirmative action can remove, fast and efficiently.&quot;<p>I think this assumption is made by most people but unfortunately simply filling slots based on socially constructed identity labels does not seem to be effective in addressing underlying inequalities.<p>For instance, we have had &quot;race&quot; based affirmative action policies for universities for decades but very limited effect in having those policies translate into balancing income and wealth gaps between socially constructed race groups. In fact those gaps have widened considerably over the past couple decades.<p>I think that people still fail to understand the extent of sub-conscious prejudice and fail to understand that the programs they are putting in place to try to solve inequalities between socially constructed identity groups are actually reinforcing the underlying causes of those inequalities instead of eliminating them.

&gt; Women indeed are, on the average, more neurotic than men. It’s not an insult, it’s a common term in psychology. Women are also, on the average, more interested in people than in things. They do, on the average, value work-life balance more, react differently to stress, compete by other rules. And so on.<p>Here&#x27;s the problem. These studies model the status quo, not the way things would be if women weren&#x27;t subjected to different historical and social pressures. I would venture that the profile distribution of women in tech is perhaps different than the population wide distribution. Imagine a world where women weren&#x27;t told they are naturally good&#x2F;bad at things, now project that forward 50 years and redo the study.<p>This is my chief problem with the memo, and the fact that he launches into IQ, the talking point of the prejudiced everywhere.

I giggled when this article said &quot;most of Google&#x27;s work is people centric&quot;. It&#x27;s data. It&#x27;s an isolated intelligent person at a computer screen. At the center is a server. On one end, a programmer, the other end, a user. People don&#x27;t enter into it.

Just because there is science and studies that indicate that women and men are &quot;X&quot;, on average, it does not mean you can immediately dismiss people&#x27;s grievances with the fact that some people are under-represented in one area or another.<p>My wife certainly does not fall under what the studies would deem a woman to be on average (nor that of which the author of the blog describes). Therefore, she would most definitely protest any notion that the reason why she is not &quot;X&quot; is due to her biology and scientific studies and take issue with anyone in the workplace trying to frame her current position as &quot;she is in that job role due to her biology.&quot;

<i>But however imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own.</i><p>Why is this surprising? People get fired in America all the time for thinking on their own. It&#x27;s also called &quot;disagreeing with the boss&quot;.

Damore&#x27;s thesis was really more around difference in personality between populations as the likely cause of differences in the same population&#x27;s distributions in STEM Fields&#x2F;Leadership. It&#x27;s about the aggregate interests of a population and not a comment on ability. The people turning it into the latter need to re-read the memo. The gender gaps in STEM&#x2F;Leadership are likely a combination of both biological and social factors but moderate centrist viewpoints are boring and don&#x27;t get you views&#x2F;clicks.

Completely right. I hope this is not banned because it is worth the read.

Casting aspersions on colleagues is not cool. There is no &#x27;science&#x27; to do this.<p>The science of studying gender and racial differences does not lend itself to &#x27;easy conclusions&#x27; and generalizations and certainly not practical application or advocacy.<p>Tomorrow a colleague could write a tome pointing to studies about male aggression and the risk of putting them in collaborative environments or about introverts unsuitability for certain roles and presume to advocate &#x27;other roles&#x27; for them. This is beyond the pale.<p>Cherry picking studies in a way they are not meant to applied in any real world scenario is a dangerous unscientific preoccupation of bigots and supremacists.<p>The fact that you are making these conclusions not as an expert in the field trying to further knowledge but in a real world application context about your fellow workers in an act of extreme prejudice and hostility and completely compromises this individual and his memo.<p>The biggest concern of this misguided memo is the level of support for this troubled individual. It appears women in the valley really have something to worry about. There exist all these men and colleagues who harbor deep doubts about their capabilities. This is alas what hostility looks like.

It&#x27;s funny that the outrage actually opens opportunities for white men to feign outrage too and stay in power. That&#x27;s why you keep seeing so much agitation in this area but not much actual change, because the smart play is to be the white male in a comfy position but distract from that by disguising yourself as a fellow freedom fighter.

Certainly much better than a lot of the outrage that&#x27;s been going on. A couple of nits:<p>&gt; I know most of Google’s work is people-centric.<p>Hmmm...is that really so? Last I checked a lot of Google&#x27;s code output and value-generation is backend-y, with very little interaction with humans. Google is also notoriously bad-mediocre at UX, though this has improved lately.<p>&gt; Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from<p>&gt; differences among demographic groups.<p>Hmm...he didn&#x27;t do this, and in fact explicitly states that doing so is not correct.<p>&gt; Damore naturally assumes the differences between<p>&gt; typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.<p>I also didn&#x27;t see that in the memo. At all. First, what he talks about is mostly <i>preferences</i>, not <i>skills</i>. Second, there is the whole &quot;you can&#x27;t draw conclusions about individuals from slight variations in populations&quot;-thing. So you can&#x27;t turn &quot;women have slightly stronger preferences, statistically, for these things&quot; into &quot;men are more skilled&quot;. Third, and maybe least intuitively, this is almost entirely about the people who don&#x27;t (yet) work at Google.<p>Finally, she brings up Northern Europe. I can relate, because I am also from Germany, and yes, the country finds, for example, having a female Chancellor simply <i>not remarkable</i>. So when people vote for or against her, it is largely (can&#x27;t speak for everyone) because of what they think about her, her party and their policies (or in her specific case, lack thereof <i>g</i>), not because she is a woman or is not a man.<p>And I also believe this applies to other jobs as well.<p>However, what Sabine misses is that this has not had the effect of gender representation in the job market equalizing. Surprisingly, it has had the <i>opposite</i> effect, as has been documented many places. And yes, I want to stress again how utterly unexpected this is.<p>And so:<p>&gt; I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal<p>&gt; opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics<p>&gt; would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation<p>&gt; gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any<p>&gt; evidence to the contrary.<p>Challenge accepted (although not for politics, that&#x27;s a different subject)!<p>If it were obstacles, countries that (as we both agree) have fewer of those obstacles such as Northern Europeans ones would see more women in technical fields. The opposite is the case.<p>And of course there is the point that the question is not &quot;why aren&#x27;t there more women in these jobs&quot;, but &quot;why are there any men that do them&quot;, because they generally suck if you want to have a life. See Jordan Peterson&#x27;s excellent take on &quot;Women in High Paying Jobs&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q</a>

See, just because STEM is less than 50% women means it&#x27;s sexist against them... Just like nursing, HR, home care, child care, social services, accounting, and a bunch of other services being less than 50% men is sexist against men! Make them equal! Begin the gender wars!<p>Don&#x27;t take my word for it though:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monster.com&#x2F;career-advice&#x2F;article&#x2F;professions-women" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monster.com&#x2F;career-advice&#x2F;article&#x2F;professions-wo...</a>

The most intolerant wins. Society is sinking. &quot;We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...</a>

It&#x27;s interesting to see the right wing interest and faith in scientific papers here, I look forward to similar enthusiasm for climate science.

Anyone else notice how bloggers and the media emphasize &#x27;white man&#x27; or &#x27;white male&#x27; to transform it into a perjorative term?

I&#x27;m trying to understand his motivations, maybe it is just naivety, but that he wanted to talk about something that was bothering him, and didn&#x27;t understand why he couldn&#x27;t (or shouldn&#x27;t) talk about it publicly seems fairly typical of a condition like aspergers, is it possible he simply has something like that?<p>Either way the witch hunt needs to cease immediately.

You know something? I have come around on my thinking on this topic.<p>There is a single central point where everyone on both sides of this debate are getting stuck and that is in the nature of the term &quot;Sexism.&quot; What helped me to better understand what people mean when they say &quot;Sexism&quot; is to replace that word with the phrase: &quot;Males Competing For Limited Resources With Females.&quot;<p>Once I made that mental shift I really was able to bridge to a place where I can sort of see what people from the Left are trying to say (but the problem is they are using a meaningless and overwrought phrase to get there and also attempting to jam insane ideas down people&#x27;s throats using Orwellian tactics along the way while holding onto delusional optimistic views about reality). <i>ahem</i><p>There are limited jobs at Google, very very high paying jobs which everyone in the entire world wants. There are people living in absolutely desperate circumstances all around America (let alone the entire globe!) who would basically kill for a job at Google. You see people lying in their own filth every day in downtown San Francisco who can&#x27;t hold a job down and pay rent. The ones who can actually afford rent (barely) are sometimes not all that much better off.<p>If you think these people are going to be nice to one another once they get inside Google and are competing for the same promotions, you are hilariously wrong.<p>I have seen myself what men in large corporations are willing to do to one another in a closed environment with few promotions and resources: We are f*cking really mean to one another. We back-stab. We lie. We undermine. I have done it myself, it was fun when I was winning and awful when it was being done to me.<p>Large corporations spend a tremendous amount of money on PR and marketing to polish their images, but inside they are filled with men acting like rats trapped in a jar with dwindling food pellets: They eat each other sometimes. Maybe 15-35% of the time, but its enough.<p>Now add in a couple women to this environment: The experiment ends badly for them unless some structures are put into place. Men can and will tend to use whatever techniques they have at their disposal to get rid of or manipulate those around them. This includes being condescending and demeaning to reduce the influence of women.<p>However, no matter what you do. No matter how much you train your workforce, when you lift the lid you are going to find the following: Men competing with women and other men for few resources and promotions.<p>The problem is that corporations are built around making employees compete with one another. Thats how promotions work! Thats how money and stock are allocated: You did better than your peers or screwed them over so they failed.<p>The biggest lie companies like Google and Facebook tell the world is that they are lovely meritocracies ruled by fairness when they aren&#x27;t. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon all share the same thing in common: People competing using whatever tools they have to get few resources.<p>All this SJW bullshit is simply an attempt to polish what is fundamentally a smiling bloodsport and always will be, its how corporations work.

Outraged about the leaked manager reactions. Will be hard to attract any talent with such middle management.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;rabble-rouser&#x2F;201707&#x2F;why-brilliant-girls-tend-favor-non-stem-careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;rabble-rouser&#x2F;201707&#x2F;wh...</a>

There&#x27;s an irony to the downvotes in this thread. People are outraged that this guy was harassed for expressing his opinion and then downvoting anyone here who expresses an opinion they don&#x27;t like.<p>Are people so afraid of having a discussion with opposing views that they shut down any conversation they don&#x27;t like with downvotes. If you disagree say why and give the person a chance to respond.

Mostly shocked that Google got caught discriminating on race&#x2F;gender grounds.

The existing legislative context, e.g: Equal Employment Opportunity, is incompatible with some of the things in this memo, particularly, stating that females do not perform well at certain roles and should not be preferred. That would not be compliant with the EEO law.

You can&#x27;t fix inequality by discriminating; discrimination is part of the problem, not the solution.<p>It&#x27;s about time we started considering other, more constructive ways of cleaning up our collective mess.

No, not at all.

An interesting article, but I was baffled by this line:<p>&#x27;The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups.&#x27;<p>From my understanding, Damore does not argue this. Instead, he argues that job skill and performances <i>in groups</i> might be deduced from differences in demographic groups. I don&#x27;t recall Damore every claiming that differences in a group make an individual less skilled.<p>I think this confusion arises from a misunderstanding of Damore&#x27;s argument flow, which goes something like this:<p>1. Women as a group tend to be interested in things other than programming, so there are fewer female programmers overall relative to their population.<p>2. Because there are fewer female programmers, there are fewer female programmers applying to google.<p>3. The distribution of skills in the population of female programmers that apply to google is identical to the distribution of skills to the male programmers that apply to Google. (This is an important assumption that we don&#x27;t have a lot of data for)<p>4. Google wishes to hire women in proportion to their representation in the general population (looots of anecdotal support for this point).<p>Conclusion: Google hires a larger percentage of their female applicant than their male applicants. Because of point 3, they will end up hiring more low skilled females than males[1].<p>You&#x27;ll notice that a lot hinges on point 3. There is some data to suggest that women self select much more when applying to a job than men do, thus it&#x27;s possible that the distribution of female engineers applying to google is either more high skilled, or the distribution is right shifted, than the distribution of skills among male engineers. If this shift was big enough, google would not require special considerations in order to hire a larger percentage of female, than male applicants. Since Google&#x27;s discriminatory hiring practices are one of the worst kept secrets in the tech industry, it&#x27;s unlikely that the skill distribution among female applicants is that skewed, though there is very likely some skew.<p>Point 1 is interesting because it suggests that the fundamental problem is not Google&#x27;s fault so it can&#x27;t be fixed by Google&#x27;s hiring or retention practices. Even if point 1 is actually &quot;Women as a group are discouraged from being programmers therefore there are fewer female programmers&quot;, it still puts the problem squarely outside Google&#x27;s hiring and retention practices.<p>[1]The actual error being made here is much more complex. Since hiring is an error prone process, a certain percentage of unsuitable candidates will be hired. Since there are so many more men hired by Google than women, even lacking any positive discrimination in favor of women, there will be far more low skilled men hired than low skilled women. What would actually happen is that the error rate for hiring low skilled candidates would be much higher for women than for men. Absent any other intervention, this could lead to a lower retention rate for female hires as managers realize that their skills are not up to par. Thus Google also introduces a plethora of retention programs designed to raise the skill level of the female engineers.<p>Note that these low skilled female hires are not low skilled because they are women, but they are low skilled because Google was less stringent while hiring them. This argument is not sufficient to say if a particular female engineered is low skilled, only that if you were to evaluate and group the skills of all the female and male developers, the female skill distribution would have a larger left tail than the male left tail. Thus for a given female engineer, they are more likely to be low skilled, despite the fact that you will almost certainly meet more low skilled male engineers.

Okay, slipping into my bomb-squad EOD suit to comment on this topic. But, seriously, the more I read about Damore, the more it seems like this was a cunning plan to get fired and then sue the roller-hockey pants off Sergey Brin and Co.<p>While much has been made of a Harvard education being no substitute for social intelligence, Damore is no slouch and really does just seem like a disgruntled employee who devised an almost surgical peace-out that would ensure he was compensated for life. This will be one interesting lawsuit.

I know people always want to discuss the merits of the memo -- whether he was right, wrong, or somewhere in between -- but I&#x27;d like to have a meta-discussion.<p>I believe the memo is irrelevant not because of its content, but rather because it&#x27;s embarrassingly reductive. In my opinion, anyone that takes it seriously validates Damore&#x27;s ultra-reductive approach to social policy -- and this is, I think, unequivocally wrong.<p>I recently wrote a blog post, <i>Confusing Math with Morality</i>[1], in which I touch on a similar subject matter. The problem with smart non-liberal-science people is that they think they are just that -- smart -- when, in fact, the emotional intelligence of STEM majors is barely average[2][3]. Now this doesn&#x27;t mean that this <i>disqualifies</i> math-y people from having opinions on social policy, but it certainly means I value their opinions much less. In the market of ideas, theirs are simply not worth a whole lot.<p>For example, you may <i>think</i> you have an educated opinion on abortion, or euthanasia, or nuclear proliferation. But the reality is that you don&#x27;t. And I&#x27;ve been called an elitist before, but until you take a few semesters on abortion[4] and read some court opinions, your views are simply not worth much of a damn.<p>And, as far as Damore is concerned, it&#x27;s a very similar scenario. He&#x27;s trying to argue for or against some kind of social policy, but he simply has no idea what he&#x27;s talking about. I doubt he&#x27;s even heard of Bakke v. UC Regents, never-mind read Betty Friedan&#x27;s Feminine Mystique. Knowing about these is <i>very</i> important in the context of gender&#x2F;race&#x2F;etc. policies. My point is only that strong, sweeping opinions and viewpoints need to be properly contextualized. There are, of course, good arguments on both sides. But Damore makes none of them -- or even if he does, it&#x27;s merely accidental to his &quot;spray and pray&quot; strategy.<p>And to be frank, I see this at work (and saw this at school) all the time. I&#x27;ve always tried to be broad in my education (both formal and otherwise) -- my grandmother was in charge of a library and I couldn&#x27;t live without books. If you talk to a programmer and ask them what&#x27;s the last book that they read, they&#x27;ll probably mention something programming-related. If you ask them what news they read, they&#x27;ll probably say slashdot. I had a co-worker recently question <i>why</i> I read fiction -- after all, we can expense any programming book we set our sights on. And don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m ragging on programming books, I even wrote one! My point is only about the type of person attracted to this type of work -- and perhaps how STEM degrees have failed us. It doesn&#x27;t seem like we are educating a generation of Isaac Newtons, but rather an army of regurgitating robots.<p>Damore is intellectually lazy in a sea of intellectual laziness. His views might be wrong or might be right, but his intellectual sloth is unforgivable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvt.name&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;10&#x2F;confusing-math-with-morality&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvt.name&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;10&#x2F;confusing-math-with-morality&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recsam.edu.my&#x2F;R&amp;D_Journals&#x2F;YEAR2008&#x2F;dec2008vol2&#x2F;emotional(132-163).pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recsam.edu.my&#x2F;R&amp;D_Journals&#x2F;YEAR2008&#x2F;dec2008vol2&#x2F;e...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;publisher-connector.core.ac.uk&#x2F;resourcesync&#x2F;data&#x2F;elsevier&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;068&#x2F;aHR0cDovL2FwaS5lbHNldmllci5jb20vY29udGVudC9hcnRpY2xlL3BpaS9zMTg3NzA0MjgxMTAxOTg4NA%3D%3D.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;publisher-connector.core.ac.uk&#x2F;resourcesync&#x2F;data&#x2F;else...</a><p>[4] You could also be self-taught, but that&#x27;s a slippery slope. Ethics is much harder than Calculus.

The problem here is that there actually is a biological disadvantage that women possess in regard to career success. That disadvantage is that on average 100% of children are born from women. Additionally on average 100% men do not bear children. Due to this statistical anomaly even if only a small percent of women; say 10% decide to have children there will be a measurable disadvantage&#x2F;bias towards the male gender in the workforce for a simple reason. A person carrying a child even on a most optimistic outlook must spend a least a tiny percent of their time dealing with the fact they are pregnant. This includes hormone levels, energy, medical issues and general physiological inconvenience. Furthermore this inconvenience lasts a minimum of 9 months and reasonably even a year. During this time of less than maximum career effort a man will never suffer such setbacks and is theoretically able to devote nearly 100% of his effort to career advancement.<p>Until we either have artificial wombs or completely change the laws dealing with childbearing to deal with the actual childbearing rather than serve an outdated form of social contract (marriage) there will never be a true resolution.

In my opinion, a lot of this rhetoric is being repeated. But the points raised by the original memo require a bit of perhaps subtle mathematics to understand.<p>This is an attempt at curating a list of relevant math and rationality articles, so that we can at least speak the same language when talking about this.<p>Start here: I personally view it as the base model of all beliefs that we can hold. It talks about some kinds of things that we can know and how much we should have confidence in what we know.<p>Bayes theorem: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arbital.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;bayes_rule_guide" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arbital.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;bayes_rule_guide</a>

Before talking about gender imbalances in computer science related jobs we should fix the imbalance in the most male centric jobs. We need more women miners, bricklayers and mechanics along with trashwomen and oil rig workers.

I find it hilarious that this guy was somehow okay with using disparate, unrelated facts to create detached conclusions to make a contrived political point, and when the obvious solution is to fire him because of his toxic, baseless beliefs that disrupt a working environment it&#x27;s suddenly about free speech? That&#x27;s delusional.<p>You out right take an unreasonable course of action, &quot;predict&quot; that there will be negative out comes from it, and cry foul when those negative outcomes come to fruition. What&#x27;s sickening is how dishonest that is, what&#x27;s disheartening is that the memo&#x27;s creator is being defended by a sizable audience in the tech community.<p>There&#x27;s a good deal of irony where the memo wanted to remove emotion from the conversation and face the &quot;true&quot; facts, yet the defenders of this guy want to cry about free speech (that isn&#x27;t being violated) and defend terribly contrived pseudo-scientific points just to be outraged to defend some principle that was never being threatened in the first place.<p>It seems to be a continuing trend that people aligning to one side of the political spectrum are <i>surprised</i> when the rest of society rebukes them, and they get unimaginably offended at the reality that people actually react to things you do and say, especially when the latter statements are completely baseless.

Interesting perspective, but:<p>&gt;I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.<p>He never said or implied that. The whole problem is people overreacting about what they read in to it.

Come on, try to make an effort. Your comment is full of straw men.

Because that huge California block of Trump supporters really changed the landscape huh?

Yet another take on the diversity memo that doesn&#x27;t mention the systemic sexism that the 50&#x2F;50 target is intended to offset. The closest she gets is saying that having more women in the field will make their presence unremarkable, which will reduce bias. But what about the institutionalized sexism that prevents so many more women from ever getting anywhere near a job at Google in the first place?