Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".
I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.
Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been written from the opposite side that have not been criticized in the same way.
And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.
I disagree. He mentioned in an interview[1] that he was looking to be proven wrong which is what led him to share it with the Skeptics group at Google, which is when the document propagated. He had actually wrote the document weeks prior but was unsatisfied with the lack of discussion on his document.
I think a large number of people in tech simply have a straight-to-the-point style of talking. They don't follow through with the HR-like "we appreciate your thoughts and comments, but going forward, we must politely decline to touch base again" style because the expectation is just to say "you're wrong and here's why." What's inviting to some people is insincere to others. What's straight-faced discussion is rude and problematic to others. It's hard reaching a middle ground, because when you try finding a middle point for a group the size of the whole tech industry about such a divisive topic, at least one person will accuse you of trying to appease (insert enemy political group here) and see it as worse than just taking a side.
It was apparently a live-document (like etherpad) and the intention was get feedback directly in-line if I understood correctly. Not an unusual way of doing things for an engineer.
As someone with a very debate-loving personality, I disagree. Saying how I'm wrong is the best way to start discussion.
Now of course, not everyone will be the same. But for those that like to debate and have discussions, then just tell me why you think I'm wrong and we can go from there. I don't need you to coddle me.
One thing I find problematic about the memo is that it conflate three issues: Google's diversity programs, Google's echo chamber, and the left/right politics.
If you want to talk about diversity programs, the other two appear to be attempts to shut down further discussion. If you want to talk about the problem of living in an echo chamber, diversity is, or ought to be, an example, not the focus. If you want to talk politics at work, don't.
I read the full memo ( https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...) and it didn't seem like that at all. Saying that discrimination exists but differences in gender representation aren't necessarily caused by discrimination didn't seem like 'you're all wrong', not do the 'suggestions' seem like something someone writing authoritatively would make. Not a female engineer so appreciate I may be missing something - what is it?
Be honest here -- do you _really_ think there's a way to present the argument that --gasp-- men and women might be different in their abilities that _wouldn't_ trigger a meltdown? I think this memo really highlights the fact that there are Some Things You Just Can't Talk About.
I don't see what's wrong with an "evidence bomb" and I've never seen the complaint that someone's position had too much evidence behind it. If Damore had no evidence, he'd be dismissed as a misogynist with no evidence. When he presents evidence, you dismiss him as an evidence bomber.
It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".
We shouldn't really take someone's degree of divergence from reality as somehow being a point in favor of their argument.
When people remove themselves so far from reality, ignoring significant mounds of evidence, nearly anything not divorced from reality is going to have the effect of an "evidence bomb."
> I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
I'm a huge proponent of the principle of charity, but I found it impossible to apply to the Google Memo. Not because I'm deeply mired in political correctness (I have a range of views people in my circle consider right-wing) but because it's so badly reasoned it makes it hard to presume good faith on the part of the writer.
Damore points to studies showing that, e.g. women are more agreeable and more people-oriented. From that, he concludes women on average are less likely to prefer programming. We can diagram this reasoning as follows (the arrow with the line through denotes a contraindicator):
Women -> (agreeable + people-oriented) -> [???] -\-> programming
As you can see, there is an unstated premise:
(agreeable + people-oriented) -\-> programming
Damore's argument thus reduces to a bit of begging the question. We assume that programming is a "masculine" profession. Thus, being agreeable and people-oriented, which are feminine traits, must be contraindicators for preferring a career as a programmer. We have no studies that show this--we just assume it.
Edith, by the way, demolishes that assumption: "For example, students and professors I met in college that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was stereotypically women’s work." That demonstrates how the "gender" of various professions is a social construct. In India, where men are over-represented in teaching, it's not considered a job for "agreeable" "people-oriented" women. It's men's work. Law was historically considered men's work (it's analytical and adversarial, and could be called "people oriented" only if you hate people). But that view has been redefined as more women enter the profession. Likewise for medicine, accounting, etc. Accounting is an archetypally "masculine" profession (locked away in a back closet crunching numbers), but today more than half of accountants are women.
The moral of the story is that if you're going to make a controversial point, it had better be a good point. Damore's memo wasn't just badly written, it was badly reasoned, and deserved the scorn heaped on it.
> Damore points to studies showing that, e.g. women are more agreeable and more people-oriented. From that, he concludes women on average are less likely to prefer programming.
"Although women have nearly attained equality with men in several formerly male-dominated fields, they remain underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We argue that one important reason for this discrepancy is that STEM careers are perceived as less likely than careers in other fields to fulfill communal goals (e.g., working with or helping other people). Such perceptions might disproportionately affect women's career decisions, because women tend to endorse communal goals more than men. As predicted, we found that STEM careers, relative to other careers, were perceived to impede communal goals. Moreover, communal-goal endorsement negatively predicted interest in STEM careers, even when controlling for past experience and self-efficacy in science and mathematics."
> Since the Communist Revolution of 1917 and during the ensuring Soviet times, the role of women in engineering and engineering education was strong with almost 60% of the engineers being women. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian women in these engineering careers has fallen to below 40% of the engineering workforce with a continuing downward trend.
I had completely forgotten about this - my own mothers' class in Moscow Aviation Institute (rocket engineers) in early 80s had more women studying than men.
The memo attempts to use references to what the author sees as well accepted science. If you have a disagreement with the science, you can disagree. However, the method the author to used construct the memo, i.e. referencing studies, is the correct method. At worst you could attempt to call it bad science mixed with ignorance.
Well said. I thought the memo was well written with poor reasoning as to causation. Though the memo said there were influences outside of biology, it spent no time exploring them.
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
You are completely right, but on the other hand if you are going to invoke "science" and you present your writing as scientific (he did), you have a higher bar. If you fail to be objective (see semi-related assertions about Marxism), or your writing obscures the point you are attempting to make, then you've failed as a writer of scientific content.
If your writing isn't good enough, then don't release a memo to your workplace of tens of thousands of smart and ideological people. Put it on a blog, write it anonymously, but expect whatever criticism you get.
It seems to be completely lost on a lot of HN people that Damore's memo was not very scientific at all for the subject matter he was tackling. It was written in a certain intellectual language that often provides a veneer of authority for those who agree with his conclusions and lack the domain knowledge to understand the nuances of why he's wrong. But a lot of these "bio-truth" type of arguments do the same thing.
Google had plenty of reason to rethink his employment, not just because of his poor judgement, but because of the fact that he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way.
All it would have taken was for him to run the essay past a couple of people with solid domain expertise, and they would have pointed out the dozens and dozens of problems with his assertions, reasoning and perspective.
As people have pointed out on HN before, there is something about computer science that leads people to believe they can out-think experts in other fields at their own game. And while reaching outside of your expertise is to be encouraged, it should come with a certain humility that is not common in our industry.
I'm glad to see that people are admitting that the memo wasn't a screed after all, and pointing out that Damore brought up some good points that are worth discussing.
But I would like to push back on the idea that it was poorly written.
Is he an expert in these fields? No.
Was his memo completely unassailable? No.
Did he anticipate every possible response? No.
But he was still quite careful about the conclusions he was trying to draw from the research, and a number of scientists from different fields have all defended the research he cites (to be fair, many criticize the research, too).
If his opponents and critics truly value dialogue, they'll show it by actually engaging in dialogue.
Your criticism is that he shouldn't have released a poorly-written memo to an enormous company. I would agree, however, I don't think that's what happened. I thought he brought it up in the internal Google Skeptics group, and then it got leaked and went viral. I doubt he wanted such an enormous audience for this draft, but I'm open to hearing statements to the contrary.
That wired article was excellent. And it proves one thing to my mind. Regardless of everything else, Damore's memo has lead me to vastly expand my knowledge of the debates in this domain, through just being a curious observer watching it all unfold. It's been wonderful, if extremely provocative, in generating proper debate on the subject, focussed on all possible angles, from writing style, to science, to hiring policies.
Amidst all this, Google firing him is the biggest shame.
One interesting point that hasn't attracted much attention is that the author self-identifies as being on the autism spectrum [1]. If this fact were better-known, would accessibility advocates defend his memo — and possibly even attack its detractors for not being sensitive to his neurological differences?
He uses high neuroticism as part of his argument against female software engineers, high neuroticism is associated with autism. So it seems that even he isn't being sensitive to his own neurological differences.
I'd actually say just the opposite - the memo seemed to be written as well and in as conciliatory manner as it could be written and the memo made good (or at least plausible) point and bad points. But the bad points were so bad that it was appropriate and necessary to fire Damore.
Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast through their entire workplace, and not have that person be creating a hostile work environment for African Americans. If that person says "I don't mean in general, I mean inferior just for this occupation, I don't mean inferior, just 'differently talented, they've got great rhythm'", it doesn't matter, if that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable. That person is done, that person should be done.
Damore never said that women were worse engineers or that biology makes them worse engineers. There was no implied inferiority.
It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.
If you look carefully at some of the comments from female Googlers after the memo was leaked, they talk about fears of being perceived as less capable based on their biology.
See the memo itself isn't only dangerous, it is what it could lead to.
The memo makes a whole case against "the Left" (capitalization from the memo) and how "leftists" are violent. That doesn't sound like "conciliatory manner" to me, especially considering he makes a blanket statement about Google "leaning left."
That's a really inflammatory and totally inappropriate analogy.
Downvoters, please cite which part of Damore's essay you think is comparable to overt racism. He explicitly said that he thinks women are capable, and should be hired.
> in as conciliatory manner as it could be written
Strongly disagree. I think emphasis is a really big deal here. Here's a key line from the memo:
> Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.
This runs right into the Jon Snow line, "everything before the word 'but' is horse____." It comes across that the author doesn't think workplace bias is as important as [other stuff], or maybe that he doesn't think it's important at all, which is understandably hurtful to tons of people. Maybe that's an uncharitable reading, but can you really write about something like this and ask your readers to be unusually charitable to you?
"Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems."
This is conciliatory to you? Implying that the opposing side is blind to the truth and such blindness is preventing them from actually solving problems? Because to me this comes across as hostile and condescending.
Unfortunately for him, he did basically say that about African-Americans.
How else am I supposed to take it when a self-identity right wing person claims the left don't believe some science related to IQ in the context of a diversity memo.
What "science" could he possibly be referring to other than the Bell Curve BS?
It's entirely possible for an argument to be correct, but too narrowly focused.
If you're saying "group X is inferior and and I can prove it mathematically", that's still wrong because those people don't have a choice about being a member of that group and still exist in society. Discriminating against them drags society down. It's a prisoners dilemma. If everybody hires fairly then the relative drag is spread across the entire economy and everyone comes out better in the end. If they try to cheat then they'll have a local advantage but in the end it only encourages everyone else to cheat and you end up in the worst case scenario with the massive drag on society as a whole.
So the only rational solution for these corporations is to pretend to be as inclusive as possible while secretly trying to cheat as much as possible, which is exactly what we see. When some dumbass publishes a paper to the entire world saying "Hey, we should openly cheat.", of course he's going to get fired.
> If that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable.
Ah, the famous, "I don't agree with it so it must be wrong" argument. I can see how the smart and well-reasoning people on HackerNews would use that. Yes...
Again, like many others you are confusing "less people from this group are qualified" with "people from this group are less qualified". The first doesn't say anything about single individuals, and doesn't suggest any discriminatory practice against the group. The second does.
Are you saying that even if it is true the message is unacceptable and you cannot say it? I think you just made the point that we cannot talk about some things.
I'm always amazed at how touchy discussions on that topic are, even more so than the Male/Female ones. I personally wouldn't bring up any studies/factual-statistics regarding it in polite conversation with a member of the relevant race being present.
There is a whole wikipedia article devoted to it with a range of information on the topic:
I am well aware of my inabilities to tackle this issue properly, so ... I don't write a big document about it and circulate it. Discretion is an issue here too. If you are not capable of addressing an issue in a productive manner, then don't, especially if it's not even related to your job. James was hired as an engineer to work on engineering stuff; he wasn't hired as a sociologist to work on diversity stuff. He made the choice to inject himself into something in an ill-advised manner when he could've instead simply not done so.
To be fair, from his perspective it appears he was trying to discuss discrimination taking place against him. I'd think long and hard before I told a woman to shut up if they were talking about the same. There's actually a reasonable argument that his document is protected speech and Google violated federal employment law by firing him.
He was like it or not thrust into it though by the choices google has made, or appeared to make. When your hiring demographics do not roughly match graduation demographics you are not being honest. There is every appearance that google is discriminating against males in their efforts to search out women. This might be best for google overall, but he is a male which means it is not in his personal favor.
It's not the quality, it's the intent. He went for an adversarial debate, not a discussion.
The memo reads as him knowingly and intentionally starting a fight. My assumption, from reading the memo, was that he was expressing an opinion he knew to be controversial, knew would upset people, but wanted to make a point of proving he was right anyway in the face of those upset people. It reads a lot like the vaguely provocative way people write about such things on twitter/reddit/here.
In a work environment, that approach can and will get you fired. It should cause you career problems even if you do it for mundane things like type theory, or memory management, or distributed systems. Do it on something controversial and cause a huge problem for the company, and of course they are going to fire you. Especially since in this context adversarial = hostile work environment.
Why is a debate worse than a discussion? We strive for debate on all other topics? If you actually want to challenge assumptions you must debate and evaluate the merits of someone else's argument. A discussion would just be you think x and I think y. A debate puts warrants behind the claims in those beliefs.
I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence. She marveled at the media response, saying she found nothing provocative or adversarial about the memo.
The memo suffered from a lack of 2nd order thinking. If Google really is using its diversity programs to "lower the bar", that's what should have been proven and addressed, whether men and women have innate differences in talent for certain occupations is irrelevant. It's Google's perogative/obligation to find and retain the best talent. I suspect that's what the purpose of their diversity programs are for. If they're not, and they are truly attempting to "lower the bar" for ideological reasons, then by all means call them on it, but the labor market will punish them for you. The whole memo was an irrelevant red herring to the topic of Google's hiring practices.
I don't see the correlation between diversity programs and retaining the best talent. Not because diversity isn't important, or because it's a negative thing, but because in general diversity programs function by more closely examining/attracting a subset of a larger total population of workers. You could still of course find the best talent within those subsets, but the implication is still that you could just as easily miss the top talent that isn't in those subsets.
The purpose wasn't to prove that Google is using its diversity programs for nefarious purposes; only to raise the question that Google's diversity aims might be misguided and even potentially harmful per their stated goals. He supports his argument by pointing to studies that suggest men and women may be differently interested, in which case we shouldn't expect 50/50 distribution.
Perhaps whether or not Google's diversity programs are lowering the bar is the more important question; it's also one he likely wasn't well-positioned to tackle (it requires a lot more resources to prove/disprove bar-lowering compared to writing a memo to express a concern).
I've always assumed this was an official rule of Hacker News commentary, but now that I look for it, I don't see it explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. Yet it somehow seems to be woven into the fabric here.
The opposite is to paint your opposition as despicable as possible to show that you are righteous and just. I feel like I've been getting way too much of this from Facebook in the last couple weeks.
There is some irony there, because a common tactic for derailing complaints of sexism towards women is "maybe you're right but you said it in a way that hurts people's feelings, so we're going to ignore you. Try again next time."
I think the challenge is there is disagreement about who is the aggrieved party. Are women aggrieved because the memo made them feel unwelcome, or is Damore the aggrieved party because he was raising a grievance?
I think Damore is aggrieved because Google leadership had chances to provide more constructive criticism, missed those chances, then resorted to a draconian resolution.
Also, I don't know why aggrievement needs to be exclusive. More than one party can be aggrieved.
My main criticism of the memo has been the external discussion it provoked. Like anyone who's been following the story I obviously have my own feelings on it. But, what seems to be missing is the social context to judge if he was out of line in how he delivered his memo or simply because he delivered it at all.
I don't know how often memos of this nature circulate around google and that's important context because a lot of the discussion really seems to boil down to "How do we feel that this guy got fired". Do other employees send out memos that also contemplate diversity in tech/google with similar length and calls to action? If so, do those employees send out their messages via the same channels that this employee sent out his memo? Without understanding more about the social context the employee was operating in a lot of necessary context is missing imo.
What I understand from this situation is that he ran through a minefield and stepped on a few mines. Could someone else have run through that minefield and not stepped on any mines... probably. Is it reasonable to expect some one to be able to run through a minefield and not step on mines? No. Should we prevent people from running through the minefield...?
Is it worth it? As far as I can tell, it's a voluntary initiative by Google which is well meaning. And I question if it really "hurts" anyone. Hiring processes are never perfect but Google seems to do a good job out of anyone.
I think the most empathetic comment on the memo that I read was that it would have been to everyone's benefit if Damore had showed it to several more experienced engineers and incorporated suggestions. No matter who you are, you can use an editor.
From outside, there's no fundamental difference between a good argument and a persuasive one, even though they're ideally orthogonal. If there's an argument that seems good, and you don't understand why people don't accept it, the delivery is the simplest (or perhaps just least well understood) thing to update.
Most importantly to me, it was written directly as a response to a request for comments on the subject. People made it out to be a rant someone just threw out there, but it wasn't. It was also published a month before, and internal polls at Google found it to be non-offensive.
That doesn't stop people from whipping up mass hysteria about it.
Personally, I like how the criticisms have shifted from outrage over statements Damore never made (and contexts in which he never posted) to sharp criticisms of his "unprofessional delivery" as though a post on a discussion board needed to be better than most published academic content. I can't frankly imagine a more conciliatory delivery. Of course, we mustn't blame the folks who are cultivating faux outrage; this is clearly James' fault... /s
I agree that we need to treat James as a human being who is allowed to be flawed, but there's something to be said about why he added the biology component to his argument that wasn't necessary and simply distracted from the core argument. I would simply say that if he had cut that portion out, the conversation that is happening right now might become more productive and focused on hiring practices outside of Google.
While I do agree that sometimes these new practices fail, it has done more good for organizations implementing similar practices than bad.
Speaking as a minority engineer, I don't like the fact that I have to constantly prove myself just to have people then assume that my beyond-the-norm performance is simply middling for my ethnicity; I've had to eat a lot of crow, but I take solace in the fact that others are able to come on-board because of these moments where you take the hits.
I don't known if I'm being clear, I empathize with Edith and all about having to "overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills" and I wish there was a better way but I feel like there is some cultural requirement that we have to bear the burden for the people who come after.
> there's something to be said about why he added the biology component to his argument that wasn't necessary and simply distracted from the core argument. I would simply say that if he had cut that portion out, the conversation that is happening right now might become more productive and focused on hiring practices outside of Google.
I'm not sure I agree. First of all, the article by Scott Alexander referenced in this post makes mostly the same arguments, and the post praises its content for being better presented. I can't tell much of a difference in presentation; certainly not one that justifies praise for Alexander and crucifixion for Damore. Secondly, 99% of Damore's critics are outraged about things he never remotely said; it was only after their accusations were thoroughly debunked that they shifted their criticism to his presentation. I seriously doubt any of the outrage is sincere; it seems far more likely that Damore made a suitable target for folks projecting their insecurities or even their legitimate victim experiences.
> I’m just exhausted by having this same damn argument over and over again since I was a teenager and the amount of time and energy I keep having to spend to counter it.
This is a human being and a colleague. I really think people ought to satisfy a very, very high evidential and expressive bar before they do this to other people. I don't say this as a dictum or law, but as an ethical suggestion.
There are socially appropriate ways to start a discussion. Taking your concerns directly to a senior leader -- who can explain the other pieces that are being missed here, such as empathy for end-users -- provides a wider view of why diversity programs exist and why companies consider them critical to success.
If you want to build products exclusively for men, by all means, staff your teams with all men. But bringing a diversity of experience into all levels of a company makes that company's products and engagement experience better for everyone. This is especially true when you're talking about a consumer-focused product (like many of Google's products are).
> I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion.
And perhaps it shouldn't! It might, however, limit their ability to write at length about sensitive, culturally-deep issues at work without getting fired and having their career stained.
Similarly, perhaps one's ability to write code shouldn't disbar them from a hackathon, but if they write a bunch of hacky code for a quadcopter and it flies into the audience, well, then they're in a bit of a pickle indeed.
I strongly agree. The double-standard is remarkable though. Merely questioning the liberal position with less than a perfect rhetorical command is nearly criminal, but if you endorse a liberal position, you can be incorrect and even downright hateful toward your position, and lots of respectable (sometimes powerful) people will defend you against any criticism. I always catch a lot of flak for calling out liberal advantages (I'm a moderate liberal, for whatever that's worth), but pretending they don't exist hasn't exactly been doing wonders for the tone of our political discourse either.
Interesting is that all Google related news (in the last two weeks) got flagged/hidden ("it's the algorithm", "it's the user", blabla). And now HN had time to post their own opinion piece - this one stays.
That's false and nasty. You've made up so many groundless insinuations against us over so many years that at some point I'm just going to give up and ban you; I don't think it's reasonable to expect patience with false accusations to be infinite.
In the meantime, here are three comments that explain how moderators had nothing to do with this.
This interview is literally a criticism that says very little about his style of writing. When they talk about "how" he approached this subject, it has to do with overall tone and the medium of delivery, not the nuances of his writing style.
> If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing words that would have inspired debate rather than hostility.
That's it. He didn't talk to a single woman at Google about this manifesto before spreading it like gospel. All he had to do was talk to other people.
I have some people at work whose opinions I value highly that I occasionally run ideas and documents by before disseminating things to a wider group. It's very helpful, and has sometimes caught potential damaging misinterpretations before they were spread too widely, allowing me to reword things.
I definitely agree that if he'd simply had a few women he knew and trusted at work read it before he disseminated it widely then this all might have been avoided. If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.
Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
Advice Damore would have done well to heed when writing his essay. You should also note there are serious questions about its validity - this is not just a matter of tone or style.
So I read that, and it's not so much "serious questions about validity" as "overall weak agreement disguised as rebuttal". The main takeaway in the form of disagreement is that social science findings are mostly untrustworthy/not usable?
A common criticism by each four of the female engineers is how the memo effected them in their job and how they had to prove themselves afterward. This strongly reminds me of about a case a year ago when a kindergarten teacher was tried and charged for rape against several children. After a lot of media attention, many male teachers all over the nation reported to constantly having prove to parents and fellow female teachers that just because they are male and chosen that profession it doesn't mean that they are criminals or are higher risk employees. Not only that, but many school implemented procedures that limited what male teacher were allowed to do, furthering pushing a second class status on them. Many also received threats of violence, and since both the left, the feminist movement, and the right fanned the flame against male teachers, many just gave up and left the profession. If memory is right, one news article ended with "I just wish I could go to work and do my job, but that is no longer possible".
I would very much like to see a discussion on how to solve this kind of problem.
The feminist movement as a whole is very much against gendered norms about who should and shouldn't be a kindergarten teacher. Which feminist movements did you see fanning these particular flames?
To be fair, movements are generally made up from people self-identify as members and thus movements get judged based on what those people say.
This happened in Sweden, and in one article I recall reading the comment that "there is no need for male kindergarten teachers" from local politician from the left block which identify as feminist (current left block call themselves as a feminist government). The left block was also in power during that time which created those restriction for male teachers. One argument used to defend those restriction was that science showed that most criminals of this kind is male, and thus argued that male employees were higher risk.
It would be hard to say anything about "The feminist movement as a whole". At the time, no movement was stepping up in support of the male kindergarten teachers.
Like with all movements, there are a lot of people who join on and don't seem to really understand it. Intersectionality is catching on among feminists, but "men bad, women good" is still a way too common sentiment.
I desperately want make male childcare workers for my children. I honestly could careless about women in tech. Installing a more even view of gender on our kids will prob do a lot more good for women in tech in the long term than any amount of screaming now.
I've known of at least one child care/early education facility that employee fairly equal numbers. It's interesting how some kids (male and female) just respond better to men.
This was my first thought on the male childcare thing,too Could not make it past the first 30 minutes, felt so much empathy for Mads' situation and anger at the teacher/administrator for assuming guilt immediately. The fact that the director/writer gave us an omniscient view point with the sex acts happening in front of the child at home sort of forced one into Mads' corner right away.
I suppose this is the one point I always find myself pondering when these women in tech arguments arise, why is there no push to for women in the oil-manufacturing industry? How many women do we have working on oil rigs? It's a very well paying job with a lot of opportunity for people with less than stellar backgrounds, but trying to get their life on track. There are lots of jobs out there that are close to 100% male, and some don't even require a lot of physical strength. Where is the outcry?
This so much; after a pedophile case hit in Amsterdam, where a day care worker molested 80 kids, a lot of male daycare and elementary school workers either lost their job or quit from all the distrust. There's rules everywhere that men aren't allowed to be alone with children.
>both the left, the feminist movement, and the right fanned the flame against male teachers
I find it hard to believe that this would be generally true. Source?
Edit: obviously you're always going to have some twats doing things like that, but that's true for everything. I'm looking for evidence that it's more than average here.
I think it is a lot of crazy moms that fan the flame, just from my observation. Adn the crazy moms are fanned by the media of creepy dudes. Do you know how frequently on my mommy group will be some dude's photo show up "this guy was taking picture of my kid!!!" ....... all the other moms are like. OMG OMG OMG!! Call the police.. Then there are always a few moms go like, FOR WHAT??!! for being a dude and taking some pictures at a public place.. You know there hasn't been a child missing in this neighborhood since 1995.... Then all the other moms yell at the reasonable mom..etc etc. There is a mix, I don't think it's limited to leftist or conservative moms. If anything, I found the really really rich moms (not conservative per se, but lean that way more) to be a bit more crazy in terms of thinking the world is dangerous and if their kid scrap their knee they need to go to the ER..
I second the request. I spent several years as a K-5 teacher, I didn't perceive this dynamic at all. All US teachers are rightfully extremely wary of being alone with any child, and from what I've seen that is a concern for teachers of all genders.
I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down.
Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm.
He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I think the memo had been posted for a week or two before it was leaked. If your argument for firing Damore is that he did the company harm, you should look at the person who took an internal company document and made it public.
There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe, but that is a different argument all together with its own merits and faults depending strongly on your stance on what constitutes tolerable speech.
Lets assume that we're in an alternative universe where the document was never leaked.
The document still did harm. Just read this quote from the posted article-
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? How do I prove myself to people one way or another? The additional mental and emotional burden on me just to do my job is not negligible at all, and it’s also a pretty crappy way to start every day thinking: “Will the team/manager/VC I talk with today realize I’m qualified, or will they be making stereotypical assumptions about my abilities and therefore make it harder for me to do my job?” To me, that absolutely makes for a hostile work environment, and it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.
That quote wasn't caused by this going public in the way it did, it was caused by it being posted in the first place. There is real harm done if women who work at a company don't feel they are welcome there.
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.
From Damore's perspective, if there were no quota/diversity hiring programs at that place of employment, the woman in question would have no reason to suspect the latter. The hiring policy was the problem.
Totally different interpretations of cause and effect.
The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way.
Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together. The only exception to this rule seems to be around leftist issues, where if you disagree you are out of luck.
You would expect, for example, the Jewish people and the Islamic people at a company to work together.
The idea that toleration for one memo form a nobody employee marks an entire company as unwelcome is insane. This zero tolerance attitude is a recipe for disaster.
When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.
> ...it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.
Maybe. There's a lot of diversity within the male gender.
I know I'm an outlier at work due to my politics, my religious beliefs, and other details of my background. I sometimes wonder which of my coworkers have something against me. I know all of them don't (or at least they are professional regardless), but people from my background are absolutely in a minority and are publicly ridiculed on a regular basis, including in HN comments.
I don't care to compare my experience to being a woman engineer, but the feeling described isn't foreign to me.
The only way to not have to feel discriminated like that would be if you could control minds of all relevant people in the workplace and make absolutely sure they don't have any bad thoughts towards you. Otherwise if you're a type of person who worries about what others think about you, you'll always have a reason to feel crappy, imagining whatever negative thought may be going through other people's minds.
Way out of this is to find a way not to care so much about what others think. Or if you suspect particular person of actual discrimination, talk to them, or report them specifically if you can't do that or it doesn't work.
Solution is not to suppress discussion by firing people for discussing diversity. That just creates a truly hostile environment of fear of being fired for others. And discussion is not really suppressed anyway. Quite the opposite.
>When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
That is a result of affirmative action, not of the memo. Shooting the messenger, if you will.
So if I say "the average women is shorter than the average man", am I now liable for being fired for creating a hostile environment for my female coworkers?
That leap of logic - taking a general statement and interpreting it as a personal attack - strikes me as something I'd read in Dilbert. It strikes me as a justification for the outrage people want to feel.
But Damore didn't do anything to make women think they were hired only because of diversity initiatives. It's common knowledge that Google makes an effort to hire more women. That was already the case, and Damore merely brought attention to the negative aspects of it.
Damore advocates removing "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar", so he's actually proposing a solution to this problem. Also, he himself isn't stereotyping women as crap engineers. He says "Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women".
Quoted argument doesn't make sense. If the hiring standards are the same for women an men then you know that any women at the company is as qualified as any men at least until you get to know more about them, there is just less of them - no reason to prove anything.
If on the other hand any kind of affirmative action is in place then you would be right to assume average women is less qualified than an average man because that's what affirmative action is: lowering the bar for certain groups.
The very presence of affirmative action ("diversity efforts") should be the reason for women at the company to feel unsafe because then the prejudice against them becomes rational.
This should be obvious in my view. The place to take action is in early schooling to get more women interested in tech or give them more opportunities to get involved not in hiring more of them from already smaller job seekers pool.
I would say that women already know that affirmative action hiring practices negatively affect people's perception of the abilities of those who benefit from them. And even if they didn't know, the hostile work environment[1] would already exist in the stereotypes women overcome, so publishing the memo would only give the opportunity to fight it more effectively for women who do not realize they face discrimination.
[1] I am not certain the extent to which this stereotype exists, so I am not sure it rises to the level of making the work environment "hostile", but I see that it could be the case.
I suspect both sides of the debate are now realizing what a hostile work environment preferential-hiring and rampant PC-culture is causing. One side has to walk on egg-shells scared of what they might let slip in conversation if they don't share the prevailing opinion of the loudest among-them. While the other side is constantly forced to question their abilities because preferential hiring appears to devalue their individual abilities, experiences and achievements.
As far as I have been able to put things together as a non-Googler he went to an unrecorded "diversity summit" about a month and 1/2 ago, where, according to his statements in the Jordan Peterson interview, practices where put forward that he considered to be potentially illegal. He then wrote the document in his free time and posted it to a forum dedicated for feedback to the summit (? or more general diversity related). After engagement has been nothing to low he also posted the memo to an internal Google Group called "Skeptics" because he wanted to be proven wrong. Shortly after that the memo was leaked to the public (either without citations or the citations were then removed by the respective media), indicating that someone from this community did so.
I'd appreciate if someone could confirm/deny or add anything to this timeline.
1. He went to the summit, which wasn't recorded mostly to allow people to be open and share their private stories without fear
2. Something about that summit didn't sit right with him, so he wrote up this document and send it as feedback directly to the organizers (not openly)
3. When he got no response back (it's arguable if organizers should reply to every single feedback, but you can also argue that this was a pretty big one), he posted it to an open but not huge discussion board (skeptics) specifically made for people to argue ideas and have discussions.
4. Eventually, it caught some attention outside of the board and it blew up across the entire company
You were pretty close but just wanted to clarify a couple small points.
I have no factual information, but I know that when I write papers where I want to invite discussion, I don't make blatant statements based on a subset of the evidence I have and then expect people to dispassionately pick them apart for me.
Rather, I present my honest assessment of the strengths of the various pieces of evidence, pro and con. If I "want to be proven wrong", I certainly wouldn't present a falsely certain argument. That is not arguing in good faith.
And that's how I would argue a scientific question, not an argument about my coworkers ability.
I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.
How? Presumably tens of thousands of employees read it; how can you possibly know which needle in that haystack converted it to a different format and then sent it to a reporter? Especially if it was done over Tor or similar? How exactly do you track that? There are technologies that work that allow for anonymous means of communication.
Is there some positive net benefit of Google releasing the details of the person they fired for leaking the internal information? Companies rarely mention details about firing employees for misconduct.
I find it frustrating that this is being downvoted - this is about the most universal piece of advice to be given to anybody in any job that uses computers to communicate with each other. I literally just read this exact line in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," a book recommended to me on this forum.
Those that are downvoting, why do you disagree that this statement is not relevant to the current discussion?
Again, only if you believe a line was crossed, or whether he wrote a well-intentioned memo with the goal of supporting and increasing diversity that had some dubious conclusions based on controversial research.
He is also young and just starting his career. If this had been addressed calmly maybe he could have learned from this situation. Zero tolerance for a young man's folly instead turned him into a sympathetic figure and an alt-right star. It has reinforced the perception that the PC left is oppressive and reactionary. And worse of all he will never learn from his experience because the reaction confirmed his natural bias.
I guess there is no cutting people a break anymore in this era of shouting into the ether, virtue signaling, and political hellfire.
I agree, and I suspect the attitude of cooler heads may act in Damore's favor when all is said and done.
The number of leakers has to be quite the headache for Google's StopLeaks folks. Between people leaking Damore's memo because they were upset by it, and people talking to Breitbart because they were angry he was fired, there's been a LOT of leaks. How Google approaches handling this issue is going to be interesting, there's a lot of hurt feelings on all sides.
If you distribute material like that, it will get leaked. That should be taken foregranted. If I got that memo I probably would have leaked it to the press, too.
LinkedIn doesn't allow one to differentiate between being enrolled in a PhD program, or having completed a PhD program
The common practice when enrolled in a PhD program is to list using a future completion date, making clear that you have not yet completed the program.
Google knew he was enrolled in this program when they hired him.
> There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe.
I feel unsafe as a Man when people advocate that employers should engage in gender discrimination against Men to enforce an arbitrary ratio of Men/Women the workforce.
Do I have the right to feel safe? Do Men have the right to get Women fired because they feel unsafe and threatened by the ideas they express?
There is a double standard and institutional bias that is being perpetrated by corporations like Google. I see no attempt to address these issues in away that changes there institutional bias and affords equity to the opponents to these ideas. This is simply damage control.
> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills.
This to me is the most interesting question that hasn't been answered about the memo. There seems to still be two camps, those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. They can't both be right and I'd imagine if we could take a look at Google's hiring practices it wouldn't be too hard to tell which is which. Of course, we can't Google keeps its hiring practices, at least the ones relating to diversity very hush hush. This was actually Damore's impetus for writing the memo, he attended a diversity summit at Google where he learned about his employer's hiring practices and also observed that this summit was, unlike other meetings at Google, not recorded for later viewing. Damore's conclusion was that the hiring processes were unethical and likely illegal, although afaik he's yet to say specifically what it was that he observed. Still I don't think it's very reasonable to say that Damore has caused harm with this misrepresentation unless you can show conclusively that it is indeed a misrepresentation, and so far I haven't seen anything conclusive that shows that.
Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allowing unqualified people to be hired, but simply because he feels that the special treatment is unfair.
The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them.
How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.
The way I understood his overall point was that in a perfect world were there is not socio-economical bias and a large enough sample size, we would still not have 50/50 split in every single field.
Now, even with that being true, that doesn't mean that whatever percentage we have right now is equilibrium either, but from my understanding, he was trying to say that we should be careful pushing too much towards 50% split.
He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.
> Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.
Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind.
I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though.
1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar it still doesn't prove conclusively that's not what they're doing. Again I'd like to see a more complete accounting of what exactly it is they do. However, I'm certainly not saying that you need to provide this in order to have a legitimate argument, you don't have access to this information any more than I do.
2) This practice seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what a interviewer bias looks like. In particular it only tries to eliminate bias in the case of a minority being rejected. What would happen if we were to instead attempt to detect interviewers who were prone to bias by randomly giving rejected candidates second interviews and seeing which interviewers wound up frequently disagreeing with their peers? If the assumption that bias only effects minority candidates is true this would have much the same effect.
3) What if it wasn't a second chance but 100 chances? I.e. if you're a minority you get to interview for Google 100 times and if any of those say yes your in. White people only get 1 shot. Unless you think Google's false positive rate is 0, this would have to lower the bar wouldn't it?
The bar for all candidates at a non-Google company: Pass your first interview.
The bar for white male candidates at Google: Pass your first interview.
The bar for minority candidates at Google: Pass your first or second interview.
Of course it lowers the bar for hiring. Maybe it's justified, but it's certainly not raising it. It's not keeping it the same. Maybe it's still tougher to get hired as a minority candidate than as a white one, but that doesn't change what the policy does.
It's trading off the false positive vs. false negative rate in the hiring signal. The question is what your assumptions are about the sources of error in that signal.
If you assume that the variance consists exclusively of false negatives due to discrimination, then the extra interviewers will work as Google claims and no bars will be lowered.
If you assume that the variance consists of randomly distributed error that's the same for all interviewees, then the second interviewer is just some statistical sleight-of-hand that's, on average, equivalent to lowering the bar.
Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.
It is an attempt to get past the type of issues that Dan Luu wrote about almost three years ago[0], where he referred someone to Google as one of the most impressive engineers he ever met in any field and that person didn't get past the phone screening as "not technical enough".
That definitely sounds like something that would lower the bar. If I was playing H.O.R.S.E. with an NBA player, if I got two chances to hit a shot for every one chance that an NBA player got, I might look competitive, even though I'm not very good at basketball.
> those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do.
That part aside - why does it matter? If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group.
But why is that a problem? The whole argument behind striving for diversity is
that "A diverse team is stronger than a non-diverse one". So the argument must be that regardless of whether you recruit the strongest individual or not, you are building the strongest team.
There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that a) The strongest team is built by having the strongest individuals, or b) that the strongest candidate has a right to be recruited even though the team is not the strongest if he is.
>If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group. But why is that a problem?
Well, from the linked article, one of the women stated that "When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?"
Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds. I would absolutely not want my company to start recruiting weak candidates who resemble my general physiological description; I wouldn't even want them to announce they are considering it.
That said, you are right, there are merits to diversity. And I would rather err on the side of too much diversity than not enough. However, this is a complex problem which merits open discussion, otherwise we are bound to settle for suboptimal solutions, or worse.
Frances: ...if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement.
I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.
And then
Frances: ...I’m also disappointed that the men I know,
including most of my male colleagues, remained silent
on the topic.
Frances: ...Many powerful men in Silicon Valley have
huge bases of social media followers. By remaining
silent on this topic or tweeting support for Damore,
they are sending a message that philosophical arguments
and principles take precedence over the lived
experiences of many smart, talented female engineers
and technical founders.
So, what? Is it just impossible to stay out of the issue if my silence is sending a message that philosophical principles and whatever matter more than women in technology? What if I just want to work my 9-5, treat all my coworkers well regardless of sex or gender, and let the PC warriors duke it out in the streets away from me? Can't even stay silent without sending a message.
While I agree with much of what is said in this piece, I find this pretty demonstrative of the "damned if i do, damned if I don't" situation I'm in as a male trying to survive in this PC crucifixion culture.
what I realized is that I am older, more world wary and far more cynical about anyone looking out for me than your average young millennial.
I think the dividing line is in that cynicism. I have never felt like anyone looked out for me.
"How do I prove myself to people one way or another?"
I have stopped trying to prove myself. I do what I think is right and am very wary of external validation that is not based on engineering data. Asking how you prove yourself seems very foreign. You always risk being wrong. You always risk being cast out.
If young social activists were less strident about how society stacks the deck for all white people- even the ones who have been abused, who had a shitty childhood, who have had bad relationships, who are suffering from depression or chemical abuse or other problems, then I think we'd stop running into this very boring and predictable conflict.
Everyone is suffering on some level. Stop talking about white men like we've never experienced pain.
I do think the memo was foundationally stupid. Compassion is needed on all sides.
>"How do I prove myself to people one way or another?"
I don't think this was about generic proving-to-others. I think it's about being prejudged by others at first glance which minorities in tech get in every interaction they have. I think that it's valid to say that's a significant struggle.
I have no expertise in this field of social ethics, so I'm hesitant to critique your comment when I'm as uninformed as anyone else, but I also think that your following comment shows an ignorance of that struggle:
>I have stopped trying to prove myself. I do what I think is right and am very wary of external validation that is not based on engineering data. Asking how you prove yourself seems very foreign. You always risk being wrong. You always risk being cast out.
If I'm interpreting this correctly as "This is what I did in response to my impulse to prove myself. This is what women in tech should do about their's as well.", then I think you are not considering the fact that you have the privilege of not needing to prove yourself. When people meet you, they don't assume a baseline level of incompetence. This same strategy that you use wouldn't apply to minorities who always feel like they need to prove themselves because of what they look like.
So I think this need to prove yourself stems from a serious, real issue, and so it's wrong to downplay this issue by equating minorities' perpetual feeling of needing to prove themselves with your feelings, to conclude that the problem exists inside them, and not outside them.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your words, but if not, I'd like to hear your response, because this is something I've been thinking about lately.
> Stop talking about white men like we've never experienced pain.
What kind of discourse are you referring to? I hate that there's this notion that trying to hire talented people from underrepresented communities somehow requires oppressing white people.
> Is it just impossible to stay out of the issue[...]?
Yes, it's impossible to stay out of this issue. It's impossible to stay out of most issues. Certainly the ones that affect ourselves and our colleagues in everyday life.
You don't have a moral obligation to throw yourself into "the fight" on one side or another, but you do have a moral obligation to consider the impact of your behavior. If you were to witness a coworker being discriminated against, silence is not the same as ignorance.
To keep your head down and not get involved is going to favor one sides' agenda. If you want to do that, it's your right, but you should own that. We all have the capacity to get involved at whatever level we happen to be on. In our social circles, in our companies or in the public discourse. By interacting with those spheres, by choosing what we mention and acknowledge and consider we push on one side or the other.
It's fine to not be, "in the streets," but it's not fine to pretend these issues have nothing to do with you.
Edit: I've read some accounts suggesting people ask their parents what they were doing during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. People might have protested, they might have been appalled from afar. They might have thought it was much to do about nothing. Ten years from now, how would you explain how you felt today at a cocktail party? However you see it, I think we all have a responsibility to decide and not simply drift through society.
I would love to offer my support against misogyny and harassment in technology but I'm frankly terrified of saying the wrong thing and being vilified for it. This is such a sensitive subject that saying nothing is safer than saying anything, even words of support.
All i got from the memo, besides the echo chamber part, which google, and others managed to prove almost immediately, was that the author thinks there are biological differences between men and women, which lead to women being less interested in the field, thus being under-represented, and that google's sexist practices won't change that, only make people resent the diversity hires.
Was i reading the wrong memo? Because everybody, including the 3 interviewees, no matter if they seem calm and collected, keep attributing malice, and talking about how the author said women are less suited to being good engineers, and that women shouldn't be encouraged to get interested in STEM. Where was that stated?
> I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
She goes on to say that people will likely misapply the ideas and judge her. It seems a lot of detractors think Damore should have known better and he takes responsibility for how his ideas affect people.
Another says:
> I don’t really see how it’s useful to have a discussion of general group traits in a work setting. Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?
Again, she's not really disagreeing with Damore in this snippet. She's saying the ideas themselves are counterproductive and shouldn't be discussed.
Sure, but it's the hypocrisy of saying, "stereotyping people by group is productive sometimes (when hiring and trying to hit quotas)" but any criticism of it is unproductive, in fact, how dare you even discuss it at the workplace."
> why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women.
Well, she only has to prove it to men that she assumes are sexist or incapable of understanding population distributions. I mean, really? Let's fight sexism with sexism.
This again? The memo is out in the open for you to read.
> "Women, on average, have more:"
> - "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs"
> - "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness"
> - "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men..." (Ironically, this is a good thing for an engineer to have)
> the author said women are less suited to being good engineers... Where was that stated?
DAMORE: "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."
And I think it's important to point out here that this argument is probably wrong. It is one of the many examples where Damore cites research, but puts his own spin on it. One of the researchers Danmore cited is David P Schmitt. Here [0] David states:
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm. Moreover, men are more emotional than women in certain ways, too. Sex differences in emotion depend on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and lots of other contextual factors."
A lot of the science that Danmore cites is correct. But he goes beyond what the science says in his memo. He misinterprets it to prove his point. This is my main problem with the memo, and why someone may call it sexist.
Fact: women and men have varying distributions in abilities and traits - due to biology
Fact: women and men aren't distributed equally in tech and leadership.
And your conclusion is that anyone who presents these facts and says that maybe one causes the other means that women are "less suited" for engineering?
There is no logical basis for this. He didn't say what you are attributing to him.
As a woman I can say "women are less inclined to be engineers" is only a skip and hop away from "women are not suited to be engineers.
I would say don't even bother with the biological argument because as a woman you likely know all too well how it's mainly used. Anyway, its not really the business of a company to argue such abstract matters.
It's one thing to be teased about these things but it's another to have people in authority making an opinion on such abstract things. No matter how tame it was. Woman know they are capable of doing anything so they don't really want anything less than that entering the discussion.
So, honest question. Suppose you work at a hospital, and 70% of the nurses are women. And you're coming under fire, and a lawsuit is pending, because this indicates discrimination.
Now suppose a coworker writes a piece saying roughly "Way fewer men apply for these positions. I suspect men are less interested in being nurses, so we have fewer male nurses, but we can't lower the bar just to make it 50-50. I think it's even possible that men just biologically enjoy nursing less on average, so trying to be 50-50 isn't a reasonable goal"
A) Should this coworker be fired for expressing this idea?
B) Is this argument a skip and hop away from "men are not suited to be nurses" ?
C) Does whether or not there actually are biological factors have any bearing on questions A/B ?
So firstly - let me say that this has been one of the most level-headed responses to the memo that I have seen so far. I personally found it very constructive. Bravo to the author and the interviewees.
I did want to discuss one particular line of thought from the interview though:
I can see that there are wide swaths of people who would refuse to work with him
Two of the interviewees gave this justification for why he should have been fired, and I have seen it elsewhere as well. I disagree, though. I have worked with with people in the past with whom I have ideological differences. But it has never stopped me from at least trying to get along and work productively with that person.
We just don't know from the evidence presented thus far what James Damore is like to worth with. Maybe he's a sexist asshole who is incapable of treating women fairly (in which case he does deserve to be fired). Or maybe we can take him at face value when he says he appreciates diversity and prefers to judge people as individuals rather than as a group. We just don't know.
On the other hand, if there are employees at Google who despite having never met James Damore before are telling their managers "I can't work with him based on this thing he wrote or this idea he believes", aren't they also in the wrong here?
If you can't put aside your personal feelings based on someone elses political views to get work done, YOU are the one with the problem.
I'm sure plenty of us have worked with people who have lifestyles, beliefs, and demonstrated actions we personally deeply disagree with.
Heck, I've worked with people where we legitimately disliked each other.
Yet when I come into the office to work, we sit down together and get stuff done.
Now, my personal opinion is: leave your politics at home, don't spend company time on such things. I'm glad you think of work as a family, but it's not (regardless of the HR feel-good marketing).
However, if they are asking for commentary and feedback on diversity initiatives, and you provide it honestly, it's extraordinarily poor form to then fire you. They had the responsibility to respond to him, and address it privately. I think the more troubling problem was as others have commented: the fact that it was leaked from an internal conversation and turned into such a contentious issue for google.
So the takeaway is: you should become extremely proficient at writing memos and back them up with vast amounts of research, or be fired. But all of the above applies only if your memo expresses conservative ideas. I don't consider myself a conservative but I find all of this disturbing.
Maybe the takeaway is: you shouldn't write "memos" that generate a lot of noise and lost productivity in your work environment and affect your company's external image. If you have political points you want to make, go find a group of like-minded individuals and discuss with them first.
As far as I understand, the memo was submitted to an area of google's internal google+ that was specifically meant for controversial/contrary opinions and discussions.
It's not as if he submitted the article in an inappropriate place in an attempt to shock and offend. He spoke his mind in a place that was seemingly designated for that purpose... Yet another person leaks the memo to drum up outrage and that's somehow ok..?
I'm really disappointed in the culture of mob outrage that's been taking over the Internet in recent years...
One of Damore's concerns is that Google has already taken an internal, political stance that he is uncomfortable with. If everyone else is allowed to have a political opinion, why isn't he?
Damore isn't a conservative either by any stretch of the imagination. He's a liberal that wandered into some conservative ideas. FWIW I don't think any amount of proficient writing or research is going to yield a different response.
If Damore is a "liberal" then I defy you to find any sitting Democratic party representative who would endorse his views. The definition of the word "liberal" itself basically conflicts with his views.
Readit News
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.
And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU
Now of course, not everyone will be the same. But for those that like to debate and have discussions, then just tell me why you think I'm wrong and we can go from there. I don't need you to coddle me.
If you want to talk about diversity programs, the other two appear to be attempts to shut down further discussion. If you want to talk about the problem of living in an echo chamber, diversity is, or ought to be, an example, not the focus. If you want to talk politics at work, don't.
It doesn't seem like Damore really tried to do that. His apparent goal with the "memo" was to change the policy of his company.
So much of philosophy is really just identity politics disguised as rational inquiry.
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You put it more concisely than I have previously.
But by phrasing the memo the way he did, he covered himself legally.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear everything was run by a lawyer first.
We shouldn't really take someone's degree of divergence from reality as somehow being a point in favor of their argument.
When people remove themselves so far from reality, ignoring significant mounds of evidence, nearly anything not divorced from reality is going to have the effect of an "evidence bomb."
I'm a huge proponent of the principle of charity, but I found it impossible to apply to the Google Memo. Not because I'm deeply mired in political correctness (I have a range of views people in my circle consider right-wing) but because it's so badly reasoned it makes it hard to presume good faith on the part of the writer.
Damore points to studies showing that, e.g. women are more agreeable and more people-oriented. From that, he concludes women on average are less likely to prefer programming. We can diagram this reasoning as follows (the arrow with the line through denotes a contraindicator):
Women -> (agreeable + people-oriented) -> [???] -\-> programming
As you can see, there is an unstated premise:
(agreeable + people-oriented) -\-> programming
Damore's argument thus reduces to a bit of begging the question. We assume that programming is a "masculine" profession. Thus, being agreeable and people-oriented, which are feminine traits, must be contraindicators for preferring a career as a programmer. We have no studies that show this--we just assume it.
Edith, by the way, demolishes that assumption: "For example, students and professors I met in college that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was stereotypically women’s work." That demonstrates how the "gender" of various professions is a social construct. In India, where men are over-represented in teaching, it's not considered a job for "agreeable" "people-oriented" women. It's men's work. Law was historically considered men's work (it's analytical and adversarial, and could be called "people oriented" only if you hate people). But that view has been redefined as more women enter the profession. Likewise for medicine, accounting, etc. Accounting is an archetypally "masculine" profession (locked away in a back closet crunching numbers), but today more than half of accountants are women.
The moral of the story is that if you're going to make a controversial point, it had better be a good point. Damore's memo wasn't just badly written, it was badly reasoned, and deserved the scorn heaped on it.
That's Diekman 2010:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20631322
"Although women have nearly attained equality with men in several formerly male-dominated fields, they remain underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We argue that one important reason for this discrepancy is that STEM careers are perceived as less likely than careers in other fields to fulfill communal goals (e.g., working with or helping other people). Such perceptions might disproportionately affect women's career decisions, because women tend to endorse communal goals more than men. As predicted, we found that STEM careers, relative to other careers, were perceived to impede communal goals. Moreover, communal-goal endorsement negatively predicted interest in STEM careers, even when controlling for past experience and self-efficacy in science and mathematics."
> Since the Communist Revolution of 1917 and during the ensuring Soviet times, the role of women in engineering and engineering education was strong with almost 60% of the engineers being women. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian women in these engineering careers has fallen to below 40% of the engineering workforce with a continuing downward trend.
I had completely forgotten about this - my own mothers' class in Moscow Aviation Institute (rocket engineers) in early 80s had more women studying than men.
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You are completely right, but on the other hand if you are going to invoke "science" and you present your writing as scientific (he did), you have a higher bar. If you fail to be objective (see semi-related assertions about Marxism), or your writing obscures the point you are attempting to make, then you've failed as a writer of scientific content.
If your writing isn't good enough, then don't release a memo to your workplace of tens of thousands of smart and ideological people. Put it on a blog, write it anonymously, but expect whatever criticism you get.
Google had plenty of reason to rethink his employment, not just because of his poor judgement, but because of the fact that he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way.
All it would have taken was for him to run the essay past a couple of people with solid domain expertise, and they would have pointed out the dozens and dozens of problems with his assertions, reasoning and perspective.
As people have pointed out on HN before, there is something about computer science that leads people to believe they can out-think experts in other fields at their own game. And while reaching outside of your expertise is to be encouraged, it should come with a certain humility that is not common in our industry.
But I would like to push back on the idea that it was poorly written.
Is he an expert in these fields? No.
Was his memo completely unassailable? No.
Did he anticipate every possible response? No.
But he was still quite careful about the conclusions he was trying to draw from the research, and a number of scientists from different fields have all defended the research he cites (to be fair, many criticize the research, too).
If his opponents and critics truly value dialogue, they'll show it by actually engaging in dialogue.
Had he been fired from a research position, I would see your point.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...
https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
Amidst all this, Google firing him is the biggest shame.
"The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore"
https://www.economist.com/news/21726276-last-week-paper-said...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/JamesDamore/comments/6thcy3/im_jame...
Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast through their entire workplace, and not have that person be creating a hostile work environment for African Americans. If that person says "I don't mean in general, I mean inferior just for this occupation, I don't mean inferior, just 'differently talented, they've got great rhythm'", it doesn't matter, if that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable. That person is done, that person should be done.
It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.
If you look carefully at some of the comments from female Googlers after the memo was leaked, they talk about fears of being perceived as less capable based on their biology.
See the memo itself isn't only dangerous, it is what it could lead to.
But that isn't at all what the memo said.
Downvoters, please cite which part of Damore's essay you think is comparable to overt racism. He explicitly said that he thinks women are capable, and should be hired.
Strongly disagree. I think emphasis is a really big deal here. Here's a key line from the memo:
> Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.
This runs right into the Jon Snow line, "everything before the word 'but' is horse____." It comes across that the author doesn't think workplace bias is as important as [other stuff], or maybe that he doesn't think it's important at all, which is understandably hurtful to tons of people. Maybe that's an uncharitable reading, but can you really write about something like this and ask your readers to be unusually charitable to you?
This is conciliatory to you? Implying that the opposing side is blind to the truth and such blindness is preventing them from actually solving problems? Because to me this comes across as hostile and condescending.
How else am I supposed to take it when a self-identity right wing person claims the left don't believe some science related to IQ in the context of a diversity memo.
What "science" could he possibly be referring to other than the Bell Curve BS?
If you're saying "group X is inferior and and I can prove it mathematically", that's still wrong because those people don't have a choice about being a member of that group and still exist in society. Discriminating against them drags society down. It's a prisoners dilemma. If everybody hires fairly then the relative drag is spread across the entire economy and everyone comes out better in the end. If they try to cheat then they'll have a local advantage but in the end it only encourages everyone else to cheat and you end up in the worst case scenario with the massive drag on society as a whole.
So the only rational solution for these corporations is to pretend to be as inclusive as possible while secretly trying to cheat as much as possible, which is exactly what we see. When some dumbass publishes a paper to the entire world saying "Hey, we should openly cheat.", of course he's going to get fired.
Ah, the famous, "I don't agree with it so it must be wrong" argument. I can see how the smart and well-reasoning people on HackerNews would use that. Yes...
This sounds like willfull ignorance, no matter how true something is you aren't allowed to say it because it might hurt some feelings.
I'd prefer to acknowledge reality.
There is a whole wikipedia article devoted to it with a range of information on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
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The memo reads as him knowingly and intentionally starting a fight. My assumption, from reading the memo, was that he was expressing an opinion he knew to be controversial, knew would upset people, but wanted to make a point of proving he was right anyway in the face of those upset people. It reads a lot like the vaguely provocative way people write about such things on twitter/reddit/here.
In a work environment, that approach can and will get you fired. It should cause you career problems even if you do it for mundane things like type theory, or memory management, or distributed systems. Do it on something controversial and cause a huge problem for the company, and of course they are going to fire you. Especially since in this context adversarial = hostile work environment.
Perhaps whether or not Google's diversity programs are lowering the bar is the more important question; it's also one he likely wasn't well-positioned to tackle (it requires a lot more resources to prove/disprove bar-lowering compared to writing a memo to express a concern).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
I've always assumed this was an official rule of Hacker News commentary, but now that I look for it, I don't see it explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. Yet it somehow seems to be woven into the fabric here.
The opposite is to paint your opposition as despicable as possible to show that you are righteous and just. I feel like I've been getting way too much of this from Facebook in the last couple weeks.
I think the challenge is there is disagreement about who is the aggrieved party. Are women aggrieved because the memo made them feel unwelcome, or is Damore the aggrieved party because he was raising a grievance?
Also, I don't know why aggrievement needs to be exclusive. More than one party can be aggrieved.
I don't know how often memos of this nature circulate around google and that's important context because a lot of the discussion really seems to boil down to "How do we feel that this guy got fired". Do other employees send out memos that also contemplate diversity in tech/google with similar length and calls to action? If so, do those employees send out their messages via the same channels that this employee sent out his memo? Without understanding more about the social context the employee was operating in a lot of necessary context is missing imo.
That doesn't stop people from whipping up mass hysteria about it.
While I do agree that sometimes these new practices fail, it has done more good for organizations implementing similar practices than bad.
Speaking as a minority engineer, I don't like the fact that I have to constantly prove myself just to have people then assume that my beyond-the-norm performance is simply middling for my ethnicity; I've had to eat a lot of crow, but I take solace in the fact that others are able to come on-board because of these moments where you take the hits.
I don't known if I'm being clear, I empathize with Edith and all about having to "overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills" and I wish there was a better way but I feel like there is some cultural requirement that we have to bear the burden for the people who come after.
I'm not sure I agree. First of all, the article by Scott Alexander referenced in this post makes mostly the same arguments, and the post praises its content for being better presented. I can't tell much of a difference in presentation; certainly not one that justifies praise for Alexander and crucifixion for Damore. Secondly, 99% of Damore's critics are outraged about things he never remotely said; it was only after their accusations were thoroughly debunked that they shifted their criticism to his presentation. I seriously doubt any of the outrage is sincere; it seems far more likely that Damore made a suitable target for folks projecting their insecurities or even their legitimate victim experiences.
[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...
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This is a human being and a colleague. I really think people ought to satisfy a very, very high evidential and expressive bar before they do this to other people. I don't say this as a dictum or law, but as an ethical suggestion.
If you want to build products exclusively for men, by all means, staff your teams with all men. But bringing a diversity of experience into all levels of a company makes that company's products and engagement experience better for everyone. This is especially true when you're talking about a consumer-focused product (like many of Google's products are).
And perhaps it shouldn't! It might, however, limit their ability to write at length about sensitive, culturally-deep issues at work without getting fired and having their career stained.
Similarly, perhaps one's ability to write code shouldn't disbar them from a hackathon, but if they write a bunch of hacky code for a quadcopter and it flies into the audience, well, then they're in a bit of a pickle indeed.
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In the meantime, here are three comments that explain how moderators had nothing to do with this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15023538
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15023498
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15023486
> If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing words that would have inspired debate rather than hostility.
That's it. He didn't talk to a single woman at Google about this manifesto before spreading it like gospel. All he had to do was talk to other people.
I definitely agree that if he'd simply had a few women he knew and trusted at work read it before he disseminated it widely then this all might have been avoided. If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.
Advice Damore would have done well to heed when writing his essay. You should also note there are serious questions about its validity - this is not just a matter of tone or style.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Then why don't you summarize the article's points so people are free to give a rebuttal
I would very much like to see a discussion on how to solve this kind of problem.
This happened in Sweden, and in one article I recall reading the comment that "there is no need for male kindergarten teachers" from local politician from the left block which identify as feminist (current left block call themselves as a feminist government). The left block was also in power during that time which created those restriction for male teachers. One argument used to defend those restriction was that science showed that most criminals of this kind is male, and thus argued that male employees were higher risk.
It would be hard to say anything about "The feminist movement as a whole". At the time, no movement was stepping up in support of the male kindergarten teachers.
It really sums up this issue well and gave me lots to think about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_(2012_film)
Dangerous tho'. By the way, apropos of nothing, 95% of workplace deaths are men.
I find it hard to believe that this would be generally true. Source?
Edit: obviously you're always going to have some twats doing things like that, but that's true for everything. I'm looking for evidence that it's more than average here.
Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm.
He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I think the memo had been posted for a week or two before it was leaked. If your argument for firing Damore is that he did the company harm, you should look at the person who took an internal company document and made it public.
There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe, but that is a different argument all together with its own merits and faults depending strongly on your stance on what constitutes tolerable speech.
The document still did harm. Just read this quote from the posted article-
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? How do I prove myself to people one way or another? The additional mental and emotional burden on me just to do my job is not negligible at all, and it’s also a pretty crappy way to start every day thinking: “Will the team/manager/VC I talk with today realize I’m qualified, or will they be making stereotypical assumptions about my abilities and therefore make it harder for me to do my job?” To me, that absolutely makes for a hostile work environment, and it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.
That quote wasn't caused by this going public in the way it did, it was caused by it being posted in the first place. There is real harm done if women who work at a company don't feel they are welcome there.
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.
From Damore's perspective, if there were no quota/diversity hiring programs at that place of employment, the woman in question would have no reason to suspect the latter. The hiring policy was the problem.
Totally different interpretations of cause and effect.
Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together. The only exception to this rule seems to be around leftist issues, where if you disagree you are out of luck.
You would expect, for example, the Jewish people and the Islamic people at a company to work together.
The idea that toleration for one memo form a nobody employee marks an entire company as unwelcome is insane. This zero tolerance attitude is a recipe for disaster.
Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.
Maybe. There's a lot of diversity within the male gender.
I know I'm an outlier at work due to my politics, my religious beliefs, and other details of my background. I sometimes wonder which of my coworkers have something against me. I know all of them don't (or at least they are professional regardless), but people from my background are absolutely in a minority and are publicly ridiculed on a regular basis, including in HN comments.
I don't care to compare my experience to being a woman engineer, but the feeling described isn't foreign to me.
The only way to not have to feel discriminated like that would be if you could control minds of all relevant people in the workplace and make absolutely sure they don't have any bad thoughts towards you. Otherwise if you're a type of person who worries about what others think about you, you'll always have a reason to feel crappy, imagining whatever negative thought may be going through other people's minds.
Way out of this is to find a way not to care so much about what others think. Or if you suspect particular person of actual discrimination, talk to them, or report them specifically if you can't do that or it doesn't work.
Solution is not to suppress discussion by firing people for discussing diversity. That just creates a truly hostile environment of fear of being fired for others. And discussion is not really suppressed anyway. Quite the opposite.
That is a result of affirmative action, not of the memo. Shooting the messenger, if you will.
That leap of logic - taking a general statement and interpreting it as a personal attack - strikes me as something I'd read in Dilbert. It strikes me as a justification for the outrage people want to feel.
It's an excuse; nothing more.
If on the other hand any kind of affirmative action is in place then you would be right to assume average women is less qualified than an average man because that's what affirmative action is: lowering the bar for certain groups.
The very presence of affirmative action ("diversity efforts") should be the reason for women at the company to feel unsafe because then the prejudice against them becomes rational.
This should be obvious in my view. The place to take action is in early schooling to get more women interested in tech or give them more opportunities to get involved not in hiring more of them from already smaller job seekers pool.
[1] I am not certain the extent to which this stereotype exists, so I am not sure it rises to the level of making the work environment "hostile", but I see that it could be the case.
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How is this harm? And how is that alleged harmed Damore's fault?
Do you think she was unaware of Googles strong push for women in the workplace?
That seems unlikely.
Do you think she was previously unaware that many people might think diversity hires are less qualified?
That seems unlikely.
Did the memo guy state that diversity hires are lowering the bar? No. He went out of his way to say the opposite.
The most likely scenario is she has felt this way since she was hired and now has a specific person she can direct her anger/frustration/hurt onto.
> and it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.
This is demonstrably false. Imposter syndrome is quite common for men in tech.
I would be interested to see studies on imposter syndrome between genders and between fields.
Using that logic, should every male feel unwelcomed because of the pro-female activity at google and in corporate america?
Can't damore and every male make the same argument?
Should men feel offended that ycombinator has a "Ask a female engineer" segment but no "Ask a male engineer" segment?
I'd appreciate if someone could confirm/deny or add anything to this timeline.
1. He went to the summit, which wasn't recorded mostly to allow people to be open and share their private stories without fear
2. Something about that summit didn't sit right with him, so he wrote up this document and send it as feedback directly to the organizers (not openly)
3. When he got no response back (it's arguable if organizers should reply to every single feedback, but you can also argue that this was a pretty big one), he posted it to an open but not huge discussion board (skeptics) specifically made for people to argue ideas and have discussions.
4. Eventually, it caught some attention outside of the board and it blew up across the entire company
You were pretty close but just wanted to clarify a couple small points.
Rather, I present my honest assessment of the strengths of the various pieces of evidence, pro and con. If I "want to be proven wrong", I certainly wouldn't present a falsely certain argument. That is not arguing in good faith.
And that's how I would argue a scientific question, not an argument about my coworkers ability.
I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.
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Those that are downvoting, why do you disagree that this statement is not relevant to the current discussion?
He is also young and just starting his career. If this had been addressed calmly maybe he could have learned from this situation. Zero tolerance for a young man's folly instead turned him into a sympathetic figure and an alt-right star. It has reinforced the perception that the PC left is oppressive and reactionary. And worse of all he will never learn from his experience because the reaction confirmed his natural bias.
I guess there is no cutting people a break anymore in this era of shouting into the ether, virtue signaling, and political hellfire.
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An internal discussion board intended for controversial discussion no less!
The number of leakers has to be quite the headache for Google's StopLeaks folks. Between people leaking Damore's memo because they were upset by it, and people talking to Breitbart because they were angry he was fired, there's been a LOT of leaks. How Google approaches handling this issue is going to be interesting, there's a lot of hurt feelings on all sides.
a month ago.
> ... said he initially shared the 3,300-word memo internally a month ago.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-10/fired-goo...
It's just as likely he was fired for lying about having a PhD from Harvard.
Edit: I stand corrected, he was just enrolled in a PhD program.
LinkedIn doesn't allow one to differentiate between being enrolled in a PhD program, or having completed a PhD program
The common practice when enrolled in a PhD program is to list using a future completion date, making clear that you have not yet completed the program.
Google knew he was enrolled in this program when they hired him.
I feel unsafe as a Man when people advocate that employers should engage in gender discrimination against Men to enforce an arbitrary ratio of Men/Women the workforce.
Do I have the right to feel safe? Do Men have the right to get Women fired because they feel unsafe and threatened by the ideas they express?
There is a double standard and institutional bias that is being perpetrated by corporations like Google. I see no attempt to address these issues in away that changes there institutional bias and affords equity to the opponents to these ideas. This is simply damage control.
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This to me is the most interesting question that hasn't been answered about the memo. There seems to still be two camps, those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. They can't both be right and I'd imagine if we could take a look at Google's hiring practices it wouldn't be too hard to tell which is which. Of course, we can't Google keeps its hiring practices, at least the ones relating to diversity very hush hush. This was actually Damore's impetus for writing the memo, he attended a diversity summit at Google where he learned about his employer's hiring practices and also observed that this summit was, unlike other meetings at Google, not recorded for later viewing. Damore's conclusion was that the hiring processes were unethical and likely illegal, although afaik he's yet to say specifically what it was that he observed. Still I don't think it's very reasonable to say that Damore has caused harm with this misrepresentation unless you can show conclusively that it is indeed a misrepresentation, and so far I haven't seen anything conclusive that shows that.
How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.
Now, even with that being true, that doesn't mean that whatever percentage we have right now is equilibrium either, but from my understanding, he was trying to say that we should be careful pushing too much towards 50% split.
Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind.
I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though.
1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar it still doesn't prove conclusively that's not what they're doing. Again I'd like to see a more complete accounting of what exactly it is they do. However, I'm certainly not saying that you need to provide this in order to have a legitimate argument, you don't have access to this information any more than I do.
2) This practice seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what a interviewer bias looks like. In particular it only tries to eliminate bias in the case of a minority being rejected. What would happen if we were to instead attempt to detect interviewers who were prone to bias by randomly giving rejected candidates second interviews and seeing which interviewers wound up frequently disagreeing with their peers? If the assumption that bias only effects minority candidates is true this would have much the same effect.
3) What if it wasn't a second chance but 100 chances? I.e. if you're a minority you get to interview for Google 100 times and if any of those say yes your in. White people only get 1 shot. Unless you think Google's false positive rate is 0, this would have to lower the bar wouldn't it?
The bar for white male candidates at Google: Pass your first interview.
The bar for minority candidates at Google: Pass your first or second interview.
Of course it lowers the bar for hiring. Maybe it's justified, but it's certainly not raising it. It's not keeping it the same. Maybe it's still tougher to get hired as a minority candidate than as a white one, but that doesn't change what the policy does.
If you assume that the variance consists exclusively of false negatives due to discrimination, then the extra interviewers will work as Google claims and no bars will be lowered.
If you assume that the variance consists of randomly distributed error that's the same for all interviewees, then the second interviewer is just some statistical sleight-of-hand that's, on average, equivalent to lowering the bar.
Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.
[0] https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
That part aside - why does it matter? If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group.
But why is that a problem? The whole argument behind striving for diversity is that "A diverse team is stronger than a non-diverse one". So the argument must be that regardless of whether you recruit the strongest individual or not, you are building the strongest team.
There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that a) The strongest team is built by having the strongest individuals, or b) that the strongest candidate has a right to be recruited even though the team is not the strongest if he is.
Well, from the linked article, one of the women stated that "When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?"
Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds. I would absolutely not want my company to start recruiting weak candidates who resemble my general physiological description; I wouldn't even want them to announce they are considering it.
That said, you are right, there are merits to diversity. And I would rather err on the side of too much diversity than not enough. However, this is a complex problem which merits open discussion, otherwise we are bound to settle for suboptimal solutions, or worse.
While I agree with much of what is said in this piece, I find this pretty demonstrative of the "damned if i do, damned if I don't" situation I'm in as a male trying to survive in this PC crucifixion culture.
what I realized is that I am older, more world wary and far more cynical about anyone looking out for me than your average young millennial.
I think the dividing line is in that cynicism. I have never felt like anyone looked out for me.
"How do I prove myself to people one way or another?"
I have stopped trying to prove myself. I do what I think is right and am very wary of external validation that is not based on engineering data. Asking how you prove yourself seems very foreign. You always risk being wrong. You always risk being cast out.
If young social activists were less strident about how society stacks the deck for all white people- even the ones who have been abused, who had a shitty childhood, who have had bad relationships, who are suffering from depression or chemical abuse or other problems, then I think we'd stop running into this very boring and predictable conflict.
Everyone is suffering on some level. Stop talking about white men like we've never experienced pain.
I do think the memo was foundationally stupid. Compassion is needed on all sides.
I don't think this was about generic proving-to-others. I think it's about being prejudged by others at first glance which minorities in tech get in every interaction they have. I think that it's valid to say that's a significant struggle.
I have no expertise in this field of social ethics, so I'm hesitant to critique your comment when I'm as uninformed as anyone else, but I also think that your following comment shows an ignorance of that struggle:
>I have stopped trying to prove myself. I do what I think is right and am very wary of external validation that is not based on engineering data. Asking how you prove yourself seems very foreign. You always risk being wrong. You always risk being cast out.
If I'm interpreting this correctly as "This is what I did in response to my impulse to prove myself. This is what women in tech should do about their's as well.", then I think you are not considering the fact that you have the privilege of not needing to prove yourself. When people meet you, they don't assume a baseline level of incompetence. This same strategy that you use wouldn't apply to minorities who always feel like they need to prove themselves because of what they look like.
So I think this need to prove yourself stems from a serious, real issue, and so it's wrong to downplay this issue by equating minorities' perpetual feeling of needing to prove themselves with your feelings, to conclude that the problem exists inside them, and not outside them.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your words, but if not, I'd like to hear your response, because this is something I've been thinking about lately.
What kind of discourse are you referring to? I hate that there's this notion that trying to hire talented people from underrepresented communities somehow requires oppressing white people.
Yes, it's impossible to stay out of this issue. It's impossible to stay out of most issues. Certainly the ones that affect ourselves and our colleagues in everyday life.
You don't have a moral obligation to throw yourself into "the fight" on one side or another, but you do have a moral obligation to consider the impact of your behavior. If you were to witness a coworker being discriminated against, silence is not the same as ignorance.
To keep your head down and not get involved is going to favor one sides' agenda. If you want to do that, it's your right, but you should own that. We all have the capacity to get involved at whatever level we happen to be on. In our social circles, in our companies or in the public discourse. By interacting with those spheres, by choosing what we mention and acknowledge and consider we push on one side or the other.
It's fine to not be, "in the streets," but it's not fine to pretend these issues have nothing to do with you.
Edit: I've read some accounts suggesting people ask their parents what they were doing during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. People might have protested, they might have been appalled from afar. They might have thought it was much to do about nothing. Ten years from now, how would you explain how you felt today at a cocktail party? However you see it, I think we all have a responsibility to decide and not simply drift through society.
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Was i reading the wrong memo? Because everybody, including the 3 interviewees, no matter if they seem calm and collected, keep attributing malice, and talking about how the author said women are less suited to being good engineers, and that women shouldn't be encouraged to get interested in STEM. Where was that stated?
> I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
She goes on to say that people will likely misapply the ideas and judge her. It seems a lot of detractors think Damore should have known better and he takes responsibility for how his ideas affect people.
Another says:
> I don’t really see how it’s useful to have a discussion of general group traits in a work setting. Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?
Again, she's not really disagreeing with Damore in this snippet. She's saying the ideas themselves are counterproductive and shouldn't be discussed.
Well, she only has to prove it to men that she assumes are sexist or incapable of understanding population distributions. I mean, really? Let's fight sexism with sexism.
That's just all sorts of crazy/anti-intellectualism
Quote from the memo: "I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ"
> "Women, on average, have more:" > - "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs" > - "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness" > - "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men..." (Ironically, this is a good thing for an engineer to have)
DAMORE: "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."
EDIT: also https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm. Moreover, men are more emotional than women in certain ways, too. Sex differences in emotion depend on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and lots of other contextual factors."
A lot of the science that Danmore cites is correct. But he goes beyond what the science says in his memo. He misinterprets it to prove his point. This is my main problem with the memo, and why someone may call it sexist.
[0] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Fact: women and men aren't distributed equally in tech and leadership.
And your conclusion is that anyone who presents these facts and says that maybe one causes the other means that women are "less suited" for engineering?
There is no logical basis for this. He didn't say what you are attributing to him.
I would say don't even bother with the biological argument because as a woman you likely know all too well how it's mainly used. Anyway, its not really the business of a company to argue such abstract matters.
It's one thing to be teased about these things but it's another to have people in authority making an opinion on such abstract things. No matter how tame it was. Woman know they are capable of doing anything so they don't really want anything less than that entering the discussion.
Now suppose a coworker writes a piece saying roughly "Way fewer men apply for these positions. I suspect men are less interested in being nurses, so we have fewer male nurses, but we can't lower the bar just to make it 50-50. I think it's even possible that men just biologically enjoy nursing less on average, so trying to be 50-50 isn't a reasonable goal"
A) Should this coworker be fired for expressing this idea?
B) Is this argument a skip and hop away from "men are not suited to be nurses" ?
C) Does whether or not there actually are biological factors have any bearing on questions A/B ?
I did want to discuss one particular line of thought from the interview though:
I can see that there are wide swaths of people who would refuse to work with him
Two of the interviewees gave this justification for why he should have been fired, and I have seen it elsewhere as well. I disagree, though. I have worked with with people in the past with whom I have ideological differences. But it has never stopped me from at least trying to get along and work productively with that person.
We just don't know from the evidence presented thus far what James Damore is like to worth with. Maybe he's a sexist asshole who is incapable of treating women fairly (in which case he does deserve to be fired). Or maybe we can take him at face value when he says he appreciates diversity and prefers to judge people as individuals rather than as a group. We just don't know.
On the other hand, if there are employees at Google who despite having never met James Damore before are telling their managers "I can't work with him based on this thing he wrote or this idea he believes", aren't they also in the wrong here?
If you can't put aside your personal feelings based on someone elses political views to get work done, YOU are the one with the problem. I'm sure plenty of us have worked with people who have lifestyles, beliefs, and demonstrated actions we personally deeply disagree with. Heck, I've worked with people where we legitimately disliked each other. Yet when I come into the office to work, we sit down together and get stuff done.
Now, my personal opinion is: leave your politics at home, don't spend company time on such things. I'm glad you think of work as a family, but it's not (regardless of the HR feel-good marketing).
However, if they are asking for commentary and feedback on diversity initiatives, and you provide it honestly, it's extraordinarily poor form to then fire you. They had the responsibility to respond to him, and address it privately. I think the more troubling problem was as others have commented: the fact that it was leaked from an internal conversation and turned into such a contentious issue for google.
It's not as if he submitted the article in an inappropriate place in an attempt to shock and offend. He spoke his mind in a place that was seemingly designated for that purpose... Yet another person leaks the memo to drum up outrage and that's somehow ok..?
I'm really disappointed in the culture of mob outrage that's been taking over the Internet in recent years...
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