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Google Grapples With Fallout After Employee Slams Diversity Efforts (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report from NPR: In a 3,300-word document that has been shared across Google's internal networks, an engineer at the company wrote that "biological causes" are part of the reason women aren't represented equally in its tech departments and leadership. The document also cited "men's higher drive for status." The engineer's criticism of Google's attempts to improve gender and racial diversity has prompted two Google executives to rebut the lengthy post, which accused the company of creating an "ideological echo chamber" and practicing discrimination. Wide sharing of the document has highlighted struggles with gender equality and the wage gap in the tech industry and particularly at Google, which was sued by the federal government earlier this year for refusing to share compensation amounts and other data.
But in contrast, the document's author -- whose identity hasn't been publicly released but who claims to work at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters -- accused Google of having "a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence." Not enough has been done, the engineer said, to encourage a diversity of viewpoints and ideologies at Google. The author also faulted the company for offering mentoring and other opportunities to its employees based on gender or race. The engineer began the document by stating, "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don't endorse using stereotypes." The message ended with a similar sentiment -- but with the added notion, "Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the [company's] training suggests." In addition to the responses made from Google's VP of Diversity, Integrity and Governance, Danielle Brown, former engineer Yonatan Zunger, and Google VP of Engineering Ari Balogh, senior developer Sarah Mei wrote: "This guy almost certainly thinks of himself as a 'computer scientist,' but he does exactly what you're not supposed to do as a scientist. He draws a conclusion favorable to his ego, and then works backwards from there, constructing an argument to justify it. [...] This google dude literally works at the company that made it _trivially easy_ to locate relevant social science research."
But in contrast, the document's author -- whose identity hasn't been publicly released but who claims to work at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters -- accused Google of having "a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence." Not enough has been done, the engineer said, to encourage a diversity of viewpoints and ideologies at Google. The author also faulted the company for offering mentoring and other opportunities to its employees based on gender or race. The engineer began the document by stating, "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don't endorse using stereotypes." The message ended with a similar sentiment -- but with the added notion, "Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the [company's] training suggests." In addition to the responses made from Google's VP of Diversity, Integrity and Governance, Danielle Brown, former engineer Yonatan Zunger, and Google VP of Engineering Ari Balogh, senior developer Sarah Mei wrote: "This guy almost certainly thinks of himself as a 'computer scientist,' but he does exactly what you're not supposed to do as a scientist. He draws a conclusion favorable to his ego, and then works backwards from there, constructing an argument to justify it. [...] This google dude literally works at the company that made it _trivially easy_ to locate relevant social science research."
They should, instead, deal with the fallout for having a moronic position like a VP of Diversity, Integrity and Governance.
I think it's interesting how this guy is being shamed for posting a controversial opinion. ;) Where did I read about that happening? Oh that's right..it reportedly happens at Google.
I read the manifesto...the whole thing. He makes two spurious and generalizing claims (women are more cooperative, men are driven by status) but everything else in the paper are legitimate concerns about "how" diversity is being enforced. He also gives a lot of suggestions as to how it could be better fostered and/or measured.
The part I dislike the most is how most of the published reactions are couched in damage control and distancing themselves from the author. In reality they needed to be inclusive saying how they want to hear everyone's opinions and how they take those concepts into account when making policy. Basically, the public responses have just reinforced the complaints that the author had with the programs in the first place. (Especially Sarah Mei, who basically just called him names and insulted his intelligence without any sort of direct rebuttal to his claims.)
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
But two people can have the same job title but have very different performance, and performance is not something that's easily measured and recorded. Simple solutions are part of the problem.
Except they opted not to actually argue against what he was saying... instead doubling down on the ideological echo chamber.
It's always been interesting to me the intellectual shallowness I see from many on the left (like this case) where they refuse to debate or discuss those things which they view as settled. Even if true, the exploration of the topic creates insights and a deeper understanding not of the end result, but how it is achieved.
But then... they still don't understand how/why Trump won.
Here's the problem: Men and Women ARE factually different, both physiologically and physcologically.
Letting political correctness attempt to solve a problem that is not there is absurd, and frankly at this point stupid. I don't see the huge push to get men into nursing (>90% female), social services (>80% female) or elementary school teaching (>80% female).
So far every single "rebuttal" from google and outside, every autistic screeching, every angry tweet and call for his firing and public outing simply confirms what he said.
Instead to tackling the deep issues of PC culture they are trying to kill the messenger.
The very existence of a VP for diversity at an engineering company should be a wake up call.
And lets not even get to her asinine "arguments" that are anything but. Sara Meis response is even worse actually (not that I thought it could be possible). Instead of citing data that disproves his arguments (protip: does not exist, neither does the wage gap) she puts words in his mouth ("conclusions that favor his ego") and implies that he did not arrive to those conclusions by observation but apparently HAD to work backwards.
Except they opted not to actually argue against what he was saying...
These issues have been argued to death. For centuries people have been saying "Women can't do X because biology says they should be home having babies", where X= policing, soldiering, leading, working as a professional, thinking about hard stuff, and now programming. So far the naysayers have always been wrong, but were never convinced by "arguments", only the performance of women in the jobs they supposedly couldn't do.
The article is saying nothing new at all, other than repeating the garbage you can find on any alt-right blog.
they still don't understand how/why Trump won.
Trump lost overwhelmingly in Silicon Valley.
VP of Diversity, Integrity and Governance AKA Social Justice Warrior
It's not a job, it's the Spanish Inquisition for anyone who disagrees with the dogma of the day.
Jesus Christ. Can we not have a discussion without blaming something on "the left" or "the right"?
Had they really been "dumb" opinions, they would've been easy to dismiss. The very problem for Google — and the "progressives" everywhere — is that the man's opinions are perfectly reasonable and well-argued.
The particular point I appreciated was that any "gap" between sexes, races, etc. is not automatically evidence of an evil bias, contrary to what Social Justice Warriors would like us to believe. Such a bias may be responsible for a gap — entirely or partially — but it also may not. And, obviously, any efforts to fight the suspected discrimination, the very existence of which is "proven" by nothing else, with actual and deliberate discrimination is patently unfair — and bad for business.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Women are physically weaker than men. This puts them at a disadvantage in jobs like police officer and soldier. I have a good friend who was hired as a resident assistant. She was blind. So they hired a blind person to be in charge of making sure that nobody was sneaking in booze, that there were no unsafe living conditions, etc... It doesn't make sense. As far as programming goes, men tend to prefer that type of solo work and more importantly, google already hire percentage of women than are actually graduating as do most other Silicon Valley firms so if we want more diversity, we are going to have to start a lot younger and figure out why men are more attracted to programming. We can start with a similar field and try to figure out why boys play video games significantly more than girls. Until we "solve" that problem the bandaids at adulthood are a joke.
I glanced through Sarah Mei's Twitter page, and she's full of shit. She seems not to get why women in tech might not be evenly distributed.
* Suppose you have a culture that hires based on personal referral. (It's usually one of the best ways to go.)
* Suppose your culture starts out with a male nucleus.
* Suppose your male nucleus mostly has male contacts.
You're gonna get a mainly male culture.
Companies don't hire the best candidate available. Companies hire the candidate for whom they have the most confidence of strong performance, meaning that the route into the door matters a lot. Applicants at large will not be given equal shrift to applicants with a strong, internal referral.
From that starting point, the organization is subject to network effects, none of which need to be intrinsically biased in order to lead to a biased outcome (as determined by simple headcount).
One can argue that the sorry state of women in technology justifies taking active measures against the default behaviour of your (potentially) gender-neutral starting point. One can't argue that failing to take active measures automatically incriminates your starting point as gender discriminatory.
In Sarah's world where water isn't wet, and laudable corporations seek the best candidate while paying no attention to existing network effects, you can draw these conclusions, loudly and with no nuance, should it serve your purpose.
I'm not saying that innocent bias doesn't coexist with toxic bias. I am saying that presumptive guilt is an extremely dangerous tool as wielded by a small, angry imagination.
Except they opted not to actually argue against what he was saying...
These issues have been argued to death. For centuries people have been saying "Women can't do X because biology says they should be home having babies", where X= policing, soldiering, leading, working as a professional, thinking about hard stuff, and now programming. So far the naysayers have always been wrong, but were never convinced by "arguments", only the performance of women in the jobs they supposedly couldn't do.
The article is saying nothing new at all, other than repeating the garbage you can find on any alt-right blog.
Soooo, how many female NFL players are there?
In a sport where you can literally get away with murder if you're good enough - hello, Ray Lewis - why has there never been a woman even come close to being able to compete? Because if a woman were a good enough player to play in the NFL, that woman would have every team in the league trying to sign her. And you know it.
Why doesn't the LPGA ever list the yardage on holes in women's golf?
How many women have played in England's Premier League or Germany's Bundesliga?
The women's world record squat is something like 705 lbs. That's also about the world record for a man - in the bench press.
they still don't understand how/why Trump won.
Trump lost overwhelmingly in Silicon Valley.
Ahh, yes, the land of the 1%
Which conservative value is at issue here ?
The conservative value of telling brown people to go back where they came from and being able to fire women who get upset about bimbo jokes and how they're too sensitive when guys just act like guys without repercussions, apparently.
You should read the article more closely, as he is not saying "all women" this or "all men" that. He specifically says that there is significant overlap between the sexes, and is only speaking to the large-number trends of gender percentages.
So in no way is he saying that all women are less suitable/inclined for leadership or for tech.. that would be laughable. He is just saying that when you look at the large trends, that part of the numbers may be in fact due to the biological traits which put the bell curves in different places with respect to success attributes for those professions.
And yes I think he stretches in places, but he is making an argument at least worthy of debate. Unfortunately the whole subject just gets everyone's hackles up, and both sides tend to start labeling rather than discussing particular points..
What an amazing exhibition of group-think. Google has accumulated thousands of Sarah Meis and by extension the Valley etc. has accrued a couple million rigorously orthodox malcontents. We're now into day three of that monoculture's collective apoplexy because one powerless nobody had the temerity to question the dogma.
Thou doth protest too much, methinks.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Women sometimes can't do X. For example, it's pretty unlikely that a woman will ever beat the men's 100m sprint world record.
What is being argued is two things:
1) Just because women are different does not mean they are lesser, and in fact having diverse perspectives is beneficial.
2) The gender gap in tech is largely unrelated to biological differences, it's mostly social. There is a very large amount of evidence to support this.
The frustration here is, as ShanghaiBill points out, it's become a lot like climate change. Most people who looked at the evidence seriously came to the same conclusion, but some people keep insisting that we do it all again from scratch and occasionally one of them puts out a well written, reasonable sounding document that people who want to believe those things latch on to.
I suppose this can't really be helped, but it's still frustrating.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Prior to 1970 most symphony orchestra musicians were men. Then around 1970 blind auditions (when you don't know who is playing or their gender) started to become common, and are now nearly universal. As a result, symphony musicians today are nearly evenly split between genders. See: http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orc...
I have interviewed prospective software developers in my career, and know that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to counteract my own prejudices even when I wanted to be fair. To be a woman interviewed for a job by someone with the views of the Google employee who believed women are genetically inferior for engineering would be devastating. Even someone with more even handed views undoubtedly harbors some bias.
I don't know if "blind interviews" for engineers will ever be practical, so maybe we are stuck with perpetuating our prejudices on hiring decisions indefinitely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't care how good one engineer is. If he is an asshat he will likely drive away more talent then he can ever dream of. I have been in companies one might consider a part of the "good ol' boy's network." When HR demanded that the pin-up posters come down the engineers screamed about how much more valuable they were to the company than any whiners. It was a pleasure to watch as over time each one of these "top-notch" engineers was walked out the door. And to add icing on the cake, once these asshats were gone people who were otherwise looked over stood up and did some incredible work.
The moral of the story is that you get what you reward. If you reward people complaining about their personal injustices then you will develop a company full of such people. (purposely ambiguous) If you reward people who work well in diverse groups then you will end up with a company that works well regardless of individual differences.
-rd