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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."
These are the opinions of a single person, not Google itself. They shouldn't have to deal with fallout because he's got dumb opinions.
. . . Vive la différence . . . !
. . . this story sounds as simple as a couple going through a difficult divorce . . . you can't ever really know where the truth lies, but it is somewhere in between . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There is a simple solution - obligatory pay transparency within a company! No more hiding; either equal pay or cya!
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--
Google and the valley are increasingly hostile towards conservative values. I don't want to read rebuttals from google executives, I want to know what exactly they are going to do to make sure google is a safe workspace for conservatives and that conservative viewpoints can be openly expressed by those who work there.
Yesterday's slashdot post on this got over 900 comments, and it was a weekend post. Do we really need another round on this topic?
This sounds a lot like this story posted earlier.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Having been on the receiving end of diversity mandates from HR at my company my stance is currently: "Hire whoever you want so long as they're qualified." I'm not certain that calling out wanting a particular gender or race to fill a position is the right way to go about things. That said, if the hiring process can select a candidate based on their qualifications I don't have a problem with any other part of the selection process.
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.
Maybe "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez? Or was it "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal" by Nick Bilton? It can't be "The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network" by Katherine Losse, as I just started reading that one last night. All three books have douche bags in common, especially from Google and Facebook.
I guess this one is good for a few more days.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
news
noun
newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent events.
That's an article from September 2016.
Purple people would tend to be a target for the Purple People Eater, making them quite the liability... just sayin'
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
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.
Google is turning into a liberal version of Skynet anyway. I'm changing my default search engine to https://duckduckgo.com/
"He draws a conclusion favorable to his ego, and then works backwards from there, constructing an argument to justify it." If he DREW a conclusion then his conclusion is not the starting point. If she read what he said she'd have seen it's chock full of observation. Maybe she meant to say, "He states an opinion, couched as a reasoned argument, and launches a tirade from there.". But then there would be more of an expectation that she'd be refuting what he actually said. It's almost like she draws a conclusion that's favorable to her world view, and then starts her criticism from there. Almost. ;)
I didn't get time to read his whole publication. But if you want to shut out all the subjective stuff about hurting someone's feelings or upsetting them over treatment they perceive as "unfair"? I think you *always* come back to one truth: The optimal way to hire people is based on who is most qualified for the job.
Workplace diversity is pretty much a code name for "guilt over the realization that our business wound up selecting an obvious majority of hires from the same ethnic background or sex".
I'm not saying Silicon Valley doesn't have some real issues with top-level execs mistreating or disrespecting women. But that's a different topic, unless the claim here is that Google execs look down on females and purposely refuse to hire them when they're clearly well qualified for the jobs they apply for?
In every aspect of life, I think men and women approach issues a bit differently. There's nothing wrong with that, but it DOES create realities, such as women tending to have less interest in climbing the rungs of a corporate ladder to get prestigious but high-stress, top-level jobs. I think some of this is changing as more people get comfortable living a life where they're in less traditional roles. (I know marriages where the guy does the laundry, washes the dishes, cleans the house, etc. and his wife earns the lion's share of the money to pay the bills. But this is still an exception to the rule and not what the majority of men or women would say they're happy doing.)
Personally? I'd rather work for a company where all of my co-workers are as competent and intelligent as possible, even if they're not very diverse. A diverse workplace, to me, should be something that just happens organically if it's meant to happen. Attempts to push for it or force it just lead to a less efficient business.
The funny thing there is, they ARE hiring the most qualified people for each job - that's why they have 35% asian representation when Asians represent about 5% of the U.S. population. Funny that this so-called "diversity" coordinator doesn't see any problem with this. In fact, the numbers are probably even more skewed - Google lumps "asian" into a single category but I'd be shocked if Indian/Pakistani didn't dominate that 35% in spite of being only one single percent of the U.S. population.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
It isn't like Google is:
Conspiring with autocratic nation's Great Firewalls
Doxxing internal critics
Fighting against free speech
Hiding important content
Getting in bed with corrupt political candidates
Trying to subvert the political process
Enforcing ThoughtCrime
Demonetizing any Youtube performers on the Right
Rewriting queries to favor their own services
Manipulated searches to hide politicians' dark deeds
Coming up with exotic Tax avoidance schemes
Supporting Terrorists' information sharing
Do no evil, right?
One thing is certain. This will be the start of a wave of leaks of other documents from Google employees. Once the first does it the barrier has been broken. It going to be very difficult for the company to block release.
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.
If the comment was written by a woman, would it have sparked this much fauxrage?
Maybe they should use the percentage of a gender able and willing to work in a position as a baseline instead of the percentage in the general population. That would screw up the narrative, though.
Diversity by Meritocracy is simply not popular with Silicon Valley. Rather than let the best people get the jobs, regardless of sex, gender, preferences, religion, ideology, or some other attribute, they are intent on equality of outcome regardless of talent and skills, which is discriminatory. The Left has turned full circle into the ideological KKK, and shortly, they'll be sending around death threats, doxxing people, or making up lies to get them fired.
We can fully expect to see McCarthyist Blacklists and political purity tests next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
slow down there, Bucko, we'll be having none of that sensible talk around here; just stick to Trump/Hillary/Obama and red vs blue and we vs them.... ah fuck it, I hate everyone equally
seriously, let's keep squabbling amongst ourselves so it'll be easier for those in power to keep it; and know this: those people's only political ideology is whichever will benefit them the most
we're all getting played for suckers
Hire the best and most qualified people for each job. If they all end up being purple, then purple people JUST MIGHT be the best people for the job!
That's sort of the reason for all of the diversity training and such. Because people have biases, sometimes they don't even know they're there, and forcing people to confront those biases and question if their choices are indeed biased, is one way to pick the best person.
It's like the symphony that said they couldn't find good female musicians, and then they made the auditions blind and surprise, a lot of women got hired. The judges, whether they acknowledged it or not weren't choosing the best musicians, they were letting their biases get in the way.
This article makes one pause to consider the culture at Google and technology companies in general. In fact there is a larger need for transparency to look at Google's internal practices, processes, and technology to protect user information. Are there rogue employees at Google trolling through information on spouses, girl friends, neighbors, etc.
Splitting Google along ideological lines? Progressive Google vs. Conservative Google? Quotas for ideologies? (The latter was pretty bad in public German TV. With politicians getting angry because the other side had one second more of screentime. Nobody ever seemed to consider that many people might get fed up with politics in general.)
Can we please stop referring to anything related to "social" or the humanities in general, as "science". It's something, it's not science.
Guy is probably a douchebag (this term will make it in to the social science literature eventually), but he is probably smart enough to stay away from a hippie drum circle masquerading as science.
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!
The text is a very detailed well written and very nuanced opinion-piece and excellent food for an educated debate on the issue. He may make wrong assumptions and may be unable to cite resources, but the essay itself is well rounded and has some excellent talking points. If you don't agree or see flaws in his chain of thought, write and talk about it. If arguments or conclusions of his are wrong, debunk them. But please stop this public shaming and hysteria, this has nothing to do anymore with equal rights or neccesary gender issue discussions.
I really wish we could talk without this all-out hatered and PR assasination of people, mostly by feminists, some of whom seem to think of feminism of some sort of religious ideology.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
One great thing about my current company is no one was talking about it on the company forums. Not on the dedicated project forums, not on the general lists.
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.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Statistical analysis by function, creates groups. It's interesting that we group numbers, genes, animals... however it's somehow evil, in a new century way, to group based on gender
The reality is men tend to process spatially where as women tend to process verbally. that is biology. These are not absolutes, as varying individuals on both sides of the spectrum cross. However, generally it's true... and yes, I'm grouping. Anyone who claims different is a liar or misinformed. There's no debate, men and women are wired differently.
https://www.scientificamerican...
I'm sure most people on this forum have seen those ads or politicians stating "everyone needs to learn to program" and smirk to yourself or get upset knowing it's ludicrous as well
This is the same. People have predispositions to specific tendencies and processes that make some professional trades ideal, where as others, not so much. Given that mathematics, and computer programming via extension, tend to favor those who process information spatially, this biologically implies males would be more likely to perform these tasks and drawn to them.
Again, I'm not saying "all", just general tendencies.
But we as reasonable people need to stop going apesh*t when someone suggests that the everyone is not the same or some people can not perform tasks as well as others. .
The memo writer's name has been revealed. Apparently he has a PhD in Biological Sciences fro harvard. IOW he is a trained scientist. Mei whose quote above is a Javascript and Rails ( not even Ruby, but Rails ) programming with no formal sciencet raining. Yet she feels justified in calling him unscientific.
It seems to reflect something about the culture. Especially when one of the senior developers says that engineering is more about getting along with people rather then optimizing inner loops. Given that the demands on resources on their server farms mean that such an optimization could save Google enough to pay the guys salary for ten years.
No wonder so many of their projects get cancelled eg Wave.
With individual freedom to choose and in the absence of discrimination, all groups do not voluntarily participate in activities in equal proportion, nor is there any reason whatsoever to expect that they would. Different groups are different from each other and the self-sorting of their members into activities is an expression of diversity. The great irony is that the self-proclaimed champions of diversity have utterly failed to understand the concept of diversity itself. They maintain that, in the absence of discrimination, all individuals would uniformly participate in all endeavors at the same rates, and that therefore any deviation form proportional allocation by social identity is necessarily evidence of discrimination. They believe that diversity is uniformity, when in fact different groups have different aptitudes and different preferences; They are diverse.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Too bad you didn't write Mei's commentary. Your argument holds more water than hers.
Purple people would tend to be a target for the Purple People Eater, making them quite the liability... just sayin'
Although the Purple People Eater does have the ability to fly, his monocular vision reduces his depth perception making him a somewhat less dangerous foe. Purple People should drop a point or two into agility to make evasion easier.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Instead of you know, all the female, queer, non white, or disenfranchised employees / potential employees and other people who are actually speaking up about the discrimination they face. Not some whining man baby who feels threatened now that others are getting their chance.
Oh, Jebus H.B. Christ, give me an effing break already, will ya?
There is *NOTHING* preventing any women or team of women getting together and building the next Apple. There is *NOTHING* at all preventing any lady from getting a refurbished ThinkPad for 250 bucks, sitting down at her desk and coding the foundation of the next Oracle. There is no obstacle what-so-freakin-ever preventing any girl or woman of picking up a book on C and joining the kernel team. Or Gnome. Or getting into C++ and joining KDE. You can become a project lead and no one will even know that you're a woman. No one freakin' cares. It's the F*CKING internet! Know one knows who you are.
Why isn't it happening? For the very same reason that musical innovation of the last 200 years in the US didn't come from well educated, musically trained and compareativly priviliged and free white women of the middle and upper class but from BLACK MALE SLAVES. Why? Well, I'll take a wild guess here: There is a strong incentive for men to prove their worth to society. BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO! A young woman has already proven her worth: She has a womb and tits that give milk. Men are disposable women are not. Men have to fight to prove their worth. They have to pull way more than their own weight to prove worthy as a mate. The criminal justice system is biased against them and in favour of women ALL AROUND THE WORLD throughout history until today. Be young, beautiful, female and an asshole and get away with it. Be a male asshole and you better be a strong one capable of defending the tribe, otherwise you're kicked out or into jail faster that you can think.
I got some freakin news for you, you dunce: Tech innovation is driven by unattractive MALE SOCIETY DROPOUTS! They have nothing else to do but code.
And now cry me a river about gender inequality in tech. NOBODY is stopping any women of joining. ... Gawd how I'd love to have some neat sex and discuss the pros and cons of Rust vs. Go afterwards while lying in bed and chilling. ... Won't happen, no matter how much we wish for it BECAUSE *NEWFLASH* on average WOMEN AREN'T ALL THAT INTERESTED IN CODING!
Did you FINALLY get the message?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
87% of people with HR roles to ensure EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) are women. I think something needs to be done about that gender imbalance.
"We can accept many transgressions, but we cannot accept thoughtcrime. It is the most dangerous to our authority."
And he's terminated as of now.
It is a business though. However, if they want out of the box thinkers... I dunno.
Google refuses to hire white males because of their gender and the color of their skin and they call it diversity. They should be fined about a billion dollars and their entire HR department gutted. At the end of the day, no matter how loony this guy sounds, that is the truth.
Aaaaannd he's gone. Utterly shocking, I know.
Remember kids, keep your harmful* opinions to yourself.
*The threshold for harmful opinion is subject to change. Google reserves the right to declare any idea, and the expression thereof, as harmful at any time, and will not tolerate employment or use of Google services by those expressing such ideas.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
At least they didn't drag this out by having a 'committee' perform an investigation. Sorry Eric Holder, nothing to see here. The guy got canned, and deservedly so. Pro tip: If your CEO (Sundar Pichai) happens to be from a country and/or ethnicity where the people have been persecuted based on their race (aka genetics)....probably not a Harvard PhD caliber idea to recycle that tired line of argument in your own personal gender grievances on aforementioned CEO's corporate social network. Also don't interrupt your CEO's family vacation. Side Note: Similar to that woman who was canned by Tesla for mouthing off, how is it that this guy passes for a "Senior Engineer"? His major LinkedIn endorsements are LaTex and MatLab.
The author of the essay was James Damore, and a few hours ago Google fired him.
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca... ... Science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. Consider someone taking the kind of high IQ and drive that would be required to obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley and going into medicine. This person would very likely be a top specialist of some sort, earning at least $300,000 per year. Instead of being fired at age 44, our medical specialist would be near the height of her value to her patients and employer. Her experience and reputation would continue to add to her salary and prestige until she was perhaps 60 years old. [A woman who wanted to spend more time with her children can choose from a variety of medical careers, such as emergency medicine, that involve shift work and where a high salary can be earned with just two or three shifts per week. She could also work from home as a radiologist reading data transmitted via Internet.] ... ... ..."
"This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.
How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition for jobs than in science.
What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility.
A divorce litigator put it a little more simply: "There is no reason for a woman to go to medical school. If she wants to have the spending power of a doctor she can just have sex with three doctors." (see the Wisconsin chapter for how the arithmetic works out) In some states, though not Wisconsin, a plaintiff's own earnings or earning potential can reduce the potential profits from child support. "A degree in poetry is a lot better than a degree in medicine when you're a child support plaintiff," observed one litigator, and added "for a woman with a functioning reproductive system, the decision to attend college and work is seldom an economically rational one in the United States."
He also writes: "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should de
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It would better suit the interests of all involved had there been efforts to foster discussion & mediate this madness rather than making a martyr of the author of the Google Memo (or "Manifesto", if you will) & fanning the flames of what is an already bellicose conflagration of acerbic, emotion-driven, divisive issue.
Interesting. Apparently it's possible (and acceptable) to believe in the ability of people to predict the globe's temperature to the 10th of a degree 200 years from now, but it is not possible to believe that science can detect a difference between men and women.
Purple people would tend to be a target for the Purple People Eater, making them quite the liability... just sayin'
Although the Purple People Eater does have the ability to fly, his monocular vision reduces his depth perception making him a somewhat less dangerous foe. Purple People should drop a point or two into agility to make evasion easier.
I would mod up if I have points, but alas I don't. That said, adding armor and/or shield, or shrinking... anything that raises Armor Class (AC) should help.
We won't talk about real stuff, it's part of the great deflection.
Yeah, they aren't complaining about the incredibly low percentage of female workers in the garbage truck driving fields either. Sewer cleaning? Bull riding? Diesel engine repair? Snipers? Registering for Selective Service? Seems like the "victim" groups want all the benefits without the responsibilities.
Worse yet, the media version that most are reading doesn't include his references that he's supporting the text with. His leaps make more sense with those included. That being said, he posted this for internal use hoping and it was of course leaked. The leaker should be sued by him for turning this into a bigger issue and likely being the actual reason he was canned. Google is a liberal shill company now that should be chopped up since we can't afford to have this kind of power in the hands of fanatics. They won't be going after the leaker. Perhaps the DOJ could as some sort of industrial espionage investigation.
Or, for us old D&D players, lowers the AC. It ran from plate and shield (2) to unarmored (9).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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Marxist Hacker, your bias is showing!
Your characterization of the Other Side is inaccurate. If the other side is truly interested in finding solutions based on adaptation, they should not have actually started off by stating so vehemently that the problem doesn't exist, as they ACTUALLY did for the past 30 years!
It is only in recent years, as more people finally realized the extent to which the "Other Side" had been lying to us all and trying to obscure the truth that they started on this "Let's adapt to this, not because climate change is real, but because we have to adapt to such-and-such problem, totally unrelated to ANYTHING we puny humans could possibly do...
The only so-called solutions they are willing to accept are those that don't cause their livelihoods to suffer. Hence, the blind support for things like fracking and oil pipelines along side grudging acceptance of renewable energy projects, which happen to be making a lot of money for their competition...
Hypocrite much?
PlaynBass
Perhaps we shouldn't split the groups at all is the real point here! Let men and women compete directly against each other, and perhaps the two groups will both get better.
Maybe women are currently slower in the 100 M sprint races because the best of each group haven't benefitted from the same level of training and competition.
In competitions, one gets better by training and competing with those who are better than you are now. It does not do much good to compete only against those who have the same skill levels as yourself.
As a musician who enjoys improvising in jam sessions, I know that my skills improve when I'm thrown in with players who are better than me. At the same time, players who are not as skilled as I can improve their skills when they play with me.
Of course, in a jam session, no one like that asshat who doesn't listen to the total sound and just insists on showing off.
PlaynBass
Surely by now someone someone should have posted a link to this: http://www.theonion.com/articl...
Slashdot, I'm very disappointed in you.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
That historical gender roles exist is not in question. The extent to which the gender roles is PURELY biological, and not societal in nature due is the question, for the reasons I tried to point out. The facts are that some women can perform just as well or better than some men have been supported by the science.
What Google is attempting is to allow society to catch up with the science. They may well be off the mark if they try to insist on a strict 50-50 ratio as the sole measure of parity.
Also, I can see a case for encouraging more diverse inputs in the software and hardware engineering fields at every stage of the design-build process that would fulfill legitimate business goals. It hasn't been that long ago that designs for the left-handed were unheard of.
I don't see this as a case of "...If you have a faulty premise (men and women are the same)..."
They are NOT the same. That is not what is being called out here. The sexism is in not including the differences in the designs from the start, and then blaming sexism for the statistics that proved a case for correcting the original problem of sexist treatment of women in the first place.
That's the problem that arises during these transitional periods when we try to shift an unjust status quo towards justice.Those who were on top in the status quo will feel slighted if their previous sinecure is impeached. They will survive it, but they may face stiffer competition for their positions, requiring some more effort to stay on top.
But that extra effort should not be to merely force a return to the same old status quo as before.
PlaynBass