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Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo On Gender Differences (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet Inc.'s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting the web company's diversity policies, creating a firestorm across Silicon Valley. James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes." Earlier on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a note to employees that said portions of the memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace." But he didn't say if the company was taking action against the employee. A Google representative, asked about the dismissal, referred to Pichai's memo. Damore's 10-page memorandum accused Google of silencing conservative political opinions and argued that biological differences play a role in the shortage of women in tech and leadership positions. It circulated widely inside the company and became public over the weekend, causing a furor that amplified the pressure on Google executives to take a more definitive stand. After the controversy swelled, Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, sent a statement to staff condemning Damore's views and reaffirmed the company's stance on diversity. In internal discussion boards, multiple employees said they supported firing the author, and some said they would not choose to work with him, according to postings viewed by Bloomberg News.
As long as your minority point of view is not racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory... by all means express away!
Come on, paradox of intolerance is not _that_ complicated to understand, is it?
http://bfy.tw/DFwQ
Actually now that we have a clear definition of "neuroticism" and "warmth," we can actually make progress towards answering the question of differences in gender. Wikipedia has some answer fwiw.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I am an Indian Hindu. Please google and read about caste system of India. Sundar Pitchai, who is from the so called "high caste" Brahmin community knows better about discrimination. His caste has discriminated and insulted millions of people just by their birth. Hindu religion and its holy books are ultra-discriminatory against lower caste people. Still every day the so called Dalits and Sudhras suffer in the hands of the Brahmin Baniya hegemony. But Sundar Pitchai won't even talk a word about this. He will even take a pride in his glorious Hindu culture. But when it comes to an American, he will become a social justice warrior. Hindus are running many American businesses and soon you will see how ugly things can get.
So... stupid fucking conservatives try their best to destroy unions, and turn states into at-will-employment states, THEN when some inbred idiot gets fired for being an inbred idiot in that at-will-employment state... you bitch like little fucking children. Conservatives, more than anyone else, made firings like this possible. Want some cheese with your whine?
LOL. Awesome. Yep I am the pro business conservative here arguing and I get modded down. All I am saying is at work it is irrelevent whether you agree or disagree. You do not have free speech in the office PERIOD and HR and legal have guidelines to protect company image and liability of possible lawsuits.
Big companies get sued sooo often because they have big pockets and lots of people means lots of firings all the time. Of course some and actually in the case of Google sue. A company has a right to set tone and policy and statements.
I think if many slashdotters were born the female sex instead of male here and got discriminated against or not taken as seriously compared to a make counterpart I think the comments here would be quite different. Remember if you are dominate you get in trouble as a woman and are a bitch. As a guy you are bold and have leadership. It is a double standard
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Thanks for the cites - this part from quillette stands out:
"Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:
* The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;
* The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink."
Never heard that paradox laid out so bare before.
By caste you would have guessed that "Modi" was probably a cleaner or street seller
I don't care if most people here on Slashdot will hate me for this, but regardless of his personal views, he took a decision to share and spread an opinion that goes against company policy. It's worse than accidentaly sharing porn "to all" because it cements his ideological position in public perception directly against a stance that Google adopted as a whole. In fact, it undermines a whole ton of effort, money and time the company has spent over recent years.
When that message got leaked it directly affected the company's image, and action had to be taken.
It'd be far worse for Google not to do anything about it because that would be interpreted as Google sharing the message, which had too many assumptions, some very few valid criticisms, and sugarcoating of quite frankly some very nasty prejudice and sexism.
The entire essay poses as a misappropriation of supposedly scientific reasoning, statistics and whatnot to support an anti-diversity position, and if you summarize the whole thing, there's content there that would be the equivalent of modern day Mengele and bogus science to justify the superiority of the Aryan race, only as a crusade against diversity efforts. It is entirely presumptuous, it assumes that just because some things are the way they are we should not try to change it, and that he feels violated in his rights because people are striving for more equal rights inside the company.
He basically sounds like a well mannered slaver trying to explain why he thinks slavery is right. It is by no coincidence that he uses some of the exact same lines of defense. We are biologically different. Such and such class of people seek different things. We're not getting any payoff for forward thinking actions. Lets not focus on this particular issue, but rather try to solve more generalistic things.
So yeah, while I really don't mind Google employing every sort of person there independent of political leaning, religion, gender, skin color and whatnot, when one person decides to share their personal views with the entire company and then the world, you are obviously going to be judged for it both inside and outside the company. This isn't new or anything, it's a problem people have with knowing what to share, when and how.
And if it reaches a point where it's affecting parts of the company that they've no doubt spend a metric ton of money and time, you can expect to be fired for it, no matter what the subject is.
If he's a reasonable enough person, he'll find another job, end of story.
I don't think anyone is claiming that women don't feel like women or that men don't feel like men. What is claimed is that women, just like men, when put in an unthreatening environment, can work equally productively. You probably don't realize how threatening a room full of strange men feels to many women.
Google are trying to create a non-threatening environment, and failing - I'm not sure I'd work there. I'm a female senior dev contractor in finance in London, and the banks pretty much get it right.
Guess what? I am now not feeling 100% safe using Chrome. I am seriously going to look into switching back to Mozilla. I don't want to trust my browser binary to a company which has a clear political slant.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There are no biological differences that matter in that workplace. There are huge mental differences between two men, you can have one far more alpha than the average amongst all men, and you can have one far less assertive than the female average. That is, the average of men and women are closer together than the extremes within the male or female populations. By the author's logic, you could say there are clear biological differences between blondes and brunettes, or tall and short people, etc.
If you read what the author actually said, it's that the differences are good and you want those differences within the workplace and even in the same types of jobs.
Why does a room full of strange men feel threatening to women?
Are you saying the men are doing something wrong? That they are by their biology prone to pose a risk to women? And since you stated it that way, do you think that the reverse is not true? A man entering a room full of women he doesn't know feels no apprehension at all?
In this case you are either agreeing with the fact that men and women function differently or you are being sexist yourself by focusing on one gender above the other.
Or is it the perception of men that make the woman worried for no reason? In this case, aren't these hypothetical women being sexist by painting the other gender with a very broad and unflattering brush?
I just don't get why we need to make such a big deal out of this. You will always find scenarios where women, on average, do better or worse or equal to men. It just depends on the scenario and what the rules are by which you judge. This is a never ending discussion because there will not and cannot be an equilibrium where nobody ever feels underappreciated, overpressured or what have you.
I will go as far as stating this: The stress this political correctness puts on our daily interactions far exceeds the stress people feel due to society's inherent sexism.
Getting pinched in the butt or being pegged as an unfeeling beast from time to time cannot compare to having to watch every word, every look, every movement, hell every damn thought all the time.
Sure, getting fired because you wouldn't spread your legs for the boss or because you dare ask for working part-time because you want to be a better dad is going too far. There is shit nobody should ever have to take but come on, what's happening right now is 1984ish, just not in a way we would have ever expected.
> Telling 1/3 of your colleagues that they are not as biologically suited to working at your workplace as you are isn't violent, but it is hostile.
That's not what was said. It was proposed that biological factors (which give rise to psychological and social factors) would contribute or even explain a gender ratio imbalance. Please look into Finland, where the equality of opportunity has been achieved in a surprisingly progressive manner. The gender ratios in labor have grown farther apart, rather than lessened, in many industries that the opportunities were meant to correct.
> It's also contrary to the evidence
Please cite this evidence so I can tease out the nature of the hypothesis. I cannot fathom what you think you read. This fragment...which you go on to call irrational and stupid, is amusingly redundant. If the evidence existed, wouldn't it be rational to act on it? Even if the appropriate action was simply to articulate a descriptive narrative in a memo as possible causal factor to some perceived cultural problem?
Color me interested. Open dialog about sensitive topics is a tool that I'm grateful we have here, unlike those within Google.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
So then why aren't they firing the bullies that think other employees have no right to speak up?
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I can see that while people didn't love Trump's policy, they definitely preferred his open "in your face" approach to politics. Yes, he's a part of the establishment and he's quite open about that.
Meanwhile, Clinton was just slimy. She hid behind the face of "defender of minorities", all the while playing for the establishment behind the scenes. People hate being lied to like that. They prefer an open, frank asshole than a smooth slimeball.
It wasn't so much of a problem that she was pro-PC. It's how she used it to hide her little swamp. And the crowds of raging or crying idiots who panicked that "Trump will rape us all, and Hillary DESERVED to win!" - people so blinded by her little pro-PC lies that they completely missed the amounts of dirt she was hiding behind them - that was a pitiful sight.
Trump is pretty transparent. You may hate what he's doing. He's doing a lot of stuff people (including me) think shortsighted and unfair and puzzling, and I don't really see where he's going with what he's doing, because I don't think it's all going anywhere towards "MAGA". But at least we *see* what he's doing. We can be puzzled, disappointed, worried, but at least for now, we're not feeling *cheated*. He's actually less bad than I thought he would be.
Meanwhile, Democrats are slimier than ever.
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There are no biological differences that matter in that workplace.
According to numerous studies, the IQ for men and women have different distributions, with women having less deviation than men, meaning women are more concentrated around the center of the graph, and men having greater numbers toward the extremes. These are measurable facts. Here is how it matters in this workplace:
For IQs between about 90 and 118, there are more women than men, and for IQs below 90 and above 118, there are more men, with the difference increasing the further from center you go. The variability is such that the ratio of men to women with IQs above 130 is about 2:1, meaning on average for every woman with an IQ above 130 there are two men. The average IQ for a US computer science major today is about 125, with harder colleges claiming even higher average IQs, and a corresponding male to female ratio. For example, in 2014 at Stanford, the ratio was 69.7% male to 30.3% female, which is reasonably consistent with the IQ distribution graphs.
Now move this into industry (yes, this is making the assumption that IQ correlates to performance as a computer scientist). If two-thirds of the CS majors from better colleges are male, and the differences in the IQ graphs become even more pronounced for the above average of those, what do you think the ratio will be for companies that try to hire the best of the best, like Google? Could that translate into 80% of the available best of the best being male?
Are these research results sexist, or is the attempt to discuss the differences from a scientific viewpoint sexist? Google seems to think the latter.