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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.
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.
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.
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.