Google Cancels Town Hall To Discuss Diversity In Its Ranks (nbcnews.com)

NBC News originally reported: Google employees will gather for a town hall meeting Thursday afternoon to discuss the tensions ignited by a memo circulated inside the company that claimed to explain why more women are not engineers. Town hall meetings are nothing new at Google, but this one will likely be different after the so-called "Google Manifesto" went viral over the weekend, adding fresh fuel to the debate around gender bias in Silicon Valley. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an email earlier this week that he would cut his family vacation short in order to facilitate the forum. "The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree -- while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct," he wrote. "I'd encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same." The town hall comes amid a report from The Guardian that as many as 60 women are considering filing a class action lawsuit against Google, alleging sexism and wage disparity.
UPDATE: NBC News now reports the event has been cancelled, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai saying "Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be 'outed' publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall... we need to step back and create a better set of conditions for us to have the discussion." Instead of the company-wide format, Google will now hold several smaller forums "to gather and engage with Googlers, where people can feel comfortable to speak freely," Pichai wrote.

Comments

Canceled.

[0100010001010011]

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Re:Canceled.

[Mr307]

The 'alt-right' is the catchall boogyman of the authoritarian left.

Re:Canceled.

[AmiMoJo]

The alt-right are a self-identifying group who split away from the mainstream right which they felt had become too centrist. They reject most things mainstream, especially the media and current laws on equality and welfare. They want a big reset, a big change in the way society thinks, aka the Red Pill.

The alt-right centres around sites like Breitbart and InfoWars. People like Steve Bannon are considered to be at the forefront of the movement. Sub-groups include the Tea Party and various nationalists.

Wikipeida has a quite detailed article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Look, women are fine at engineering

[WillAffleckUW]

Fun Fact, I'm at one of the world's best universities, filled with highly educated professional women who are in STEM. Advanced Math, Statistics, Genetics, Biochem, Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, AI, you name it.

Half of our students. Half of our faculty. We create more practical science in a day than you see in most countries. And tons of patents.

This reminds me of when the Canadian Army was resistant to women in combat. We did studies. We found that women made better fighter pilots than men did (who do you think fly those A-10 Warthogs?), I've trained and served with highly decorated women of all ranks. Our main resistance was the senior NCOs, with similar attitudes to the ones I hear coming from Google engineers. They were wrong then - back in the 1980s. They're wrong now, here at Google, in the 2100s.

It's 2017. Not 1957.

Re:Look, women are fine at engineering

[misexistentialist]

the fact you think Canada has fought air wars this century proves how deep your delusion is

Re:Look, women are fine at engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

Fun Fact, I'm at one of the world's best universities,

Yes, a university whose primary attendee is essentially defined by their position outside of the norm (i.e. the top x% of learners) is an ideal sample for guaging the average characteristics of the groups they fall within. /s

Nobody reasonable is claiming that individual women are incapable of excelling in STEM. The document that started this whole thing sought to explain the current status quo based on average characteristics of a group. You and most of the students around you are outliers and do not represent the mean.

The author of the document is arguing that the WAY we're trying to achieve diversity amounts to brute force and that we need to re-examine our approach, as well as examine our understanding of what constitutes a successfully diverse environment.

Re:Look, women are fine at engineering

[PopeRatzo]

the fact you think Canada has fought air wars this century proves how deep your delusion is

Why you stupid sonofabitch. Canada's RCAF has been fighting in the same wars as the United States since 2000. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Bosnia, Iraq again.

Canadian special forces have been fighting in and around Mosul for years, side by side with US special forces. If you should ever meet a member of the Canadian military, especially one of their pilots, you should try asking them how deep their delusion is. Let me know how it works out for you.

Re:Look, women are fine at engineering

[HornWumpus]

University of Wisconsin, engineering school graduate gender breakdown. 2014 only year provided. From https://ecs.engr.wisc.edu/publ...

BS: male 467, female 115

MS: male 265, female 86

PhD: male 63, female 21

Bullshit on you. Also more than half as many MS grads as BS?...something fishy. Are they making Master's degrees cheap in terms of time and money? One year?

Rush

[Tulsa_Time]

RUSH: They can’t be open about what they think. They have to follow the Google groupthink or they’re going to be canned. They’re not allowed to dissent. And yet these are people claiming to be the greatest defenders of First Amendment free speech.

Conservatives, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I have read this guy sounded more like a moderate and provided long term solutions to the problem, but pointed out short term it isn't really helping things.

Pushing education and activities to get women interested, while at the same time helping employees organize so that more feminine or sociable guys work with more sociable women, while taking note that some people will not be assertive about desiring raises, and thus putting more burden on managers to offer raises/promotions to their employees as they reach skill/veterancy related milestores at their jobs.

Places like google are no more 'right' for Conservatives than say a Church based organization, the police, or the military is for atheist Liberals. If either individual wants to join the 'other side's' organizations, they go into it understanding it will not be a welcoming environment for their views. Sort of like some touristy American going to a Muslim country, China, or North Korea, and wondering why they don't respect his/her freedoms there.

Re:Purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Cassie Jaye's Red Pill documentary is one of the most important films to come out in the past year, its basic argument is that men are already not valued by society and the increased emphasis on women's issues only reinforces the current state of affairs. So a jury wouldn't side with the male engineer, because no one would actually expect them to. It changes nothing. But if the woman engineer wins a settlement, this only increases social entropy, more women will be emboldened to take advantage, to get some money just for being women.

Summary misrepresents the memo

[nut]

I _READ_ the memo, and nowhere did it claim to explain why more women are not engineers. It did suggest that a number of possible reasons, including inherent gender differences, had not been ruled out by any scholarly study. Not quite the same thing.

Re:Count the bumper stickers

[meglon]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Not a day goes by without a conservative whining about those mean old liberals. Conservatives on /. are not any different, they just down-mod anything they don't agree with or like as a mob.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.theatlantic.com/na...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Now, if you're trying to suggest that Obama was treated far better by the right than Trump is being treated by the left, there's really no need to continue this conversation, as you are nothing more than a brainwashed idiot who's incapable of thought.

Re:Hilarious

[uncqual]

I suspect that the google executives that understand technology (so, likely not VP of HR and the "Chief Diversity Officer") know deep in their hearts that these gender diversity programs are mostly nonsense and unfair to star performers of both genders -- if nothing else, if there is a problem, it's way too late to address the issue in the google workplace as there just are not enough women getting Computer Science degrees to have the "ideal" ratio of male:female developers that mirrors the population as a whole.

This may explain their tin ear on this one -- when you're playing a role for show, you have no internal moral compass to guide you so it's really hard to know what is worthy of firing someone over and what is not.

Anyway, if I was looking at joining a company, the fact that they have honest and analytical employees like James Damore who are willing to point out that the Emperor Has No Clothes would make me more likely to join.

Re:Yeah.

[murdocj]

People are entitled to speak their opinions, but Google isn't required to employee them. For example, if an employee expresses an opinion that non-whites are inferior, he can do so, but he can then also be fired.

Welcome to reality.

Re:Purpose

[MightyYar]

Wired has a writeup

Some upvoted questions:

“The doc asserted that Google has a lower bar for diversity candidates,” reads one question ranked highly by employees in an internal voting system. “This is hurting minority Googlers because it creates the perception that they are less qualified. What can we do to combat that perception?”

“I am a moderately conservative Googler, and I am and have been scared to share my beliefs,” the question reads. “The loud voice here is the liberal one. Conservative voices are hushed. What is leadership doing to ensure Googlers like me feel invited and accepted, not just tolerated or safe from angry mobs?”

Of course, the same article has such gems as:

The document cited purported principles of evolutionary psychology to argue that women are not well-suited to be good engineers.

Which is of course not at all what the document said.

Re:Purpose

[AmiMoJo]

He wrote that women are less able to deal with stress, and thus there are fewer of them in stressful jobs. That's clearly saying that women are less capable of handling stress. He even proposes reducing stress as a way to mitigate this reduced capability.

Re:Count the bumper stickers

[AmiMoJo]

Really, have you already forgotten the violence and racism that emerged when Obama was elected?

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundi...

Kaylon Johnson, an African American campaign worker for Obama, was physically assaulted for wearing an Obama T-shirt in Louisiana following the 2008 election. The three white male attackers shouted "Fuck Obama!" and "N*gger president!" as they broke Johnsonâ(TM)s nose and fractured his eye-socket, requiring surgery.

More frequently, Obamaâ(TM)s presidency was marked by effigies of our first black president hanging from nooses across the country, for example in Kentucky, Washington State, and Maine, or being burned around the world. What Trump supporters fail to remember is that following Obamaâ(TM)s election, property was destroyed across the country, for example in Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Carolina, and a predominately black church was torched in Massachusetts.

(links to coverage of these events are in the article)

Wikipedia has an interesting list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

November 6 - Donald Trump called for protests, based on the mistaken belief that Obama had lost the popular vote when re-elected.

I guess Trump supported protests against himself when he lost the popular vote too.