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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.
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.
The purpose of a "townhall meeting" is dialog. Google had already made it clear that they want a monologue. Cancelling it was very sensible.
we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree
Without letting the people who disagree with me talk.
Watching the google execs dance and do dog tricks at the command of this completely intolerant ideology that poses as this loving progressive way of thinking has been really amusing. They are all trying so hard and falling all over themselves to offend the least amount of people as possible. It kinda proves one of the points of that former employee's memo.
What is the point of making sure everybody looks different, when you require them all to be the same person?
The purpose of this town hall is to help Google PR and to show they are acting 'responsibly' to ensure a hostile work environment for those who wrongthink.
I'm sure people will feel free to speak out now that someone was fired after speaking out.
Given that the original manifesto was originally published to a supposedly anonymous internal forum, I think being "outed" publicly is a valid concern for someone who dares to have a different perspective.
I'm not a Trump supporter (but I was also never a Hilary supporter), but I am a San Francisco native, I work in Silicon Valley, and I did interview with Google and did fairly well (though I chose to work elsewhere, a decision I'm very thankful for after this debacle). I also consider myself to be independent these days.
That being said, I think there's several reasons for a lack of Trump bumper stickers you'd see in Google's parking lot.
1) I think you're right, that conservatives would be afraid (and rightfully so) to show Trump bumper stickers in the Google parking lot for fear of violating the group think.
2) Silicon Valley is pretty left leaning in general, there's just not a whole lot of conservatives in the area.
3) I think having a Trump bumper sticker in the bay area would be a great way to get your car vandalized.
Indeed, my first thought is, why would anyone show up who has a Wrong Thought? Nobody wants to get fired.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
"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"
Translation: If you know of a work colleague who doesn't already march lock-step with Google's peecee agenda, then now's the time to warn them to get with the program.
If it's a mandatory meeting, I'd attend and unless I had another confirmed and accepted job offer elsewhere, I'd keep out of any "discussion" with regards to this topic.
Whenever you're asked for "open and honest" discussion, it's like when someone asks if you're stopped beating your children, a no-win scenario.
All this seems to be a complete distraction from what a job is supposed to be. Somewhere you go to work and make money.
The purpose of this town hall is to help Google PR and to show they are acting 'responsibly' to ensure a hostile work environment for those who wrongthink.
Who do you think a jury is more likely to have sympathy for?
(a) The woman engineer who's paid less and faces an environment where people say women are naturally bad at being useful,
(b) the male engineer who forces his opinions about why women are bad at being useful on others
Even if you understand where the guy's coming from, that doesn't mean that supporting him is objectively the right choice for a jury, a company, or a community.
As Gad Saad said: "We're good at promoting endless forms of diversity: racial diversity, ethnic diversity, religious diversity, sexual orientation diversity, and so on. But the most important diversity of all, which is intellectual diversity: no, that one we simply won't tolerate. We should all think the same way. "
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I've been really vocal about my disappointment in google firing James Damore. Let's use James Damore's words to address what you're saying.
When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions.
In other words, it's possible that the reason there aren't very many conservatives working for google has more to do from the distribution it hires from, than any sort of bigotry. Population density is well correlated with liberalism and Google tends to hire from urban or suburban areas.
I agree they've increased the hostility in the environment, however your hypothesis for why there may be so few Trump supporters in the parking lot is not a slam dunk.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
how do they plan on outing the wrong thinkers?
According to TFA they have already been outed. Googlers were allowed to pre-submit questions, and told they could do so anonymously, yet their questions along with their names have been leaked and published on several websites.
In terms of ineptness and incompetence, Google is handling this about as well as the British handled Gallipoli.
If I was a conservative employee at Google, after the last week, I'd keep my mouth shut and look for another job as quickly as possible.
They've shown EXACTLY what they REALLY think about someone asking an honest question.
And no pronouncements or showmanship or promises of safety are going to convince anyone otherwise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I don't know where you've worked, but every company only wants a monologue. They will tell you they want a dialogue, and talk about "team-building" and "horizontal management structures" and other happy-crappy bullshit.
But the system is designed for monologue. Management says "jump" and you jump. Welcome to the world of work in late-stage capitalism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You have some issues with facts:
(a) The woman engineer who's paid less and insists that people citing scientific research after being asked for their opinion constitutes a 'hostile work environment'
(b) the male engineer who responds to a request for dialog about diversity with an essay citing more than two dozen sources and supports increasing diversity in a more effective way
It's objectively better to support B, but since one side can't stop lying they'll mindlessly go with A, regardless of the facts.
See what happens when a repetitively smart Trump voter outs themselves.
Damore is strongly left-wing, he merely dared to be not orthodox enough.
I'm outright scared by modern US-style politics (most western countries have a variant of this): you see nothing but echo chambers, both left and right wingers carefully avoid places where they could be not in majority. And both positions have became so extreme that applying even basic reason is enough to rip them to shreds -- but either side will instead consider you to be a heretic instead of entertaining the idea that perhaps their religion might be unsound.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You bet they are! They're not just fine, women can be great engineers.
But that's actually not related to the issue at hand at all.
Here's the issue: somebody observed that engineering is a male-dominated field. They decided that was a problem. Next they decided the reason for that divide is because of rampant sexism, and next they decided that the solution to the problem was to enforce quotas that discriminate against male applicants in order to try to push the ratio closer to 50%.
That's what James Damore is objecting to. His memo is basically saying that there are reasons for the imbalanced ratio -- reasons that aren't "women aren't good at engineering" or "I hate women" -- and that even if that is a problem, implementing sexist hiring policies is not the right solution.
His opposition is trying very hard to make you believe that he's just a misogynist who wants women to be oppressed, because doing that is easier than trying to refute any of the sources he cited.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Two words you need to learn: statistical dispersion.
For the sake of argument let's take "manliness" and "womanliness" as givens, and not some kind of social construct. Not all men are equally manly; some are very manly and some are sissies. Likewise for women -- not all women are equally "womanly".
So you have two population bell-curves, and the curves overlap. That is to say some women are more manly than some men. Everybody knows this, and yet somehow they talk as if all men were identically masculine and all women were identically feminine.
What does this has to do with engineering? Not much. Different types of engineering have different requirements. Women as a population tend to have slightly better verbal reasoning skills and men as a population tend to have slightly better spatial reasoning. So you'd expect women to do better, say, as software engineers; and men to do better as mechanical engineers.
However the small population differences in ability are dwarfed by individual variability. There are men with extremely formidable verbal reasoning skills, and women with astonishing spatial reasoning skills. Case in point: when I was at MIT I knew a woman who got her PhD in EE and was the first person to figure out how to fold a stellated icosahedron in origami. I don't care if you are a man, even a manly man, it's a safe bet that her right brain could kick your right brain's ass.
And that's OK. It doesn't make you less of a man; it means you have to judge people as individuals.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
(c) I would hope that the jury would have enough sense to actually READ what James Damore wrote and not fabricate shit like you did.
In 2017, more men than women are graduating with CS degrees. Also, in 2017, scientists are expected to understanding sample sizes when drawing generalizations. Also, in 2017, scientists are expected to not to straw man an argument. Damore didn't say that women couldn't hack it, he just said there were fewer to hire and proposed some reasons why that may be. If you don't understand the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, you probably shouldn't wade into this argument.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
The function of cigarette shaming it to make the filthy smokers keep their goddamn drugs out of air that other people have to breath. Who gives a flying fuck about their health -- that's their own business, and they can kill themselves faster for all I care, so long as they leave me out of it. It's public health that's at stake there.
Somebody being fat, on the other hand, is nobody's business but their own.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Someone should go in there and ask the Question
Googler: "Sundar, Have you stopped abusing your children"
Sundar: "I have never abused my children"
Googler: Thats not the Question i asked. Have you Stopped?
Sundar: I never started
Googler: So you are saying you havn't Stopped?
Sundar: Speechless
Googler : And thats how your Diversity training is run. They assume that the White Male is biased. Well this particular White Male is not biased and feels no need to atone for the sins of others.
Sundar: Has a moment of absolute clarity, resigns from Alphabet and moves to Tibet to study Buddhism. (I wish)
**Life is too short to be serious**
Failure to attend the requisite Two Minutes of Hate will be interpreted as dissent.
When you fire someone for voicing an opinion, and then turn around and say that people should feel safe speaking out, don't be surprised when nobody believes you.
What do you mean when you say "alt-right"?
Anyone who doesn't sacrifice their common sense at the altar of virtue signaling.
lucm, indeed.
Conservatives love playing the victim card as often as possible.
If it was the case (which isn't), liberals would only have themselves to blame for that, since they basically invented the victimhood culture.
For instance, please visit a conservative campus and find mentions of "safe space" or "code of conducts", or provide a real life example of conservatives rioting over a "not my president" chant under Obama.
I'm not holding my breath.
lucm, indeed.
He stated no such thing. His premise was that each individual should be judged on their skills and abilities, not their gender or ethnicity and he was stating that on the average women were less interested and/or less suited for some jobs than others. He was very clear about the statistical nature of his evaluation. In fact he showed a graph of what a stereotype looks like (two vertical lines - i.e., no overlap) and what he thought reality was (overlapping bell like curves -- although had he realized the scrutiny this casual memo would get, he probably would have made the tails of both curves on both ends reach to the same point).
Why do we even have female sports leagues distinct from male sports leagues if there is no difference between men and women? Why are there any gender specific activities? Why does the The United States Chess Federation have specific rankings for female players as opposed to just lumping everyone into the same ranking ONLY and not even noting gender in the entries? Why are the same people, esp. women, objecting to this memo not calling for the elimination of female sports leagues and separate rankings of women in pursuits like chess?
Why are there, in spite of outreach and diversity efforts reaching back to the day that people graduating from university now with BSc degrees were born, still so few women who choose computer science as a major (as opposed to biological sciences where the balance is much more equal)?
As he pointed out, over 90% of the workplace deaths are suffered by males. Why don't I hear "woman equality" activists calling to fix this problem and either force more women in to dangerous professions like logging or roofing (which seems preferable to achieving equality just by executing random women in office workplaces until an equal number of men and women die in the workplace).
long term solutions to the problem
What problem? Not enough women in STEM? Why don't we worry as a society about the gender gap in nursing, kindergarten teaching or flight attending? Why don't we talk about the gender gap in the Titanic survivors? Is this really about diversity, or is this just plain feminism (as in promoting the female agenda over the male agenda)?
lucm, indeed.
Wait, you think a corporate workplace is for you to "discuss the issues we want to discuss"?
Well, the author of the memo got that idea from the meetings he was dragged into to discuss the need for diversity. He was presented with statements and then he researched and produced a document showing that those statements didn't hold up. For doing such research and sharing it privately with people who call themselves "skeptics" at Google (presumably because they enjoy poking holes and correcting less-than-fully-rigorous conceptions), he was publicly exposed and summarily fired without cause (well, he was given a cause which was factually accurate, so without due cause).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Reasonable discussion looks something like this:
Your conclusions are based on faulty data, study A and B was debunked by X, Y, and Z.
This is not what happened.
What happened is approximately like this:
Personal insults. Outright lies. Straw man take downs.
Even your response, reasonably civil, assumes that James Damore only cited Wikipedia. This is not the case. He cited peer reviewed articles from respectable journals.
I understand actually reading what he wrote might end up getting you expelled from your social group, but you can still do it in secret. This way you won't sound quite as misinformed to anyone who read the article.
Same here.
I really wouldn't have wanted Johnson to be President (he's only slightly more competent than Trump), but there was no chance of him winning and I use my vote to signal to both the Republicans and Democrats where they need to shift to get my vote (i.e., towards individual liberty and freedom in all dimensions -- including economic and social). Voting for the (R) or (D) just makes the respective party think you are a reliable (R) or (D) voter and there's no need to change anything.
Of course, I'm in California so it really doesn't matter who I vote for for President -- California will not, in the current environment, ever vote for, and cast all their EC votes for, anything but a Democrat for President. If you vote Democrat, it won't change that. If you vote Republican, it won't change that. If, in some bizarre case, the Democratic candidate was so unappealing (much worse than Hillary) that California actually voted for the Republican candidate, there would have been such a national landslide for the Republican candidate they would win the EC with or without California.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I wish it weren't such a difficult discussion for people to have these days.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research. We can look at the studies that point out that women are more neurotic, agreeable, etc while men are more aggressive, goal oriented, etc and that's colored by how we already feel. This guy takes the conclusion from them that women are inherently less capable than the men. I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level. I can see the guy claiming these are inherent biological differences and think that while the inherent biological differences are significant the culture can't be written off to make that claim.
If it were merely a matter of what the studies say and conclude then the utter shit storms we see wouldn't be happening the way they are.
I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level.
Which is the first reasonable response I've heard. And I could counter by pointing out that it's still an existing general sex difference rather than sexism in the industry, or with studies of how people are kinder to women and protect them from aggression and how culture (in general) acts to amplify almost any existing sex difference. Then you could come up with a response, and the next thing you know we'd be having a rational discussion.
But we can't have that, because the opening move of everyone on your side (including you) was you misrepresentation, lying, badmouthing and name calling.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research.
Yeah, I wish people like you could get past it. /snark But we're all only human, right? :(
This guy takes the conclusion from them that women are inherently less capable than the men.
The article did no such thing. You will have to stretch definition of 'capable' in unusual ways to make such claim. To summarize the article, it states that men on average are more focused on status while women are more focused on relationships. Neither of these would fit traditional definition of capable.
It's easy to know the right answer 99% of the time. Our whole speech system is based on this -- that when I say a word, people know what it means, and when they say a word, I know what it means. The problem is there's one specific area of knowledge that very few people ever know: what it's like to be the opposite sex.
No one's really wrong here. I just think that that's how you get lots of men who feel like they should know the right answer trying to explain what they think women are all going through. They share their ideas about why they think women are probably having trouble getting in the door at computer programming jobs -- based on their own personal experiences as men seeking those same jobs. And since it's so rare -- to suddenly discover one small domain of knowledge which they can never, ever fully experience -- I think people end up taking shortcuts.
This isn't limited to companies. It affects the entire country. The one poll which correctly predicted the 2016 election noticed that Trump supporters were less likely to reveal to pollsters that they were Trump supporters. And when they took steps to compensate for it in their poll weighting, lo and behold they predicted Trump would win the election.
The vitriol and violence in the media and by protesters created a culture of shaming Trump supporters, who promptly went turtle to protect themselves. Consequently they ended up undercounted in all the polls, but showed up in the election.
We need to take a lesson from science. When the theory of continental drift was first proposed, geologists initially scoffed at it and dismissed its proponents. But they never ridiculed them, never excluded them from publishing papers. And as more evidence was gathered, the community gradually came around to accept it as correct. Democracy gets it strength from the diversity of viewpoints within its population. This allows us to think up, consider, and try all sorts of different ideas which would never even be suggested in other forms of government. "Shaming" people with unpopular views is detrimental to a functional democracy.
The best quote I heard on this phenomenon was Wired's interview with someone who was actually good friends with James Damore when he was still a college student -- and who had a surprisingly balanced response when he read about all the angry attacks on Damore.
This classmate says he did not view Damore as “some sort of raving sexist or bigot.” But, this classmate adds, “When you’re really smart you’re prone to thinking that you can solve these big issues if you just think real hard on them, and if you don’t have the social skills to navigate a dicey issue, it can go wildly awry."
He didn't conclude women are less capable in tech. He said they are more likely to prefer another field. Huge difference!
along with their names have been leaked and published on several websites
That's inaccurate. Some of the questions were published, but not the names of the people asking them or any other identifying information.
Unless you have a link demonstrating otherwise...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I wish it weren't such a difficult discussion for people to have these days.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research. We can look at the studies that point out that women are more neurotic, agreeable, etc while men are more aggressive, goal oriented, etc and that's colored by how we already feel. This guy takes the conclusion from them that women are inherently less capable than the men. I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level. I can see the guy claiming these are inherent biological differences and think that while the inherent biological differences are significant the culture can't be written off to make that claim.
If it were merely a matter of what the studies say and conclude then the utter shit storms we see wouldn't be happening the way they are.
Yeah that would be confusing cause and effect.
But say for sake of argument, that testosterone levels are a cause, which lead men to be more competitive, be more aggressive in dealing with situations, and generally be more willing to work longer hours, make more sacrifices for work, and so on.
Now, if that is true, for sake of argument, then I would think that we NEED to research possible male female trait differences, in order to expose the ways in which work culture has become SKEWED by male culture.
In other words, if men tend to be more aggressive, and women more relationship-oriented and intuitive and flexible ("neurotic"), then we need to CHANGE work culture so that its standards more suit both men AND women.
Because if we don't, then that leaves women as forced to work in a male version of work culture, and so of course women will be driven out of the workplace.
Just like, if the workplace culture values people who can cheat, then that'll drive out the honest people.
Now, simply saying that nobody can ask whether men and women on the whole have some different tendencies, just IGNORES the problem, and leaves women having to adapt to male culture. And some individual women will do this very well as the individual is always different, but if the question is, why isn't 50% of our workforce female, then the average traits do matter.
The PC thing is when we believe that culture IS language (postmodernism came from writers and literature, and is heavily language biased -- biased to looking for causes in language rather than in science or material things) and so it is PC to see all social problems like racism and sexism are embedded in the structure of language itself, so all you have to do is forbid people from saying certain things and the biases will "disappear" -- which sadly entirely misses the role of other factors.
So by simply banning certain talk they avoid having to face the issue that maybe their inherently male biased culture would have to CHANGE. This is PC being used to oppress women and hold on to whatever male-oriented advantage Google imagines it holds. Which ignores that female traits are just as important if not more so in the workplace.
There is a big difference between what a job is trying to achieve and how it goes about achieving it. Maybe Google+ would have worked a lot better if the culture hadn't been "engineering" (ie. male) dominated, for example. Or that the culture of hanging our at the office all times of day isn't actually a young male thing, and women tend to want to have a life, as well as succeed in work.
But if you can avoid the question as Google is doing, you can keep the status quo.
“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?”
Nothing. That is the problem with affirmative action: by definition some candidates are less qualified. Which inevitably means that all members of the group are looked at skeptically, because you just don't know which ones are qualified, and which ones are not.
Affirmative action creates a hostile work environment.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This Damore fellow seems naive. You don't have free speech at work. Anyone who has been around the block a few times should know that.
I hold some controversial views about politics and society. I don't talk about them at work. I keep conversation with my colleagues limited to the work we are doing and maybe the weather and what I did over the weekend. Even then, they get a sanitized version of my weekend. Management is going to do what they're going to do, and likely don't give a fuck what I think. Sure, I'll make suggestions in the proper setting if I think something can be done better. But as a Systems Admin I'm not going to weigh in, uninvited, on the company's hiring policies; especially about something as contentious and politically charged as women's aptitude for engineering.
I'm not sure this guy should have been fired. But the fact is he stuck his head up and it got lopped off. Companies have cultures. Not everyone if a fit for every culture, and the culture is likely not going to change just for you. Don't like it? Don't work for Google. I have refused job offers because the people at the company seemed like dicks. Damore should just move on. He won't have free speech ant his next job either.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I posted an extensive list of criticisms and rebuttals to his specific arguments and sources.
First, you do know that you can post links to such posts so that people don't have to hunt them down in a 600+ response thread right? Second, cherry picking is not a rebuttal! Everything I see here from you is either regurgitated SJW narrated "opinion" or cherry picking fragments of the paper to complain about. Let us see your 10 page manifesto and decide who has the better grasp on science. Hint: my bet is on the guy with a masters in biology and several years of work toward his PHD.
It was modded down as being a "troll". That's why you aren't seeing the considered responses, they are being censored and suppressed to enforce an echo chamber.
I read at -1 and and have to wonder how many sock puppets you have. You seem to get up modded for poor posts quite often. Like this one complaining about unfair moderation on other posts. Your whine gets moderated "interesting", where most people complaining about moderation receive "-1 off topic" or "redundant".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.