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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.
You want to measure diversity at google? Count the political bumper stickers on the cars that park there. You'll have no problem finding Hillary and Sanders stickers, but Trump stickers are rarer than hen's teeth.
They built this absolutely toxic environment for conservatives under the cover of "diversity". Why should anyone believe they are going to do anything except continue to make conservatives feel like pariahs?
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.
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.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
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.
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.
They've basically built a company populated with rabid malcontents that are prepared to harm or kill their cow-orkers.
I think orking cows is unacceptable behavior even in California.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Failure to attend the requisite Two Minutes of Hate will be interpreted as dissent.
As if most engineers attend that sort of event.
What about engineerettes?
lucm, indeed.
If women engineers attend, then they are just reinforcing the manifesto's position that women gravitate to social events more than men.
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.
Has all the appeal and sincerity of a North Korean democratic election.
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.
I wonder if this "manifesto" will do for Google what that sexual harassment post did for Uber.
Wired has a writeup
Some upvoted questions:
Of course, the same article has such gems as:
Which is of course not at all what the document said.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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.
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/...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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)