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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.
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?
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.