Slashdot Mirror
From Google To Yahoo, Tech Grapples With White Male Discontent (bloomberg.com)
Reader joshtops shares a Bloomberg report: Google isn't the only Silicon Valley employer being accused of hostility to white men. Yahoo and Tata Consultancy Services were already fighting discrimination lawsuits brought by white men before Google engineer James Damore ignited a firestorm -- and got himself fired -- with an internal memo criticizing the company's diversity efforts and claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers. The Yahoo case began last year when two men sued, claiming they'd been unfairly fired after managers allegedly manipulated performance evaluations to favor women. They claim Marissa Mayer approved the review process and was involved in their terminations, and last month a judge ordered the former chief executive be deposed. TCS, meanwhile, is fighting three men who claim the Mumbai-based firm discriminates against non-Indians at its U.S. offices.
White males are not very PC today but it's hard to run a company without any of them. The trick is to find a balance where you treat them shitty enough to make the left happy but not so shitty they go somewhere more tolerant.
I gotta say, I get treated pretty nicely. When I was a twenty-something I was really resentful because I couldn't figure out how to get dates. I want to believe that there is more to this kerfuffle than that, but I really just don't get it. Why are my youthful brethren so discontent?
The memo not only does NOT make the claim that women are less suited to tech roles and leadership roles, it makes the counter claim, that men have designed those roles to make them less friendly to women and that by altering those roles we can improve diversity and decrease the gender gap.
But I've yet to see a single neoliberal source treat the memo honestly, every neoliberal source I've seen treats Damore radically different than his behavior reflects. I don't agree with everything he says, but to claim he is against diversity is straight slander here.
The “Google Manifesto”: Bad Biology, Ignorance of Evolutionary Processes, and Privilege
Pretend you're gay. You'll gets lots of kudos and become part of a protected class.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
>> claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers.
Come on, He didn't make such a claim. He said biology may play a part in women's preferences in choosing to go into the field.
maybe you should say the same to women & other minorities.
With a CS degree who can't find work as a programmer. It's got nothing to do with skin color or sex. None of us can compete with India. Sad thing is a lot of us voted Trump because he at least have IT workers lip service. Last I heard his plan was to cut back on low skill immigrants in favor of high skill ones. E.g. the ones gunning for the same jobs as me and everyone else reading this post...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The kind that have vanished. There's nothing more dangerous than a man, any man, with no job prospects and therefore no marriage prospects.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And better yet, treat them exactly the same as you would treat women or minorities. That means no discriminating against people based on gender or race (as is alleged by the "discontent white males")
Slashdot, that's not what the memo said.
You can agree with the memo or you can't, but at least get the f$#@ing facts straight.
But don't worry, discrimination against white males is socially acceptable.
I've been in the computing industry for decades now. Despite the recent rise of so-called "social justice", things are worse now than they've ever been.
I've worked alongside many women since the 1970s. I've worked alongside open homosexuals, and even some transgendered people, since the 1980s. I've worked with people having every imaginable shade of skin color over the years. And you know what? We all got along fine. We accomplished some great technological achievements. We didn't spend all day fixated on things like gender, sexual preference, and skin color. We had real work to do, and we did this work together.
What we're seeing now is a relatively new phenomenon. It really wasn't an issue in our industry until leftists came in and started segregating people into different groups based on various irrelevant traits.
Before this leftist agitation, the only factor we really cared about was merit. The one and only question that mattered was "Can you get the work done properly, on time and under budget?". It was not "What color is your skin?" or "What gender do you think you are?" or "What kind of sexual intercourse do you prefer?".
Our industry's focus used to be computer hardware and computer software. Now the industry is more focused on penises, vaginas, anal intercourse, sex change operations, and skin color than it is about anything having to do with computing.
I know, I know, somebody will trot out the "Get off my lawn you damn kids!" or "Shaddap, gramps!" or "Remembering the past better than it was." lines. But the reality is that these are recent issues, and they were introduced by leftists. Until these leftists, many of them with absolutely no technical abilities at all, showed up and infiltrated our industry, we had a natural diversity that was unmatched. Leftists manufactured the division that we see today. Before then, the computing industry was far more concerned about merit and ability than it ever was about gender, or sexual preference, or skin color, or other meaningless attributes like those.
Wow. Now imagine we called black people being discriminated against "black discontent."
Slashdot, your bias is leaking.
I don't know if CNN counts as 'neoliberal,' but I just searched for "CNN google memo," and the first link that came up was this one, which says, "his opinion seems to be that women are underrepresented in tech because of psychological differences between women and men, not because of bias."
A search for "msnbc google manifesto" came up with this as the first search,, which says, "[Damore] claims to explain why more women aren't in engineering positions, chalking up the disparity to "biological" differences, including generalizations that women don't tend to handle stress well and are more neurotic."
That's not an exhaustive search, but I think it shows there is at least some nuance in media coverage.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The memo stated that women on average have more **INTEREST** towards people and a cooperative environment and that might detract possibly good candidates.
He also suggested to focus more on peer programming and focus on making the environment less cutthroat and more welcoming to everybody.
White men are being oppressed, that's true. But probably less so than any other group on the planet.
Well here's the thing, if you treat everyone equally then you end up with a majority of white males in various roles such as tech.
Different people are interested in different things, and different cultures have different biases. Girls in school for instance are usually not interested in technology, and their peers will shun the few that are.
People are different, they have different interests, different upbringing, different aspirations. Trying to artificially distort the proportion of different groups in the workplace is stupid. If people were interested in doing a particular job they would have studied for it, learned about it and applied for positions.
In all my years working in tech, the vast majority of job applicants who have applied for jobs i've been responsible for have been white or asian males.
If you want women and other minorities to do tech roles, then look at schools and culture. If people are interested in these fields at an early age, and not discouraged (or bullied) away from them by their peers in school, then they will pursue careers in the subjects that most interest them.
Trying to force "diversity quotas" and other stupid shit is simply a form of discrimination against the presently dominant groups, and will result in an overall lower standard of employee. As minorities account for far fewer applicants, you will need to apply far lower standards in order to ensure the same number of successful applicants vs the larger majority group.
There are also many professions which are typically not taken by white males, nursing for instance - are any steps being taken to increase the number of white males working as nurses?
If 99 women and 1 man apply for 5 nursing positions, how does the hospital satisfy a diversity quota saying that 50% of nurses should be male?
What if the diversity quota is 20%, but the one man applying has no qualifications or experience and yet 30 of the women are highly qualified and experienced?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
with an internal memo criticizing the company's diversity efforts and claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers.
At no point in the memo was this ever stated.
I'm fucking tired of disingenuous assholes trying to spin something that says one thing, into something else to further their agenda.
Disagree with the memo all you like, but at least have the integrity to argue against the points it raised instead of making up some bullshit that it didn't say.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"an internal memo... claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers."
Goddamnit, have you people no shame whatsoever? THE MEMO DOES NOT SAY THIS. Why do you keep on repeating this lie?
1.) He did _NOT_ criticize Googles diversity efforts per se. In fact, he applauded them. He did however express concerns that the way they are executes isn't effective and/or counter-productive to the cause and provided educated conclusions for this presumption.
2.) He did _NOT_ claim that women are biologically less suited for tech jobs. He used solid state-of-the-art scientific research results to find explanations why women might not be interested in taking tech jobs other that the standard arguably totally insuifficient "OGM! WTF! WHITE MALE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN!" narrative/explanation.
Please quit the lying/irresponsible spreading of falsehoods and inform yourself.
Just be an educated slashdotter and question the official group-think narrative. Thank you.
Here's to help you out:
Jordan Peterson interview with James Demore (citations linked in the description of the video)
The actual paper/memo that James Demore wrote
You're welcome.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Oh my god stop lying. He made no such claim. Stop pushing your agenda down my throat. Fuck
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When I hear a white man complaining that he can't get ahead in his career due because of affirmative action then all the evidence I have in my life tells me that that man probably isn't as good at his job as he thinks.
In the UK it's legal to hire a woman instead of a man if they're both equally capable on the basis that she's female. The inverse is not true.
You really think that would be enshrined in law if it never happened? Really?
Well, in the UK it's legal to hire a woman ahead of a man. To hire someone that's BME ("black or minority ethnic", a phrase in use in the UK) instead of someone that's white.
Then there's the funding available for things like university grants.
Plus there's the fact that women can retire with a state pension at a younger age than men.
Perhaps you weren't aware that poor white boys have the lowest educational outcomes in the country right now?
I'll close on the constant attacks in the media. Some are subtle, some are downright nasty, and many tacitly support anti-white and/or anti-male writings on less formal channels.
Being blamed for all the woes in the world, getting no credit for individual achievement because of "privilege", seeing laws passed that discriminate against your gender and/or race? Yeah, I wonder how white men think they are being oppressed in this society.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14...
"By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men."
To expand on your point, while this is obviously a complex topic with many possible causes, could part of that decline in overall happiness be the result of well-meaning people encouraging (or even forcing) women to do things they don't really want to do for whatever reason?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What you've said is that if a more qualified woman or black person applies for the job, an employer is in no way obligated to accept a while, male candidate.
No, that's not what I said. Oh, and here's a reference for hiring women purely on the grounds of their gender:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Here's one where the BBC are defending and claiming legality for offering paid work to people that must be non-white:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ente...
OTOH, there is no law stating a less qualified candidate who is not white or male must be accepted. You're pretty much trying to do what Damore did in his memo, insinuate a conclusion and lie by omission.
No, I'm just better informed than you and able to back up my statements with references. You merely throw around insults.
White males are not discriminated against in any way
Except the ways I mentioned in my original post, none of which you've been able to disprove.
Not even the Guardian tries to say that white men are evil, that shit is entirely the DM's area.
No one is attacking you for being white or male
Well, since you mentioned the Guardian, even they acknowledge that "In America, as in Europe, older, white men are the only group that liberals can abuse and exclude with impunity."
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
you're being attacked because you spout a lot of bullshit and the rest of us are sick of it
When even the fucking Guardian acknowledges the issue I think it shows that you're either ignorant, in denial or maliciously trying to prevent conversation.
So call bollocks on whatever the fuck you like, but do try and provide some fucking evidence next time.