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James Damore Sues Google For Allegedly Discriminating Against Conservative White Men (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The author of the controversial memo that upended Google in August is suing the company, alleging that white, male conservatives are systematically discriminated against by Google. James Damore was fired as an engineer after a manifesto questioning the benefits of diversity programs was widely passed around the company. In a new lawsuit, he and another fired engineer claim that "employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google's employment policies and its business, such as 'diversity' hiring policies, 'bias sensitivity,' or 'social justice,' were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights."
I work with a generally older male crowd, and some of them are quite vocal about their views on gender. Some are borderline MRA/MGTOW types, having been taken to the cleaners in divorces, etc. None are old enough to be adults back in the 50s when barely any married woman worked outside the home, but certainly some are old enough to look upon that time with nostalgia. The major thing that separates these guys from Mr. Damore is that they don't use company resources to promote their views, and their views don't really affect the work of others. I have to listen to them, but in reality they're no different than your traditional conservative white male talk radio-quoting types. They still do their jobs and don't anger anyone enough to make them complain.
The thing that's different with Google is that I'm sure their legal counsel just told the executives to make the problem go away immediately. No company wants to deal with the expense of a lawsuit and the reputation hit of getting dragged into court because one of their employees is acting like a jerk. I know the company I work for would show me the door in 15 seconds if I personally caused any reputational damage, regardless of how internal the forum was, or how the information was leaked.
What I wonder is why the Aspergers/autism angle wasn't used instead. That's a legitimate protected class. I work with a lot of tech company employees, and outside of the SV startup brogrammer world, there are _a lot_ of non-neurotypical types working for vendors. Once you get below the product managers and feature designer types, the ones doing the super-low level stuff like writing kernel modules and device drivers aren't exactly extroverts. Going after Google for discriminating against disabled people is a lot less clickbait-y than "conservative white males."
There may very well be laws against firing whistleblowers who were blowing the whistle on illegal discrimination.
Illegal discrimination would be anything that violates the equal protection clause
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And if Google were illegally discriminating and Damore pointed this out, which he did, it would be illegal to fire him
https://www.workplacefairness....
In addition, the California State Legislature has adopted statutory protections for employees. Notably, California has a general whistleblower protection statute that protects employees who disclose illegal activity or refuse to participate in illegal activities. Whistleblowers are thus protected under both this statute and the common law public policy exception. Also, several other California statutes contain anti-retaliation provisions. Employees who engage in protected activities (usually filing a complaint or testifying) under laws in the following subject areas are protected from retaliation: discrimination, hazardous substances, occupational safety and health, and workers' compensation. Also, California protects employees who file a complaint relating to employee rights with Labor Commissioner.
Damore's memo was more subtle than his detractors give him credit for
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
He explains that 'Google has created several discriminatory practice' and suggests 'non discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap'. So he could argue Google were breaking the law, he blew the whistle and they fired him.
Google have pots of money of course, so they'll probably pay him off. And go on discriminating.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...as an engineer after a manifesto questioning the benefits of diversity programs....
His manifesto did not question the benefits of the diversity program. It questioned its fficacy -- in other words, he questioned if Google could achieve more diversity by structuring the program differently.
And that's a very big difference. I really hate the level of journalism being thrown at this topic, here and everywhere else.
I read it in its entirety. Im also more willing to recognize sexism than most people in tech it seems. Im not sure why everyone in these comments that disagrees with him is getting modded with "troll". Did slashdot turn into r/TD while I was away?
Actually, thanks to the lawsuits against the heavily gerrymandered states of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia,Pennsylvania and Georgia, the fact that the GOP lost votes is becoming more and more apparent.
Add in the lawsuits against disenfranchisement in Kansas, Alabama, Florida, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and it gets even more obvious.
Plus Arizona's Republican legislature's attempt to subvert the will of the people by refusing to follow the state constitution.
That's why the Turnip in chief had to give up looking for voter fraud. The only confirmed criminal was Kris Kobach.
It's ok, we know that you're upset that more people in Wisconsin voted in 2004 than 2016. With facts like that, your lies about a landslide become more obvious.
Don't worry, you can still proclaim yourself a genius.
There are a number of different lists but a pretty good example of why James Damore has a decent chance at legal victory is here.
If he Google were anywhere else but California he probably would not be able to win. But then again, if Google were any place other than California he would not have been fired...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I worked at Intel and - sure - you can talk about employment policies during the appropriate venue. However, there is a stronger policy called "disagree and commit". Means just what it says: you may disagree, but at the end of the day you will adhere to policy or leave.
While you are right, that isn't what they are alleging in the suit. According to the article, this isn't about white men, but white conservative men who espoused views different than Google's. So it isn't that they discriminated against "white men" but only a subset of white men, which means it wasn't race of sex discrimination. And the fact that they think the only people who could be discriminated against by Google for espousing views different than theirs are white men says a lot of about the complainants. They apparently believe only white men would hold views that would be discriminated against by Google. It's hard to say a place that is made up mostly of white men and pays white men as good or better than everyone else discriminates against white men. They are taking their issue and trying to make it about all white men, which is clearly is not.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I went to college in North Carolina, a small school named Wingate University. We happened to have a building there called the Helms Center, named after US Senator for North Carolina Jesse Helms. The guy who happened to lead the conservative switch from the Democrat to Republican Party during the 60's and 70's. Or did he not happen either?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
California explicitly protects based on political affiliation.
https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/what-are-californias-protected-classes-in-employment.shtml
Conservative isn't a political affiliation though, it's a political belief. He's not claiming that Google fired him for being a registered Republican (I think he actually claimed to be Independent?), but that they fired him because of his conservative beliefs.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
No, because often it is required. We got nailed at work for hiring too many males even though we hired female candidates at a higher rate than males. We went over two years without being able to hire anyone decent because of that. It sucked interviewing one idiot after another and not being able to bring in any males. That really hurt the company, and it made my life much harder since I had to do the work of my entire five man team since we couldn't hire replacements for the people that quit to go to a new competitor.
Doesn't California have a state law that bans employment discrimination based on political leanings.
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats' 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South - but not that slow.
Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas's John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms, which he declared "would set up a despot in the attorney general's office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler's minions coerced and subjugated the German people. I would say this - I believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature." (Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?) Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.
It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation - and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.
And that's from the National Review, a magazine which is keen - overly keen in my opinion - to denounce Trump as some sort of moral abomination.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Haven't you heard? Meritocracy is a white male privilege!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Hire a Female Music Major "Scientist" as security chief in a credit card agency... PROGRESSIVE
Donate your own money to help your favorite candidate at the election while president of SJWzilla... RESIGN
...
Be white male candidate, accused of having connections with Russians.... CONFIRMED
Be female candidate, support feminists, have actual connections with russians... (X) Doubt
...
Be black president, order to bomb the shiet out of anyone... OUR PRESIDENT
Be white male candidate, retract troops and seize operation.... NOT OUR PRESIDENT
It astounds me that American politics has devolved into confused name-calling and an almost complete inability to form coherent and rational arguments.
That's mostly how it appears on TV.
"On the ground" in the state and local governments, things are generally more sane.
It's also pretty clear to anyone with a reasonable grasp of the English language that President Trump is prone to frequent odd outbursts and declarations that are sometimes completely incoherent and provably false. That should be cause for significant concern, whether you're conservative or liberal.
Our political system doesn't really have all that many checks or balances in it. It has primarily worked on social norms. Continuous, blatant lying used to violate those norms, and so would cause some repercussions.
However, the Republican party currently sees an advantage in torching all those norms, and gerrymandering and legislative structure gives them about a 10-15% popular vote buffer to retain power. So there's no one with sufficient power who is willing to step in.
What will get "interesting" is when that 10-15% buffer is not large enough, and the Democratic party seizes absolute power with no social norms remaining. Because the climb over that buffer is not being done by the right-wing of the party, but the left. The right-wing of the party will want to restore the norms. The left wing of the party will find that unacceptable. And thus things start to get really interesting.
This is actually textbook punishment of a victim of discrimination escalating to management. He highlighted illegal, textbook discrimination (at least in California) at Google and was harassed and eventually fired for it. I would take his case in a minute. If he is smart he will also bend Google over in the court of public opinion. They will be begging him for a settlement if he plays his cards right.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
You read an article and swallowed it whole. No thought, no dissection, nothing that could even remotely be called thought went into that.
Let me put Damore's writing into terms you can understand:
Men built this company and the others like it. Because of this, every chair has a Fleshlight built into it. Everyone should like that right? Damore says no, let's remove some of the Fleshlights and put some Sybian vibrators on the seats. This, in turn, will result in more women wanting to work here.
He didn't attack women. He attacked the culture of Google and implied that if women were taken into consideration as women, and not offered a free fleshlight with their employment, change in levels of employment would be organic, self starting, and sustainable. Just throwing more money at "diversity" or lowering standards does nothing to address the culture that has kept the qualified women looking elsewhere for opportunity.
He argued for shorter working hours, more egalitarian promotion criteria, and a healthier overall worker environment that takes into consideration the attractive qualities from other industries.
And dumbfucks came out of the woodwork to call him a sexist. No wonder this country is so fucked up. The workers are arguing for longer hours, less pay, and more abuse. Any worker that stands up and tries to change it gets attacked by both the corporate overlords AND their peers!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Donald Trump's unhinged tantrums on Twitter are game theory. Tit for tat.
He is merely feeding back to the American public exactly what they are putting out.
I totally agree. However, if you think Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton did anything different you are deceiving yourself the difference is really that Trump is a poor liar compared to those two. The reason he was elected is because the American public is tired of a the 'elite' creating a legal and political system that is a complete vacuum of logic. Consider the two of the hot button issues of they day , gay rights and abortion rights. Then aside from the term 'legal right' try and define the term 'right' without any reference to a deity or religion. The simple fact is the 'trump effect' is exactly what you get if you don't have any belief in a morality that demands social responsibility, self control, personal integrity. All of those things however are non-sense without context unless you have a workable , rational , moral framework from which to define them and agnosticism and atheism and for that matter liberal Protestantism, which naturally leads to the former , are not capable of creating the necessary philosophical and mental framework that supports the existence of a populous and culture that embraces values of personal integrity and policies based on hard data and logic. Still, those moral frameworks are exactly the ones enshrined in the democratic platform and regular pushed by all American large media outlets , which themselves show no inclination for either integrity of information or truth, but rather filter information to create a political illusion consistent with the ratings that fuel them..
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
That's ok, I don't like all the willful dumbfuckery in defense of bigotry.
How about not being so willfully obtuse? If the butcher doesn't sell pork to anyone, he doesn't sell pork to anyone - thus there's no discrimination. If the gay couple had walked into the bakery and the shopkeeper said "we don't bake wedding cakes, only muffins and cookies" there would have been no discrimination and thus no story. A straw man about the baker engaging in discrimination because he wont sell you a hammer or change the oil in your car would make just as much sense.
Then why defend the indefensible? This "argument" was settled in the 60's when stores and restaurants had to take down their "whites only" signs.
Because being a homophobe with your public accommodations is exactly the same as picking and choosing what to allow into your mouth, anus or vagina.
Discrimination would have been unacceptable if there were a hundred other bakeries on the same street - but what if this is the only bakery within 50 miles that the couple can go to. Or hardware store. Or car dealership. Or clinic. Or clothing store.
Ever heard of the Green Book? The sort of discrimination you want to legalize was so bad that black Americans printed their own travel guide, showing where they could buy gas or get a hotel room with some measure of safety.
A book that might see a new printing. If SCOTUS rules in favor of the homophobic bakers, it's a matter of time until you start seeing "whites only" signs again. Thanks, bigots!
But it would be infeasible in software development.
And yet Google (and a few others) are doing it. It's not even difficult how; they discriminate against white males (and asian males to a point) in the hiring process so they can claim diversity awards, and then they acquire talented white or asian males as a package deal when they buy companies because they need better tech and their regular staff is useless diversity hires.
Think I'm kidding? Look it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Find startups with strong female presence in that list.
lucm, indeed.
We all want to be with people like us. That means living near, hiring, being hired by, buying from, selling to, dating, marrying, breeding with, befriending, having them as our law enforcement officers and judges, seeing them daily, and having shared cultural standards and mores with them.
Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) had some convincing research on the failure of diversity which explains our balkanized and atomized state:
Alternative Right.
This required sufficient internal response that the CEO had to cut short a family vacation in order to handle it. In general, a CEO of that size company does not expect to personally manage damage from an engineering hire unless things are seriously wrong. IMO that alone was sufficient reason for termination.
You don't fire an employee speaking out because your company has turned into a hotbed of discrimination against white males. Google violated the law by discriminating not only against conservative opinion within the company, but also via their discrimination in hiring practices. You should try reading the complaint before spouting off: https://www.scribd.com/documen...
Damore's a turkey.
You're a social "justice" idiot.
Monster.com enables recruiters to check a box to "include diversity candidates" to include resumes from their "Diversity and Inclusion network" in search results. They appear to have built a monetized product around this. Can somebody please explain to me how the existence of this checkbox is not discriminatory? https://hiring.monster.com/jcm...
Damore was asked for input in a debate on diversity hiring policies. He produced a thoughtful and well researched memo in response to the quest for how to best hire people. This memo was addressed to the people within the company, specifically those on the diversity committee. The memo was not released by Damore, and he did not intend for it to leave Google.
A month passed between the memo being released internally and a director being called back from holiday to deal with a situation.
So I have to ask, if he was fired for the content of the memo, why did they wait a month? If they wanted to do that they could have "managed" him out over that period and left their arses completely covered.
There's more to this story, directors do not get called back from holiday to deal with a nicely worded memo. I'll say it plainly, Damore was stupid, stupid enough to do something that got him fired and now stupid enough to put Google in a position where they may have to make what he did public. Previously they had incentive to keep it quiet to avoid being sued, that incentive has been removed.
The asshole in this case was the person or persons that released the document publicly. That person or persons created this shitstorm. Lots of people say things in private that if plastered on the internet, and taken far out of context, that could also create bad PR for a company.
Google fired the guy instead of standing up for him. Now they are getting sued for it. Good. They can't keep an internal memo to themselves so they deserve all the bad publicity they get from it.
You don't know what he actually did to get fired. You've only got what Damore wants you to think he was fired for, a story to which the facts do not add up for.
An employee is in no way obligated to stand up for every employee who has a tantrum. If the way Damore acted after being fired is any indication, he wasn't worth it and standing up for him probably would have caused more problems.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.