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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."
Reading the memo will only make you dumber,
If you read it, you wouldn't pretend things like :
His opinion being that google shouldn't recruit women because they might have on average less aptitude than men for some tasks.
The actual quote :
Note, Iâ(TM)m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are âoejust.â Iâ(TM)m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we donâ(TM)t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and thereâ(TM)s significant overlap between men and women, so you canâ(TM)t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
So yes, you can disagree, you can argue the science he used and the studies he cited are wrong, or that he misunderstood them, but trying to depict the memo as vile while not having read it is malicious.
Well, yeah, the strongest argument is that the memo shows that Damore is a terrible engineer who shouldn't be employed, because he doesn't understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
Specifically, Damore attempted to argue a hypothesis that gender differences in STEM are due to inherent biological factors, and therefore cannot be addressed by social engineering. He cited studies that showed that when adult, post-college men and women are surveyed, they self-report different levels of interest in STEM fields. Issues with those studies (e.g. limited populations, self-reporting, no controls, etc.) aside, they don't even begin to prove Damore's point regarding biological inherency. And that's the biggest issue with the manifesto - Damore clearly has no understanding of the difference between correlation and causation. Yes, there are fewer women in tech. Yes, on surveys of adults, they report different levels of interest in the field. But only someone really unclear on logic and science would say "this difference exists, therefore genetics."
And that means he's a terrible engineer, since he doesn't understand that "if X, then Y" doesn't also mean "Y, therefore X." That alone would be reason to fire him, because you sure as fark can't trust his code.