Slashdot Mirror
Ex-Google Employee's Memo Says Executives Shut Down Pro-Diversity Discussions (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A memo written by a former Google engineer claims that the company's human resources department and a senior vice president pressured him to stop discussing diversity initiatives on company forums, interactions that ultimately motivated him to leave the company. The document, which was written in 2016 and shared publicly this week, provides a striking counterpoint to allegations made by former Google employees James Damore and David Gudeman in a discrimination lawsuit filed against their former employer. Cory Altheide, the former employee who wrote the memo, began work as a security engineer at Google in 2010 and departed the company in January 2016. He recently published his account in a public Google document. Altheide posted several articles and comments to internal discussion groups that promoted diversity in the workplace and was chastised for doing so, he wrote.
So well researched and reasoned that the authors of the two papers he relies on the most have publicly stated that he didn't understand them, and that his conclusions are wrong.
Really? As far as I know they distanced themselves from Damore (nobody likes to be lynched in a witch hunt) and not from what he wrote. The article "The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond" features the comments of four scientists (including scientists cited by Damore) about the Google Memo. Here are some excerpts:
"The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. "
L. Jussim
"A Google employee recently shared a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences[...]. Alongside other evidence, the employee argued, in part, that this research indicates affirmative action policies based on biological sex are misguided. Maybe, maybe not. "
D. Schmitt
"[...]this memo unleashed a firestorm of negative commentary, most of which ignored the memo’s evidence-based arguments. Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research."
G. Milller
"As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership."
D. Soh
It is interesting to note that while Schmitt (who is extensively cited in Damore's memo) seems a bit critical of Damore, he basically confirms what Damore says: he keeps saying that treating sexes as dichotomous is wrong, which is exactly what Damore said. In fact Schmitt writes: "treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do" (that is what Damore was rebutting).
Many tried to misrepresent the Google Memo, including Wired, where you can read things like:
“It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
That seems a rebuttal of Damore's claim, by the same author he cited. Except for the fact that Damore never said something like: "women can't handle the stresses of leadership in the workplace". Nor he implied that. When you resort to straw man arguments, you probably lack a strong point.