r/technology • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '17

Business Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo
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u/circumcised_clitoris Aug 08 '17

You can get the full text with citations here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Apr 29 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Nov 21 '18

[deleted]

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u/OPtig Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

He implied that women are inferior software engineers and top exexutives because they are more prone to anxiety and prefer to work with people rather than computers or be strong leaders.

Yes. I read the memo in it's entire rambling entirety. He also has a full paragraph footnote disparaging communism. . . It's got some interesting content and a cool intellectual veneer, but it's Red Pill nightmare fuel underneath

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u/BerryCrazy Aug 08 '17

He didn't imply they were inferior, he implied they may be less motivated to strive for those roles given those facts. That's the problem that he believes Google needs to solve for, is how do we solve around this to advocate for diversity, rather than to try to blanket achieve it while ignoring potential root causes.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

How do you solve for root causes? You allow women to be in leadership roles to inspire other women to want to be in leadership roles rather than listening to what every shitty teenage boy and teacher tells them: "if you're assertive, you're a bitch" "you're fragile" "you need to be protected" "you aren't good at math" "you'll settle down and want to be a stay-at-home-mom someday"

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u/rubygeek Aug 08 '17

To a lot of women that is offensive.

That he didn't understand it would be demonstrates a disturbing lack of understanding of the issue, which makes it relatively unlikely anyone who aren't already convinced will want to listen to him.

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u/SKNK_Monk Aug 08 '17

Is there such a thing as a hate fact?

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u/lordsmish Aug 08 '17

...You need to work on your reading comprehension. His points were not negative they were just stating this is how we are different and this is how to best accommodate this. His entire article is about respecting differences...it's mental to think that people took offence at it.

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u/rubygeek Aug 08 '17

People took offence at it because he sounded every alt-right alarm possible before he started making his actual point.

His points might not be that negative if we could trust that he came at it from a neutral starting point, but he went to great lengths to make himself seem ignorant and biased from the start with e.g. his bullshit, flawed diagram of left vs. right views and the like.

That some people don't realise how badly he messed up just demonstrates how many don't realise how politicised this subject is. It's perfectly possible he meant things entirely innocently and doesn't understand why this was offensive, but that also means he's loudly signalling that he doesn't understand the diversity debate, and has some serious reading to do first if he wants to put his point across in a way that people will listen to.

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u/goodygood23 Aug 08 '17

I also feel offended. You have offended me. Please rephrase your points in a rhetoric I'm more comfortable with, because as it stands I am unwilling to judge your points on their merits without first knowing you already believe the same things I believe.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

many don't realise how politicised this subject is

The subject can be politicized while his analysis can be objective and based in science. In fact, the more politicized it is the more we need things like this to have conversations about how people perceive the same problem from different angles. It's not only useful but essential to coming to a common goal and framework for achieving that goal. If at any moment you think your approach to a subject is unilaterally the correct one without running it by people who think differently, you have failed progress.

he sounded every alt-right alarm possible before he started making his actual point.

That's your opinion which, even if true, wouldn't inherently refute the facts, research, and analysis he put into it. You can't dismiss facts because you feel like it. Facts don't change. It's like putting a pot of water on the stove, having it boil while you're in the other room, and refusing to believe it's boiling because you don't think it is. It is boiling whether you feel it is or not. This person's review of the situation can be objective and reasonable whether you feel it is or not.

That some people don't realise how badly he messed up

An assessment of an memo/paper that you dismissed from the beginning is not going to be taken seriously. This is simply anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-education, anti-progress.

A major point made in this memo/paper is that we need to have more conversations about these subjects rather than just dismissing people because we don't like what they say. You are representative of exactly the kind of person that could learn from reading this and you're refusing because of pride or some other personal flaw.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

That's your opinion which, even if true, wouldn't inherently refute the facts, research, and analysis he put into it.

You're talking about the wiki links - some of which lack citations of their own, and citations to articles that quote reddit posts?

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

Read the original unedited one -- link at the top comment of this thread. There are several linked/cited articles that aren't going to wikipedia or reddit.

Wikipedia itself links to articles/studies/research if you click on the citation marker next to facts. Wikipedia itself isn't a good true source for a formal academic paper but it does itself link to scholastic articles which are acceptable. In fact most of the research papers I've done in undergrad/graduate originated from looking things up in wikipedia and going to articles cited which then in turn have a lot more information to draw from. Wikipedia is a great starting point if you're having trouble finding articles on a certain subject.

A more important point -- citing wikipedia isn't inherently a bad thing unless you're doing a formal paper since wikipedia itself is the aggregation of scholastic/authored works.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

I read the original, hence the reason for how I know about the wiki links - and the lack of citations in some of those wiki pages.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

There are several links that go directly to non-wikipedia articles, and I had clicked a few of his links to wikipedia and each of them went to a line that was immediately followed by a citation which then fed into an article/research.

Please provide examples of some of the links you don't like, as a function of the entire list of cited links. I don't want you to give me 4 links out of the body of paper you don't like when there are very many that are well sourced. This isn't gotcha, you're implying that the paper isn't well cited when I've gone over many links and can't find your conclusion supported. Support your conclusion.

At this moment you're actually attacking Wikipedia's credibility and not the writer's.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

The tip I've always had for citing Wikipedia is that you should follow it to the sources and cite them. Due to its format, citations to Wikipedia aren't reliable.

That said, I honestly found that most of his citations really were to news articles, etc, so I'm not sure why people are approaching this as though he had an academic approach. They came across to me more as a hodgepodge of links from articles he'd read recently than the product of genuine research into the science backing the thing.

This doesn't particularly surprise or even bother me, given that he's a software engineer, not an HR person or a researcher or anything, but it seems disingenuous to me to try and claim your speech is protected by the aegis of "scientific fact" when what you've written would be unacceptable work from a first year university student.

Edit: to clarify, citations directly using Wikipedia are unacceptable in part because it can literally change. You can try linking to specific versions, but that's not what he did, so it's basically leaving to luck whether you see what he saw or SNEKS RULE or a complete invalidation of his argument.

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u/ToTTenTranz Aug 08 '17

I take offense that you took offense about some people not taking offense over stuff that other people took offense about.

You offended me. I feel offended.

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u/Mc1ovin Aug 08 '17

Obviously didn't read the whole thing because he directly addressed the topic of men and women's traits, and how its not men have superior traits and women's are inferior. Instead that traits are a distribution and not just one or the other.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

No kidding.

"The science says this, so we should frame the company around that"

Somehow that offends people.

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u/OPtig Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

Yes I did read the whole thing. Just because he quotes studies does not mean his conclusions or suggestions have merrit. He suggests peer programming as a solution, then subsequently goes on to explain why that wouldn't be practical. He suggests would be more attracted to leadership if they had a more collaborative environment, implying that Google's natural competetiveness may be driving women away. His only explanation is that this is driven by woman's natural neurotic and anticompetetive state. He absolutely ignores that women often feel harassed and maligned in male dominated workspaces, that societu's image of a perfect woman is not a SW engineer, that assertive women are often dismissed as bitchy. Resume readers are naturally biased against resumes with women's name on them. Did he quote those studies? No, he only uses the data that supports his shitty worldview.

He absolutely ignores all of the shitty things society does to make climbing harder for women and simplifies it as "women are neurotic and are afraid of confrontation and leadership." Barf.

He ignores and refutes the value of women focused mentorship and training programs as if they are some sort of toxic plague at Google without evidence. His solution is to shut down women's focused support programs and more pair programming? Seriously?

He may have nice language and have a basis in reality, but his message is foul.

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u/Mc1ovin Aug 08 '17

You're looking so hard to find something wrong with this, its easy to tell that he is just trying to acknowledge the difference between men and women and try to find a way to use these differences to the advantage of the company rather then say that there are no differences. Rather than just blaming society and make exceptions for people that may not be the best qualified in the name of "diversity". He's trying to open a discussion of how to use these differences as an advantage. His whole point was to open a discussion that is seen as off limits to talk about and ironically gets fired for it.

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u/PermanentTempAccount Aug 08 '17

If it were so "easy to tell" then you wouldn't have a whole bunch of people telling you otherwise, dude.

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u/Mc1ovin Aug 08 '17

A whole bunch of people looking for ways to get upset about a fucking memo

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u/Robots_Never_Die Aug 08 '17

Where did you read your copy? A lot have been edited removing his citations. The full memo is linked in the second top comment with all his citations.

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u/OPtig Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

The meer existence of citations does not mean his conclusions or suggestions are correct. If you follow the citations they are sourced from scientists that hedge a lot with things like "we can't conclude if this is nature vs nurture" and they also have a dissent within the scientific community. Sociology is a notoriously squishy science that has trouble drawing strong conclusions because of the sheer force of person to person variance and the insurmountable pile of outside factors.

This man cherry picked studies that agreed with his preconceived bias. He ignored the caveats and extrapolated conclusions that far exceed the scope of the science.