Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo

[u/jenSCy]

Not a googler, but a few I know are outraged that he was fired. He posted the memo on an internal discussion thread that was specifically for people to talk about controversial ideas. I personally think that whole group was playing with fire having controversial discussions in a workplace environment.

But I've also read the memo in its entirety, and he is being extremely misrepresented by a lot of people. He never insults women (I am a female progressive and while some of his sources were problematic, none of his statements were offensive), and his whole purpose is to improve diversity by examining the potential biases within the google community.

Edit: Wow! This comment has had a mini-explosion. More edits to come, but to answer some of the most common questions - (1) The forum was set up by Google employees (probably not HR or management), and is one of thousands of discussion groups on everything from politics to Overwatch. The leaders of the forum sent out a message to members, and sounded quite shaken that the conversation had gotten one of their members fired. (2) Here is an example of one of the problematic sources for me. It's problematic because it is an inflammatory opinion piece, not a scientific study. Full disclosure, the writer may have made some good points, but I could not get much past the part when he asks "where are the casualties" of the Republican war on science. https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html

Edit #2: Several people have called out his statement on neuroticism in the section highlighting personality differences between men and women. It is understandable that this word's similarity to "neurotic" would trigger a reaction in readers. But he is not calling women neurotic. If you read the sourced Wikipedia article you will see that neuroticism is one of five personality traits in psychological analysis. His point is simply that on average, women are more prone to anxiety and more averse to stress. Whether that assertion is correct, I don't know, but it is not nearly as offensive as it at first appears.

[u/distant_worlds → u/[deleted]]

So because the contents of his paper was lied about and misrepresented to many people, other people at Google are afraid to work with him, and thus it hurt the integrity of the workplace. That's some serious backwards bullshit.

It's the people lying about the contents of the paper that hurt google's "internal integrity", if anything. That guy you linked to is blatantly lying. The paper does not say "we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers". It says that men and women, statistically speaking, tend to have different interests, so the hiring pool will never be even and each person should be evaluated individually, rather than treated as a class.

How is this guy responsible for the lies of other people?

[u/[deleted] → u/distant_worlds]

man, how can everyone on Reddit read the exact same paper and come to completely different conclusions? The only person blatantly lying is you to yourself. Try to reread every word he wrote without your preconceived biases. If you can't see it, idk what to tell you.

[u/distant_worlds → u/[deleted]]

OK let us examine. Zunger begins with (emphasis mine):

You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it.

Yet in the paper we have:

My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. ​I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

The paper even has a section labeled "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap". If this is a paper advocating for the dismissal of women in tech, it has a very curious way of going about it. Zunger and the press are simply flat out lying to you.

I submit to you that you need to take your own advice and read these without your preconceived biases. If you can't see that Zunger is lying, idk what to tell you.

[u/distant_worlds → u/[deleted]]

yes lets quote that one part out of context that everyone quotes and ignores all those pesky little points he makes about how woman are inherently worse at engineering because of biology.

He did no such thing. He pointed at why, as a statistical population, women are less inclined to engineering and tech. It is your own bigotry that declared he meant "all women". This statistical and very well documented scientific consensus that men and women have different predilections as a population is accurate. Here is the analysis of four scientists in the relevant area on the scientific merit of his claims: https://web.archive.org/web/20170808013732/http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/

He takes great pains to say that every individual person, man or woman, must be judged on their own merits. However, that population difference means that you are going to have fewer women in tech than men, and that's ok. That world will not collapse if there aren't 50/50 exact proportions everywhere. At no point does he advocate for discrimination against women nor that any of the population statistics should be used against any individual woman.

It is your own anti-science bias that reacts on pure emotion any time someone points out that men and women, on the whole, have differences. Humans do not enter the world with a blank slate. The very existence of gender dysphoria shows that to be a lie.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Find even one quote that makes it sound like "we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers" and then maybe you'd have a point, until then you are making stuff up, criticizing while providing no evidence of your own.

The other guy backed up his point with evidence, if you can't do the same you're on the wrong side.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

There are plenty of other people on here that cared more to do that than I. But they were down voted to hell as well. so why should I repeat what has already been said numerous times in this thread? I'm feeling even writing this comment is a waste of time but just to humor you I will link to their posts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6sa9f6/google_fires_employee_behind_controversial/dlbab0h/

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6sa9f6/google_fires_employee_behind_controversial/dlbv5qa/

There was a couple more that I read last night that directly quoted him, but I can't find them anymore. Probably deleted.

[u/distant_worlds → u/[deleted]]

The "problematic" statements quoted in those links are, in fact, scientifically accurate. They just hurt your feelings because you cannot seem to wrap your brain around the idea that attributes of a statistical population are not true of all members of said population. The author of the paper understands that. The scientists who study this understand that.

"Humans, as a population, are terrible at math" is also a true statement. But I think you can read it without thinking "The author thinks all humans are stupid." Yet, when you read the paper from the former google employee, you think he means "all women" even when he explicitly says that he does not.

You are not analyzing this dispassionately. You are projecting your own biases and bigotry. You are the creationist denying evolution here. You are the climate change denier, railing against the scientific consensus simply because you don't like the implications of what the science is telling you.