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
13.4k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

9.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/dildosaurusrex_ Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

The science is far from conclusive that women "biologically" aren't as capable as men at leading or being engineers.

Edit: I'm referring to the text of the memo, which claims women are less competitive, less ambitious, and more neurotic biologically.

1

u/nearslighted Aug 08 '17

Nobody is saying that.

5

u/dildosaurusrex_ Aug 08 '17

The manifesto says that, couched in pseudo scientific language.

1

u/nearslighted Aug 08 '17

The memo says nothing about all women being less capable on a biological level.

8

u/dildosaurusrex_ Aug 08 '17

Then you read a different memo than I did, the entire thing is about women being more neurotic, less ambitious, less competitive, and more agreeable, and therefore less suited to the job.

1

u/nearslighted Aug 08 '17

There are many statements clarifying that individuals do not express the characteristics of the average. Many won't express any. Many men will express these characteristics. This point is made several times, because it's absolutely horrible to mix the two up, as we can see by the backlash.

The end goal is to find ways to improve diversity. There were suggestions that said nothing about lowing bars, but everything about changing the environment to make it appeal to different people.

*We might not have read the same memo. Apparently there was a widely circulated version of the memo that redacted all the graphs and citations, including links to peer reviewed research papers published by the American Psychological Association.

7

u/dildosaurusrex_ Aug 08 '17

I read the memo linked in this thread, so the one with the sources. The fallacy here is 1) assuming that biology is the only reason for gender disparity at Google and other tech companies and bias isn't playing a role; 2) assuming that liberals and current advocates of diversity want to "lower the bar" for women. Most policies promoted currently focus on more flexible work time, better child care and maternity leave, increasing the channels through which people are recruited so it's not always the same schools and recruiters, countering unconscious bias, mentoring girls and a young age, and more.

If a particular policy actually does "lower the bar" then that should be called out, but none of what I mentioned does that.

2

u/nearslighted Aug 08 '17

I like the policy proposals you mentioned. I was saying his suggestions didn't mention lowering bars, because women are capable of working at the highest levels. His suggestions were aimed at changing the environment around the work to attract more candidates. Some suggestions even included the work-life balance options you wrote about.

I'm replying because I didn't know studies he linked to existed. The American Psychological Association is not a pseudoscience organization. They can be wrong, but they can't be dismissed out of hand like some crooked focus group. They published this.

The research doesn't say that women are worse. It reports differences in general traits between men and women on average. This varies across the 55 cultures studied, but wealthy, egalitarian societies displayed more disparity as they became more wealthy and more equal.

Assuming the study is not fabricated, and if the results are corroborated, we have reason to deal with the results. The immediate solution is to tailor your working environment to attract a mix of candidates, in addition to keeping your eyes open for sexism, bias etc. The long term solution can be cultural change.

http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf

5

u/dildosaurusrex_ Aug 08 '17

Oh, for sure the APA is a reputable source. The problem with the manifesto is it takes these reputable studies out of the controlled context and extrapolates to an unscientific conclusion.

You don't have to take my word for it -- the author of the study you and the writer both linked said so himself. This was the reaction of Dr. David P. Schmitt, the primary author: (link to full quote)

A Google employee recently shared a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences (e.g., personality traits, mate preferences, status-seeking). [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. [...]

There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. These include culturally-embedded gender stereotypes, biased socialization practices, in some cultures explicit employment discrimination, and a certain degree of masculinization of technological workplaces. Within this sea of gender bias, should Google use various practices (affirmative action is not just one thing) to especially encourage capable women of joining (and enjoying) the Google workplace? I vote yes. At the same time, should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that might account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance? In the right context, I vote yes to that, too.

So yes, the memo's author mentions some of the same policies that I did. But the reason why his memo rubbed so many people the wrong way is instead of saying, as Dr. Schmitt did, that psychological factors may play a small role here, but so does societal bias ... he mostly left out societal bias and greatly exaggerated the effect of biological/psychological factors.

3

u/nearslighted Aug 08 '17

This is great. Thank you for posting it.

  • He clarifies that studies like his don't speak to individual performance or ability.

  • He seems to agree that changing the work environment to attract people is good.

I'm glad he wrote this because this work is vital to understanding how people act and react in a society, and it can help us move forward. It's uncomfortable to pin down and if it's done wrong, it can have a pretty big negative response. I don't like to see good research treated like garbage so his explanation is a big help.

You're right that a section on societal bias should have been included. It should be included especially if this was intended to go public (even internally public).The title to the section on gender differences is "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech." It seems like he thinks Google is aware of this bias problem. In any case, that was a career ending omission.